Home » Coinbase unveils “Base”, its own layer 2 for the Ethereum blockchain (ETH)

Coinbase unveils “Base”, its own layer 2 for the Ethereum blockchain (ETH)

by Patricia

While a mysterious blue circle shared by Coinbase had invaded social networks yesterday, without knowing its meaning, we learn today a big news: Coinbase launches its own layer 2 named “Base”. The latter is built on the Ethereum blockchain (ETH) and exploits the technical infrastructure offered by Optimism (OP).

Coinbase launches its own layer 2 called “Base “

This is a huge announcement: US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, one of the world’s largest in terms of volume traded, has unveiled “Base”, its own layer 2 based on the Ethereum blockchain (ETH).

Layer 2s are scalability solutions designed to solve the problems inherent in the blockchains on which they are based. In this case, Base will benefit from the security of the Ethereum network while significantly improving its technical capabilities and transaction costs. For more information, read our page explaining what layer 2 is.

According to the release, Coinbase hopes to get 1 billion users on board the new network, which it says offers a “secure, low-cost, developer-friendly way to create decentralised on-chain applications”. It has been built using the technical infrastructure provided by OP Stack, the source code of the Optimism layer 2.

At the moment, Base only exists in its testnet form, but it turns out to be completely open source. It can, according to Coinbase, be exploited by developers who can already use the network’s custom RPC.

Regarding the philosophy of Base, the network is primarily presented as a “bridge” interconnection between the various networks compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM):

“We are designing Base to provide easy and secure access to layer 1 Ethereum and layer 2, as well as other layer 1 ecosystems like Solana (SOL). We encourage them [developers] to start on Base, but go everywhere. “

According to Jesse Pollak, head of engineering at Coinbase, the mainnet should be available “within the next few months”. However, the project teams have made it clear that they have no plans to issue their own token. Jesse Pollak made his views on the matter clear:

We’ve seen a lot of people use tokens to drive business. But our thesis is that tokens are not the only way to drive business. Building great products is a great way to drive activity by making things actually useful. “

For your information, Coinbase becomes the first publicly traded company in the world to offer a layer 2 based on the Ethereum blockchain with this announcement.

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