Why are we building Base?
To bring in billions of users to the cryptoeconomy, dapps need to be easier, cheaper, and safer to interact with. For this to happen, we need to make it even easier for developers to build these dapps. As we’re building Base, we are explicitly adhering to a few core principles:
A bridge, not an island
We’re designing Base to provide easy, secure access to Ethereum L1, other L2s, as well as other L1 ecosystems like Solana. We encourage them to start on Base, but go everywhere: we see Base as a “bridge” for users into the cryptoeconomy. It’s an easy-to-use default onchain experience with access to products on other chains. Along with making Base interoperable with other chains, we will continue supporting as many chains as possible across Coinbase products.
Open source
Foundational software for the global cryptoeconomy should be fully open source and freely available. Base is built on the MIT-licensed OP Stack, in collaboration with Optimism. We’re joining as the second Core Dev team working on the OP Stack to ensure it’s a public good available to everyone. We see this toolkit as an open platform that anyone can contribute to, fork and extend to help the cryptoeconomy scale. Learn more about how we’re working with Optimism.
Decentralized
Decentralization is essential for the cryptoeconomy to remain open, global, and accessible to everyone. While we’ve begun incubating Base inside of Coinbase, we are deeply committed to progressing towards full decentralization over the years ahead. With the increased resourcing that Coinbase brings to the OP Stack, we are confident Base will progress from a Stage 0 to Stage 1 rollup in 2023 and a Stage 2 rollup in 2024. Learn more about our approach to decentralization here.
For everyone
Base has a vision to be an open ecosystem, seeded with Coinbase products, users, and assets. We’ll work with the broader community to bring the chain to life. We're thrilled to have an incredible community who will contribute to making Base a robust ecosystem.
This is Day 1 of our journey with Base and we couldn’t be more excited about the incredible community already building alongside us.
Base Ecosystem Fund
We’re also announcing the Base Ecosystem Fund, which invests in and supports early stage projects building on Base that meet our investment criteria. If you’re interested, please fill out the form here.
What’s next?
Our focus is ensuring a successful testnet. In the weeks ahead, we’ll share our roadmap to mainnet and provide more developers resources for building on Base.
Start building on Base today