BANGKOK – Coinbase's Base blockchain launched in August 2023, and grew with the power of memecoins like BALD, a reference to CEO Brian Armstrong's bare scalp. But the protocol's creator says there's more to the story than silliness.
“BALD caught us all by surprise. You know, this was before the public launch of Base. It was when it was just open for developers," Jesse Pollak said during an interview on the sidelines of Devcon in Bangkok. "I remember waking up on Saturday morning and being like, what is going on? It was not in our plan, and it happened.”
BALD was a salient reminder before Base’s public launch that the crypto space can be unpredictable, and sometimes, rather than trying to control everything, the stewards of a protocol simply need to lean into the chaos and figure out how to turn unexpected situations into something great, Pollak said.
Something that's not a rugpull, which <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/07/31/bald-token-plunges-90-as-developer-pulls-liquidity" target="_blank">Bald unfortunately ended up being.</a>
Even though dozens of memecoins have launched on Base in the last year, Pollak wants the protocol to be known for more than that.
Pollak has been on something of a world tour with Base over the last few weeks meeting developers in Africa and Asia, stopping in conferences like Devcon.
During the interview, he emphasized that Base is witnessing significant growth in emerging markets like Southeast Asia, Kenya, and India, where the population wants access to secure economic options like stablecoins.
Indeed, <a href="https://defillama.com/stablecoins/chains" target="_blank">on-chain data shows</a> that Base is quickly catching up to Solana – a much older and more established blockchain – in stablecoin issuance. DeFiLlama data shows Base clocking in at just over $3.5 billion in stablecoin market cap, making it the sixth-highest chain for the dollar-pegged tokens.
Base also has its critics, who argue that <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/09/03/bitgo-ceo-says-wrapped-bitcoins-critics-arent-being-intellectually-honest-about-their-concerns" target="_blank">its ties to Coinbase</a> lead to an unhealthy amount of <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/podcasts/carpe-consensus/did-centralization-cause-the-base-blockchain-outage" target="_blank">centralization in the industry.</a>
The recent one-two punch of delisting Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) while promoting a Base-powered competitor, cbBTC, earned the latter bitcoin analogue the epithet "<a href="https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/11/20/coinbase-delists-wrapped-bitcoin-wbtc-citing-listing-concerns" target="_blank">central bank bitcoin</a>" from the CEO of wBTC's custodian. But Pollak dismisses these concerns, pointing to Bald.
"Bald showed that Base wasn't going to be this place that was fully manicured, curated, controlled, and centralized," he said.
Pollak argues that if Bald can happen on Base with such incredible expressiveness that the Base team had no control over, it proves the platform’s openness.
"I think that was actually a really, really powerful welcoming for the rest of the ecosystem to embrace Base as an open economy where they could participate," he continued.
Base, a layer-2, is built to lean into the decentralization of Ethereum, the protocol that it's built upon, Pollak pointed out.
“Base is built on open source, so that anyone, anywhere can fork the code, know what’s running, and see that it’s actually doing the thing they wanted to,” he said, pointing to the recent launch of <a href="https://base.mirror.xyz/eOsedW4tm8MU5OhdGK107A9wsn-aU7MAb8f3edgX5Tk" target="_blank">fault proofs</a> on Base.
These proofs allow any of Base's 763,036 active addresses (<a href="https://defillama.com/chain/Base?addresses=true" target="_blank">according to DeFiLlama data</a>) to validate and challenge transactions, which Pollak says significantly increases decentralization by removing reliance on centralized entities.
Centralized entities, including Coinbase, which, technically, Base could outlive.
“There are seamless ways to get in and out of Base, so even if Coinbase completely disappeared, people would still be able to transact," Pollak said.
