Base launched in August 2023 as Coinbase’s Ethereum L2, built on Optimism’s OP Stack. The announcement was a bombshell: the largest US crypto exchange was launching its own blockchain. Base had no token at launch (and Coinbase insisted it never would), which meant growth would come from genuine usage rather than airdrop farming. Jesse Pollak, head of Base, became the face of the chain’s developer-first ethos.
Base grew slowly at first, then explosively. The catalyst was Friend.tech in August 2023, a social trading app that drove millions of transactions. Then came Farcaster integration, memecoin activity, and most importantly Aerodrome — the DEX that became Base’s native liquidity hub. By mid-2024, Base was processing more daily transactions than Arbitrum and Optimism combined on many days, despite being less than a year old.
Coinbase’s distribution advantage was the key. With 100+ million verified users, Coinbase could onboard people to Base through its main app with a single button. The Coinbase Wallet integrated Base natively. Smart Wallet, launched in 2024, made creating a Base account gasless and nearly invisible. For many crypto newcomers, Base was their first experience with any blockchain, and they didn’t even know they were using one.
Base’s rapid growth raised questions about decentralization — at launch, Coinbase was the sole sequencer, meaning the company had theoretical control over transaction ordering. The roadmap included plans for a decentralized sequencer set, but as of 2025, Base was still more centralized than Arbitrum or Optimism’s governance structures. Whether users care about sequencer decentralization or just want cheap, fast transactions is the question Base is implicitly asking the market. So far, the market has answered: they want cheap and fast.
Leave a Reply