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Base: Coinbase's New L2
Niklas Polk
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Key Takeaways
7 min read
  • Base Chain is an L2 incubated by Coinbase and built on the Bedrock OP Stack.
  • The chain is set to go live on 9. August 2023, however, plenty of users bridged in while the chain was on developer access. On 30. July and 31. July over $80m in ETH were bridged to Base using the native bridge that did not even have a proper UI at the time.
  • Most of that ETH went into the BALD token - a memecoin, which subsequently collapsed because the deployer removed most of the liquidity for the token. LeetSwap, the DEX where this took place, also got exploited for $630k days later.
  • Despite these recent events, Base is well positioned to attract a lot of new users and traffic and might become a very retail-focused chain like BNB Chain, with lots of interesting investment opportunities.

Introduction

Base is a new Layer2, incubated by Coinbase. It is built on the Bedrock OP Stack and functions like Optimism in most ways. The L2 Chain is still in developer access and is still not live yet for the general public. Despite the limitations in access, it has already garnered huge interest due to a meme token frenzy that ensued, also known as the BALD token, and the exploit of LeetSwap on Base, the only DEX with a UI at that time. Although there were several negative implications that occurred once the BALD token deployer chose to rug, the strong backing by Coinbase combined with the technical support of the Optimism stack makes the chain well-positioned to attract a lot of users and builders and become a major player in the...