The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, Coinbase, has finally announced the mainnet launch of its new blockchain Base this week. With this launch, Coinbase is heralding the start of a new era of public companies running their own distributed networks.
The company held a direct listing of its shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker COIN in April 2021. In reaction to this news, Coinbase’s share price jumped to $88.50, only to drop soon after, and is currently trading at $83.36. COIN prices are down 18.4% from the 2023 high of $114.46 hit on July 14 but still up more than 130% in 2023 so far though still well below its initial offering price of $381.
The Layer 2 blockchain Base was finally opened to the public at 12 p.m. ET on Wednesday after being already live for developer testing for weeks.
Base marks the company’s fourth development phase as per Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s “secret master plan” written in 2016. This phase is characterized by “decentralized apps,” or dApps, designed to reach one billion people.
In connection with the Base launch, Coinbase also announced plans for an “Onchain Summer” promotion with corporate partners to show off the new project’s capabilities. The initiative consists of a series of events in which creators and developers can make art or build applications on Base.
At the time of the launch of this initiative, Coinbase vice president of Product Max Branzburg shared that the company will be giving away more than 100 Ethereum in grants to teams building apps on Base.
Given Coinbase’s large user base, the new network is expected to help onboard more users into crypto protocols.
Last month, Jesse Pollak, who is overseeing Base as Coinbase’s head of protocols, said in an interview with Decrypt at EthCC in Paris that crypto adoption would see considerable growth over the next decade. “We have less than 10 million people on-chain today. There’s going to be 8 billion people on-chain over the next decade,” he said at the time. This, according to him, will put everyone on a level playing field, describing on-chain services as “fundamentally global by default.”
Talking about Base, which improves on the cost and efficiency of Ethereum transactions using Optimism’s OP Stack, he said this would provide people with “more opportunities to use Coinbase,” beyond just speculation and trading to also cover art, music, gaming, and other consumer products.
Click here to learn all about the Base blockchain.
Base Mainnet: Open for Everyone
After spending a few weeks in an “open for builders only” phase, Coinbase’s Base network is finally ready for onboarding users. Base’s beta version was first released on February 23, then its mainnet version “for builders” launched on July 13, and on August 9, the network became available for all users.
Base is technically an L2 built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, using another popular layer 2 network Optimism’s OP Stack software. Powered by Optimism, Base is defined as a rollup agnostic superchain, and it aims to bring the next million developers and billion users onchain.
It is an open, permissionless blockchain that is an “extension of Ethereum” and leverages the underlying security of the second-largest cryptocurrency. The blockchain is touted as hyper-scalable by Coinbase, which says it is faster and cheaper than Ethereum. At the movement, though, Base is processing about six transactions per second (TPS), about half of Ethereum.
Explaining the difference between layer 1 Ethereum blockchain and Coinbase’s layer 2, Pollak described Base as a “public transportation” which can “fit hundreds of people into a single train” as opposed to Ethereum, where “everyone’s driving in a single car,” making it expensive.
Besides, Base provides dApps a stellar opportunity to access Coinbase’s vast ecosystem, which includes seamless product integrations, easy fiat onramps, and powerful acquisition tools to serve it’s over a hundred million verified users and to access tens of billions of dollars worth of assets on the platform.
On the Base network, users can currently bridge Ether from the mainnet to the L2 blockchain using the official Base bridge. A user interface for the bridge was launched on August 3, and about a week later, the cross-chain bridging protocol Wormhole also announced it is available on Base.
With the largest decentralized exchange (DEX), Uniswap running a Base version along with several other DEXs, users can now swap tokens or become liquidity providers. Additionally, users can make payments, register a username, launch a DAO, and mint NFTs on Base. When it comes to NFTs, multiple brands, including Coca-Cola, Coinbase’s Stand With Crypto campaign, Showtime, Atari, OpenSea, Optimism,…
Read More: Coinbase’s BASE Blockchain Launches Publicly, Sees Remarkable User Adoption