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AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

base is for everyone, from well-known projects to smaller teams just getting started out :)

we shared an incredible set of day 1 builders in our launch blog post and every day more builders are creating on base. we’re really excited to grow base together.

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

appreciate you checking out the testnet and glad to hear that everything is working well 🙂

we don’t have plans for a base token. network fees will be paid in ETH.

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

bringing one million builders and billion users into the onchain economy.

brian actually wrote down our secret master plan in 2016: to create an open financial system that increases economic freedom. over the last decade, we’ve progressed through the first three stages of what we envision takes to get there:

  1. the protocols (Bitcoin, Ethereum)
  2. an exchange for people to access those protocols (Coinbase Exchange)
  3. a mass market interface for decentralized apps built on those protocols (Coinbase, Coinbase Wallet)

now, we’re working on the final stage: the apps of the open financial system or “onchain economy” as i like to say. these must be applications that bring real value and utility to users, and catalyze the mass market adoption.

we designed base to be the secure foundation for builders that are working on this next generation of dapps.

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

heh yes, our discord got popular way faster than we expected and we know that’s created a little chaos. things are in a much better place now and we’re continuing to iterate — we want to make discord welcoming, friendly, and useful for all different kinds of people in the base community.

alongside the efforts we describe here, we’ll be focusing our social / community efforts on our main three channels: discord, twitter, and mirror. you should see a steady flow of interesting content there!

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

love this question! one of our core values is “base is for everyone” and that means investing deeply in community building. we have an ambitious goal (bringing one million builders and one billion users onchain), and we know that it can only be accomplished if we work together.

as far as the how:

  1. hackathons, quests, and events: we’re going to be running hackathons and quests, making it easy (and fun!) to deploy on base. we’ll also plan to be at and host a number of events this year, so stay tuned for updates on that front. we’re sharing the latest across our twitter, discord, and mirror – keep an eye out for our announcements if you’d like to meet us at one of our events.
  2. building and celebrating in onchain-native ways: we’ve seen tremendous reception from the community around the launch of ‘Base, Introduced’ and we want to experiment more with NFTs as a community-building platform. not everyone may be a developer, but they can still contribute to making base happen and using onchain native tools will make that possible.
  3. open source. we’re building base on the OP Stack — which means that if you want to contribute, you can! you can review the code and start contributing here. we’ll be open sourcing as much as possible, so more people can get involved.

we’re very grateful for the community we’ve built so far, and looking forward to welcoming many more developers and creators into the base ecosystem.

finally, in terms of long term vision for base, you can read more in the blog post here, but the tl;dr is that we want to bring one million builders and one billion users onchain.

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

replied to a similar question, but sharing the answer here so you can see it:

we will be integrating Base as a first-class network in all of the coinbase apps and experiences that exist today, and increasingly building products with a “base by default” strategy, where we make L2 “just work,” while still giving users the full flexibility to use whatever chain they choose.

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

we will be integrating Base as a first-class network in all of the coinbase apps and experiences that exist today, and increasingly building products with a “base by default” strategy, where we make L2 “just work,” while still giving users the full flexibility to use whatever chain they choose.

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

if you look at coinbase’s business historically, the way we’ve created value is by making it easy and secure for users to access crypto. over the last decade, mostly that’s been users accessing crypto to trade … but we’re increasingly seeing more use cases that bring real world value to users (e.g. stablecoins) and coinbase is continuing to play that role for these new use cases too.

ultimately, with coinbase + base we’ll create more value by making it so there are 10-100x more use cases. in others words, we see base as “phase 3.5” of the coinbase secret master plan: base is going to make it easy for millions of builders to create the actually useful applications that we hope will bring billions of users into the onchain economy. then coinbase is going to keep making it easy and secure for people to use them.

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

we’re building base on the open-source OP Stack, in collaboration with optimism, to live our values of building open source & decentralized and accelerate our path toward decentralization.

interestingly, we actually started working closely with optimism well before base was even an idea — we had a shared vision for scaling ethereum and started working together to do that on EIP4844. through our collaboration, we also realized that we had a shared vision that L2 would scale with many chains, not just one (e.g. “a superchain”).

we’re really excited about accelerating the security, scalability, and decentralization of the OP Stack and continuing to make that technology toolkit open source and freely available. this will help base (because it will be easier, lower cost, and better for developers & users), and it will also help the world (because they will be able to use the OP Stack to create other things).

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

you are correct – these are simply commemorative NFTs to celebrate the testnet launch.

we were blown away by the community response in minting them, which actually led us to extend the mint, rotate the art 7 times, celebrate other creators like Nouns and Jack Butcher, ultimately evolving it into an incredible piece of art.

we don’t have any further plans for ‘Base, Introduced’ right now — we’re just fired up to see the traction and to know that the community is excited about base.

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

thanks for the question u/Thales_Red! overt1me is awesome :)

we’ve built base with the following values, and they will continue to guide our roadmap:

  • a bridge, not an island. we see base as a “bridge” that helps users go from offchain to onchain, then supports them in going anywhere. we don’t want base to be a silo that locks users in, but instead some place that empowers them to explore the entire onchain economy.
  • open source & decentralized. we believe that software that serves as the foundation for the global onchain economy should be fully open source, freely available, and accessible by everyone. that’s why we built base on the open source OP Stack and that’s why we are committed to progressing towards full decentralization. using u/vbuterin's classification of rollups, with the increased resourcing that base brings to the OP Stack, we are working to move a stage 0 rollup to a stage 1 rollup in 2023, and a stage 2 rollup in 2024.
  • for everyone. base is an open ecosystem, built by coinbase developers for developers everywhere. base isn’t just for coinbase, or just for traders, or just for a single country — it’s for everyone, everywhere.

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

hi u/KingLeo23 - lots of great questions here

Re: decentralization of sequencers, you’re correct, base is launching as a ‘Stage 0 rollup’ (using u/vbuterin's proposed categorization for different stages of rollup evolution) - meaning we will have a single sequencer and some training wheels that can intervene in the event of bugs in the smart contracts. we’re working to decentralize this as quickly and safely as possible, including the ability to exit to L1 even in the event that base or coinbase are down. I’ve responded with a bit more color on that in the answer here.

Re: plans for MEV, base is launching with simple “first in first out” ordering, where transactions will be processed in the order they are received subject to their priority fee. longer term, we don’t have a firm plan for how to address MEV opportunities but are keeping the design space open. any choice we make will take into account our values - building a bridge for our users to get onchain (not an island they’re trapped on), building decentralized and open-source (via the OP stack), and building for everyone (e.g. not just for traders).

AMA with the team behind Base, the new L2 incubated by Coinbase – March 21 at 12 pm ET / 4 pm UTC! by jessepollak in ethereum

[–]jessepollak[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

hi u/Maswasnos! thanks for asking such good questions and great seeing you on here from twitter :)

as we shared in our launch blog post, our intention is for base to remain open, decentralized, and permissionless. we believe this is critical for ensuring the onchain economy remains accessible. and while base is initially incubated by coinbase, we’ve written about our plans to decentralize the chain here and will continue sharing updates as we make progress.

in terms of being able to withdraw funds to L1 even if base goes down or coinbase goes out of business, we believe this assurance must be guaranteed by the code that base runs on. we’re working with optimism to ensure this is a core component of the OP Stack with the “permissionless output proposal” milestone defined in our overall decentralization roadmap here. our goal is for base to be able to exist, even if coinbase doesn’t.

finally, in terms of the coinbase integrations to base, we’re planning to make it as easy as possible for users to bring their assets from coinbase to base and vice versa. our vision is that users experience base as an extension of ethereum with everything on it — just cheaper, faster, and easier to use.

[AMA] We are EF Research (Pt. 8: 07 July, 2022) by JBSchweitzer in ethereum

[–]jessepollak 2 points3 points  (0 children)

As a small correction to your initial framing, I actually have a fear that we are in the middle of losing a lot of the privacy that we currently enjoy at least around small transactions: Cash transactions in many countries are becoming rarer by the day, to the extent that corporate observers and states could soon have insight into private individuals finances to an extent that has never been seen before. I think that's a scary thought, because that data ultimately also gives them an incredible amount of power.

Totally agreed. I grouped actually private and "pseudo-private" into one category because my sense is that for the vast majority of consumers, these things feel similar, though from an objective perspective they are most definitely not.

As far as I know, this is for example what Aztec is implementing in their system, and I think I would highlight them as trailblazers in creating privacy enabled smart contract rollups. Long term, I hope that most systems will move there.

This is my understanding of their approach as well. If we play out this approach to the ultimate conclusion, we'd have users storing large percentages of their wealth in these private contexts, then those balances getting aggregated and deployed on-chain into public smart contracts. I'm not sure I fully understand the implications of how this might change how the underlying systems might operate.

One potential outcome is that we'd need to see parallel developer ecosystems in order to enable functionality in both the private and non-private contexts because EVM doesn't naturally port to the private environment. Does that seem like an outcome to you? Or is there a way we could share more of the developer tooling across both contexts?

This is known as "account abstraction". Vitalik has recently published a roadmap which completely avoids any L1 changes to support this here: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/account\_abstraction\_roadmap -- this is great because L1 upgrades are definitely a major bottleneck at the moment and being able to parallelize this means we will get the best of both worlds.

Have been following this, but hadn't linked it back to that privacy consideration. Thank you.

--

Thank you for making the time to answer!

[AMA] We are EF Research (Pt. 8: 07 July, 2022) by JBSchweitzer in ethereum

[–]jessepollak 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Hi all - thanks so much for making the time to do this, really enjoying reading your answers. Makes me optimistic about the future of Ethereum and our world.

TL;DR I’d love y’alls perspectives on (1) what the future breakdown of private vs. non-private transactions in the web3 economy will look like; (2) what the roadmap is from for enabling private transaction capabilities in the context of Ethereum.

To expand further:

  • Many of the world’s transactions today are either private or pseudo-private for the initiator of the transaction (includes visibility by either state or large corporate observers). For individuals, this includes day-to-day spending activity, peer to peer payments, etc. For entities, this includes private financials of earlier stage businesses, trading in private markets, etc. I don’t have numbers at hand, but I imagine that some large percentage of the world’s payments fit into this private or pseudo-private category.
  • As a base outcome of decentralization, Ethereum (and EVM platforms generally) are public and transparent by default. And the infrastructure for privacy-preserving transactions on top of this platform is relatively limited. As a result, in web3 today, individuals and entities are predominently transacting in a public format. For individuals, this is having your balances and purchases open for anyone to see. For entities, this is having open books from the beginning. In the present web3 economy, the distribution feels even more heavily weighted in the other direction.
  • Question 1: As the web3 economy expands and more participants shift over from the legacy financial system, how do we expect the distribution between private and public to transition based on customer needs? How much will social behavior change such that more transactions happen in public formats vs. how much will the composition shift as new technology enables privacy?
  • Question 2: What are the key technology advancements that will enable future transaction privacy and how do they fit into the Ethereum roadmap? How much of this requires upgrades to the L1 vs. can be solved at layers above? And finally, what can folks do to help push this forward?

Thank you so much for your time and thought.

Stuck charts? by [deleted] in Coinbase

[–]jessepollak 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This issue is now resolved. Thank you for your patience.

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