Coinbase’s Base Goes Live

Publicly-traded crypto exchange platform Coinbase recently announced the mainnet launch of its new blockchain. The announcement of a San Francisco-based fintech company marks Coinbase’s entry into an emerging paradigm, where publicly-listed companies launch and operate their own distributed network.

The Base mainnet launch grants users access to a robust ecosystem of over 100 decentralized apps and services, featuring an interesting assortment of crypto projects. Base offers decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, oracles, and bridges, not to mention technology/analytics infrastructure since its testnet launch last February and dev-only release last July.

Users can explore this DApp ecosystem while benefiting from faster transactions and lower transaction costs.

The lowdown on Base

Base is a Layer 2 rollup network and scaling solution that processes transactions off Ethereum. This allows users to take advantage of lower transaction fees, faster transaction speeds, and more efficient transactions for DApp users.

Base has no plans of issuing a network token, instead focusing its efforts as an incubator for blockchain projects. 

According to company sources, it plans to gradually decentralize the chain over time as the team concentrates on building crypto products. Base is expected to serve as the main network for the firm's product and service portfolio.

Base’s highlights include:

1. Developed on Ethereum. It is built on Ethereum and its security, enabling users to confidently utilize the network as an onramp from Coinbase and other Ethereum-compatible blockchains.
2. Developed by Coinbase. Coinbase’s robust infrastructure makes it easy for developers to build and users to use Base. With synergistic product integrations, secure fiat onramps, and a wide array of tools, developers can directly build products for over 120 million Coinbase users.
3. Low fees, more functionality. Base offers users full Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility at significantly lower costs. Intuitive developer APIs for account abstraction enable gasless transactions on Base, while bridges enable multi-chain DApp development.
4. Open-source ethos. Base is going to progressively decentralize and maintain an open-source ethos as it works to create a rollup-agnostic standard modular blockchain powered by the Optimism software stack.

“Onchain Summer” in full swing

To mark the successful launch, Base has launched its “Onchain Summer” event, which will promote Base partner DApps across industries such as gaming, music, and art over a period of multiple weeks.

Additionally, Base users will be able to mint a commemorative non-fungible token as part of the promotional activities from “Onchain Summer.” 

Base: future opportunities 

While Base faces significant opposition with other layer 2 solutions, such as Polygon (MATIC), Arbitrum (ARB), Optimism (OP), and ImmutableX (IMX), interest levels indicate bullish sentiment for the Coinbase product. Over $100 million worth of crypto assets have since moved to the Base network, without a doubt indicating the interest in the product.

Coinbase’s move into a similar model to Binance (in the sense of a crypto exchange running its own blockchain) can help it open a potentially lucrative income stream. Besides transaction fees, Coinbase stands to earn potential revenue from the DApps built on top of Base.

With over $130 billion in assets and 120 million users, Coinbase seems to be going in the right direction towards success. 

Conclusion

Base will ultimately help promote scalability and interoperability on Ethereum, while offering native Coinbase users and developers a stable and secure ecosystem for high-performance, low-cost blockchain applications. 

The enthusiasm surrounding Base is quite massive. We can expect big things from Base, this at least seems logical for such a big company. However, time will tell and SimpleSwap is watching the updates concerning Crypto World to deliver them to you. 

SimpleSwap reminds you that this article is provided for informational purposes only and does not provide investment advice. All purchases and cryptocurrency investments are your own responsibility.