BANGKOK – Coinbase’s Base blockchain launched in August 2023 and grew on the strength of memecoins like BALD, a reference to CEO Brian Armstrong’s bare scalp. But the protocol’s creator says there’s more to it than foolishness.
“BALD surprised us all. You know, this was before the public launch of Base. It was back when it was just open to developers,” Jesse Pollak said during an interview on the sidelines of Devcon in Bangkok. “I remember waking up on Saturday morning and thinking, what’s going on? It wasn’t in our plan and it happened.”
BALD was a poignant reminder before Base’s public launch that the crypto space can be unpredictable, and that sometimes, instead of trying to control everything, a protocol’s maintainers must simply lean into the chaos and figure out how to handle unexpected situations can turn into something great. , Pollak said.
Something that isn’t a rug pull, which is what Bald unfortunately ended up being.
Although dozens of memecoins have been launched on Base in the past year, Pollak wants the protocol to be known for more than that.
Pollak has been on a sort of world tour with Base in recent weeks, meeting developers in Africa and Asia, stopping at conferences like Devcon.
During the interview, he highlighted that Base is witnessing significant growth in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, Kenya and India, where populations want access to secure economic options such as stablecoins.
On-chain data shows that Base is quickly catching up to Solana – a much older and more established blockchain – in stablecoin issuance. Data from DeFiLlama shows that Base has just over $3.5 billion in stablecoin market cap, making it the sixth highest chain for dollar-pegged tokens.
Base also has critics, who argue that its ties to Coinbase lead to an unhealthy degree of centralization in the industry.
The recent one-two punch of delisting Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) and promoting a Base-powered competitor, cbBTC, earned the latter bitcoin analog the moniker “central bank bitcoin” from the CEO of wBTC’s custodian . But Pollak dismisses these concerns and points to Bald.
“Bald showed that Base would not be this place that was fully cared for, curated, controlled and centralized,” he said.
Pollak argues that if Bald on Base can happen with such incredible expressiveness that the Base team had no control over, it proves the openness of the platform.
“I think this was actually a very, very powerful welcome for the rest of the ecosystem to embrace Base as an open economy that they could participate in,” he continued.
Base, a layer 2, is built to lean on the decentralization of Ethereum, the protocol it is built on, Pollak points out.
“Base is built on open source, so anyone, anywhere can fork the code, know what’s running, and see that it actually does what they wanted,” he said, pointing to the recent launch of bug proofs on Base.
These proofs allow any of Base’s 763,036 active addresses (according to DeFiLlama data) to validate and dispute transactions, which Pollak says significantly increases decentralization by removing dependence on centralized entities.
Centralized entities, including Coinbase, which could technically outlast Base.
“There are seamless ways to get in and out of Base, so even if Coinbase were to disappear completely, people would still be able to transact,” Pollak said.