In 2016, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote his "Master Plan" for a global open financial system.
Today, Coinbase is home to 110 million users with $80 Billion in assets on the platform.
Coinbase is launching BASE, an attempt to bridge their users to the crypto ecosystem 🧵⬇️
1/ The master plan has 4 parts:
1. Develop the protocols
2. Build an exchange
3. Build interfaces for dApps
4. Build dApps to power an open financial system
BASE falls in between stages 3 & 4, and no player is better suited than Coinbase to achieve this mission.
2/ To understand BASE, you need to first understand
@optimismFND
.
Optimism aims to be a Super-Chain, where the OP codebase is forked to create new chains that are configured to optimize for different use cases.
"OP-Chains" are seamlessly interoperable with each other.
3/ BASE is a fork of the OP codebase.
The chain itself will be permissionless, allowing anybody to deploy on it.
While Coinbase will build infrastructure and applications on top of BASE, it invites anybody to build and deploy on BASE to tap into 100 million verified users.
4/ Coinbase aims to leverage the infrastructure and applications built on BASE as a way to bridge the gap between their retail user base and the crypto economy.
They don't want to keep their users on an island, but rather provide a bridge towards decentralized applications.
5/ The goal is to offer their user base of more than 100,000,000 verified users with a safe and intuitive interface towards the crypto economy.
They want to create a default experience for anybody to go on-chain.
They are evolving from an exchange to a web3 gateway.
6/ There is no plan for a $BASE token.❌
Coinbase doesn't need a token to incentivize usage of its chain. It already has a colossal user base.
Ethereum will be the native gas token of BASE, with account abstraction enabling users to pay transaction fees with any coin they want.
7/ Coinbase and Optimism have been working together for more than a year and contributed heavily to the development of EIP-4844.
EIP-4844 aka “Proto-Danksharding” can decrease L2 transaction fees by 10-100x.
8/ BASE is being built on Optimism for 3 reasons:
1. Synergy built from EIP-4844 development
2. EVM being the “path of least resistance”
3. OP's codebase enabling a fast path to launch
Coinbase is now an OP stack core contributor and is running a joint roadmap with Optimism.
9/ The OP stack provides standardized, open-source modules for Layer 2 chains to provide shared security, composability and coordinated sequencing of transactions.
BASE being built into the OP stack opens up all applications built on Op-Chains to Coinbase's retail user base.
10/ There is no player better suited than Coinbase to onboard billions of users to the crypto economy.
BASE is Coinbase's Master Plan.
