Base

Base is a layer 2 network on Ethereum developed and operated by Coinbase, the US cryptocurrency exchange. It processes transactions off Ethereum, posts the data back to it, and uses ETH to pay for gas. Base was announced in February 2023 and opened to the public in August 2023. It was built on Optimism's OP Stack and was part of the Optimism Superchain until February 2026, when Base said it would move to its own software stack. As of October 2026 Base has no network token, although Coinbase has said it is exploring one.¹²³

HistoryReport an error

Announcement

Coinbase unveiled Base at the ETHDenver conference on 23 February 2023, launching a testnet at the same time. Base was built on the OP Stack, an open-source framework for layer 2 networks created by Optimism, and Coinbase said it would join Optimism as a core developer of the OP Stack. Jesse Pollak, then Coinbase's senior director of engineering, said Base would not have a token: "These networks don't need tokens to be successful." Coinbase Ventures announced a Base Ecosystem Fund to invest in early-stage projects building on the network.¹

Pollak had joined Coinbase in 2017 and is described in press coverage as the creator of Base.⁴ By mid-2023 he was described as the lead for Base and head of protocols at Coinbase.⁵

Launch and Onchain Summer

The testnet ran from late February to mid-July 2023, when Base opened its mainnet to developers only. The network opened to the public on 9 August 2023, alongside "Onchain Summer", a month of promotions in which Coinbase and more than 50 brands, platforms and creators, including Coca-Cola and Atari, released NFTs and other projects on Base.⁵

During the developer-only phase, users bridged funds to Base before its official opening. Much of the early trading volume came from BALD, a memecoin that rose and then collapsed. Pollak called the activity an unplanned result of an open, permissionless network.⁵

Friend.tech, a social app linked to Twitter in which users trade "shares" in other users' accounts, launched on Base in August 2023. Decrypt reported that on 20 August 2023 Base processed more than 900,000 transactions, nearly double the daily totals of Arbitrum and Optimism at the time.⁶

Agreement with Optimism

Under an agreement announced in August 2023, Base could earn up to 118 million OP tokens over six years. In return, Base would contribute to the Optimism Collective the greater of 2.5% of its total sequencer revenue or 15% of its profit after the cost of posting data to Ethereum. According to The Block, the agreement was part of a "shared commitment to the rules for upgrades and sequencing of OP Chains", with upgrades decided by Optimism governance.⁷⁸ Base's voting power in Optimism governance was capped at 9%.⁸⁹

According to DL News, Base contributed 8,387 ETH to the Collective over the course of the partnership, about 41% of the Collective's lifetime revenue.¹⁰

Blobs and growth

Ethereum's Dencun upgrade, scheduled for 13 March 2024, introduced blobs (EIP-4844), and Base adopted them through its Ecotone upgrade on 14 March 2024, saying it would support them from "day 1". Blobs gave rollups a separate, cheaper way to post data to Ethereum, and Base had predicted fee reductions of 10 to 100 times.¹¹¹² The Defiant reported that fees on the leading layer 2s that adopted blobs fell by between 50% and 98%.¹³ Research by Galaxy found that in the 150 days after the upgrade Base spent more on blobs than any other rollup, and that the combined margins of Base, OP Mainnet and Arbitrum rose sharply. It also found that Base's transaction failure rate peaked at 21%, which it attributed largely to bots.¹⁴

Coinbase launched Smart Wallet on 5 June 2024. The wallet replaced recovery phrases with passkeys, could be created with a fingerprint, Face ID or a hardware key, and let developers sponsor users' gas fees. Its launch opened that year's Onchain Summer campaign.¹⁵

Decentralisation steps

At launch, proposing and challenging Base's state was permissioned. In August 2023 Pollak acknowledged that "the current systems' upgradability and challenging authorizations are still permissioned".¹⁶ Base deployed permissionless fault proofs on mainnet on 30 October 2024, allowing anyone to challenge invalid withdrawal claims.¹⁷ On 29 April 2025 Base said it had reached Stage 1 in the rollup decentralisation framework proposed by Vitalik Buterin, after adding a Security Council of 10 independent entities. Upgrades required 75% agreement among the council, Base and Optimism.¹⁸

Content coins and the Base App

On 16 April 2025 Base's official X account posted "Base is for everyone" and then said it had "coined it" on Zora, a platform that turns posts into tradable tokens. The token's price surged and then fell about 90% within minutes. Coinbase said that "Base did not launch a token, this is not an official Base token, and Base did not sell this token". Pollak described it as a "content coin" rather than a memecoin.¹⁹²⁰

On 16 July 2025 Coinbase renamed Coinbase Wallet the Base App and relaunched it as what it called an "everything app". It combined a social feed built on the Farcaster protocol, posts tokenised through Zora, trading, mini-apps, USDC payments and XMTP messaging. Accounts were created as smart wallets called Base Accounts. Coinbase also described Base as three parts: Base Chain, Base Build for developers, and the Base App.²¹

On 9 February 2026 the Base App removed its Farcaster-powered feed, and Coinbase began winding down its creator rewards programme. Pollak said that "the app needs to have one primary focus, and that thing is trading".²² In a podcast interview reported on 3 March 2026, Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong said that the app's social features "didn't quite work".²³ In July 2026 he said that content coins "didn't work" and that Base had pivoted away from them early in the year, while defending its focus on AI agents.²⁴²⁵ On 15 July 2026 Pollak handed leadership of the app to Jordan "Cobie" Fish to focus on the Base chain, saying its social bets, including creator coins, had "disintegrated completely".²⁶ On 10 September 2026 Coinbase renamed the Base App back to Coinbase Wallet, describing it as a multichain trading app.²⁷

Token exploration

At the BaseCamp conference on 15 September 2025, Pollak said Base was "beginning to explore" a network token, reversing Coinbase's earlier position. Armstrong confirmed this on X but said there were no definitive plans. At the same event Pollak announced a bridge between Base and Solana.² In November 2025 Pollak launched a personal memecoin, JESSE, which drew criticism from users who said bots had taken much of the supply. A Base spokesperson said the company stood behind the project.⁴ As of October 2026 no Base network token has been launched.

Unified stack

On 18 February 2026 Base announced that it would move to "a unified, Base-operated stack" in a single repository, base/base, built on open-source components such as Reth.²⁸ Base said the code for components such as the sequencer had been owned by several teams across several repositories, creating coordination overhead. It said it would remain compatible with the OP Stack specification in the short term, would replace Optimism on its Security Council with an independent signer, and would require node operators to run base/base releases. It remained a customer of Optimism's "OP Enterprise" service.²⁸³¹⁰ Base's head of product, Wilson Cusack, said the change would give it "our own spec, code, and infra". Base planned six hard forks a year and set a target of 1 gigagas per second.²⁸²⁹

An Optimism spokesperson said it was "grateful for our three-year partnership with Base". OP Labs chief executive Jing Wang wrote that the move "is a hit to near-term onchain revenues".¹⁰ On the Optimism governance forum, the Optimism Foundation said the Superchain revenue share "will not continue", that Base was not entitled to the unvested portion of its OP grant, and that the 9% voting cap still applied.⁹

Independent upgrades

Base's first independent upgrade, Azul, activated on mainnet on 28 May 2026. It replaced optimistic fault proofs with a multi-proof system and made base-reth-node the only execution client.¹²³⁰³¹ Beryl followed on 25 June 2026. It introduced B20, a token standard compatible with ERC-20 but implemented as a native precompile inside the node, and shortened the single-proof withdrawal window from seven days to five.³² On 24 August 2026 tokenised stocks issued by Coinbase and built on B20 went live on Base for users outside the US.³³ Cobalt, activated on 30 September 2026, extended B20, added "validity transactions" that are included only if specified onchain conditions hold, and moved verification of TEE signer registrations fully onchain.³⁴ As of October 2026 the next upgrade, Denim, was targeted for November 2026, and a further upgrade, Everest, had no date.¹²

TechnologyReport an error

Transaction flow

A single centralised sequencer run by Base orders transactions. Base runs five sequencer instances coordinated by op-conductor, but only the leader produces blocks, and L2Beat notes that the replicas "do not create independent operators or censorship resistance". Blocks are sealed every two seconds, and Flashblocks give preconfirmations about every 200 milliseconds, which the protocol does not enforce. Transaction data is posted to Ethereum as blobs.³⁵

Users can bypass the sequencer by submitting a transaction to a contract on Ethereum. If it is not included, it can be forced into the chain after up to 12 hours.³⁵

Proving

Under the Azul design, each proposed checkpoint of Base's state is submitted to an AggregateVerifier contract on Ethereum, which accepts one or two proofs. The usual first proof comes from provers running in AWS Nitro enclaves, a trusted execution environment (TEE), which re-execute blocks and sign the result. Zero-knowledge (ZK) provers can be run by anyone and can back a proposal or dispute an invalid one.³⁰ Permissionless ZK proofs can override TEE proofs if the two conflict.³¹ A proposal with a single proof can be finalised after five days, and one with both after one day.³²

L2Beat classifies Base as Stage 1 and states that users can exit in the presence of a malicious operator even if the Security Council disappears. It notes that contracts can be upgraded with no delay, so users have no window to exit before an unwanted upgrade, and that the Security Council's powers are not limited to provable bugs, which keeps Base from Stage 2.³⁵

GovernanceReport an error

Base has no token governance. Contract upgrades require the approval of a two-of-two multisig made up of the Base Coordinator Multisig (three of six signers) and the Base Security Council (eight of 11). A separate three-of-12 multisig can change some system parameters and pause withdrawals for up to three months.³⁵ Before February 2026, Optimism was one of the parties whose approval upgrades required.¹⁸³

Incidents and controversiesReport an error

• Centralisation. At launch critics argued that Coinbase's sole control of the sequencer made Base centralised, and Gnosis founder Martin Köppelmann pointed to Base's lack of fraud proofs, saying the Coinbase team would need to provide more details about measures that might reduce Coinbase's control. Pollak said that Coinbase "cannot unilaterally upgrade contracts or land invalid output proposals".¹⁶ As of October 2026 the sequencer is still centralised, and L2Beat rates it as having no real-time censorship resistance beyond the 12-hour forced-inclusion path.³⁵
• Sequencer fees (February 2025). Onchain observers noted that Base's sequencer fee revenue was being sent to the Coinbase exchange, and critics, including Sonic Labs co-founder Andre Cronje, questioned whether Base was aligned with Ethereum. A Base strategy team member said the ETH was held by Coinbase for "security and auditing purposes".³⁶
• "Base is for everyone" (April 2025). DL News reported that onchain records showed a few buyers bought early and sold at a profit. Blockchain developer Suhail Kakar called it "deeply disappointing", while Base defended it as an experiment in public.¹⁹²⁰
• Sequencer outage (August 2025). On 5 August 2025 block production stopped for 33 minutes after the active sequencer fell behind and automatic failover chose a replacement that was still being provisioned. Engineers moved block production to a healthy sequencer by hand.³⁷
• Block production outages (June 2026). On 25 June 2026 the chain halted for 116 minutes, and on 26 June for 20 minutes. Base said a bug in the sequencer's block-building logic let stale state persist after a failed transaction, producing a block that other nodes rejected. A separate bug slowed recovery. Base said "all funds on Base were safe".³⁸³⁹
• Departure from the Superchain. Base's move to its own stack ended its revenue share with the Optimism Collective. A participant in the Optimism governance forum asked whether the original agreements had allowed this and why it had not been disclosed. The Foundation replied that Base's participation was "never a given".⁹

TimelineReport an error

See alsoReport an error

• Ethereum
• Optimism
• Arbitrum
• USDC
• Solana

ReferencesReport an error