The Base mainnet has been publicly available since August 2023 and, with more than 10 million active addresses and 8 billion dollars in deposits, is the second-largest Layer 2 solution after Arbitrum. Base is an optimistic rollup built on Optimism's open-source "OP Stack."
What's the story
The launch of Coinbase's Smart Wallet allows wallet users to deploy their balances held on the Coinbase exchange directly on Layer 2. Additional features such as fee-free transactions (no gas fees) and the replacement of seed phrases with passkeys greatly simplify the user experience. Measured by transactions over the past 30 days, Base is the most active Layer 2 solution with close to 68 million transactions. To date, Coinbase has generated 60 million dollars in revenue from transaction fees as operator of the sequencer, which orders and processes transactions.
Good to know
A key element in scaling the Ethereum blockchain is offloading transactions to Layer 2, which then periodically settles them back on Layer 1. Base is an optimistic rollup that executes transactions outside the Ethereum mainnet and regularly publishes the transaction data on the Ethereum mainnet. This reduces the load on the Ethereum mainnet and enables the entire network to scale. The term "optimistic" derives from the assumption that all transactions are treated as valid by default. Optimistic rollups such as Base only compute and verify transactions if someone submits a "fraud proof," thereby signaling that an error has occurred. If the error is then confirmed, the transaction is reversed. This approach contrasts with zero-knowledge rollups such as Starknet or Scroll, where a cryptographic proof of the validity of all transactions is attached directly.
Translated from the German original, which is the authoritative version. Read the German version
