Introducing Base
TL;DR: Base is a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly Ethereum L2 built to bring the next billion users to web3. Start building on the Base testnet today and stay tuned for the upcoming mainnet launch.
Today, we’re excited to announce the testnet launch of Base, an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) network offering a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly way for anyone, anywhere, to build decentralized apps or “dapps” onchain. Our goal with Base is to make onchain the next online and onboard 1B+ users into the cryptoeconomy. In pursuit of this goal, Base will serve as both a home for Coinbase’s onchain products and an open ecosystem where anyone can build.
We’re incubating Base inside of Coinbase, leveraging the last decade of our experience building crypto products, and plan to progressively decentralize the chain over time. We have no plans to issue a new network token.
Developers can get started building on Base today at base.org.
So, what is Base?
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Introducing Base
We've built Base to be one of the best places for developers to build onchain.
Secured by Ethereum: Base is built with the security and scalability you need to power your decentralized apps. It leverages the underlying security of Ethereum, along with Coinbase’s best practices, to enable you to confidently onramp into Base from Coinbase, Ethereum L1, and other interoperable chains.
Empowered by Coinbase: Base makes it easy to build decentralized apps with access to Coinbase’s products, users, and tools. Seamless Coinbase product integrations, easy fiat onramps, and powerful acquisition tools enable developers to serve the 110M+ verified users and to access $80B assets on platform in the Coinbase ecosystem.
Big features, small fees: Base offers full EVM equivalence at a fraction of the cost and is committed to pushing forward the developer platform. Set up gasless transactions for your dapps with easy developer APIs for account abstraction, and securely build multichain applications with easy-to-use bridges.
Open source: Base aims to be decentralized, permissionless, and open to anyone with the vision of creating a standard, modular, rollup agnostic Superchain powered by Optimism. We’re joining Optimism as a Core Dev on the open source OP Stack, and working to create a thriving community of other developers.
To get started, Base developers can build on Base using our RPC testnet endpoint or choose from Node providers: QuickNode, Infura, and Blockdaemon.
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
About Will Robinson
Will Robinson serves as our VP of Engineering, leading our developer product suite. His teams enable direct user interactions with blockchains through products and services including Coinbase Cloud, core cryptographic primitives, hot and cold storage, yield, staking, asset additions and maintenance, and Coinbase NFT. Prior to Coinbase, Mr. Robinson served as the Chief Technology Officer at ASAPP, an AI-powered customer software platform. Mr. Robinson spent nearly 13 years at Google in multiple technical leadership roles, from running the Google Chicago engineering team to being Chief Technology Officer of Chronical, an independent Alphabet company focused on enterprise cybersecurity. Mr. Robinson graduated from Stanford with a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science.
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