Original Author: Mary Liu
Original source:BitpushNews
Original Author: Mary Liu
Coinbase (COIN), the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, announced Thursday the launch of Base — a layer 2 network built using Optimism’s OP Stack.
Base will be incubated within Coinbase, but plans to be fully decentralized in the future. It will join as the second core contributor to the OP Stack, the developer toolkit for the Optimism network. However, Base will not be limited to Ethereum, it will also provide easy and secure access to layer 2 networks such as Optimism, as well as other blockchain ecosystems such as Solana, Avalanche and Polygon The "Buy, Build or Invest" project in the "System" will bring 1 billion people into the crypto space.
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Coinbase's diversification strategy attempt"build"The new announcement comes at a critical time for Coinbase's growth bottleneck, with the company's latest quarterly report showing its core trading volume revenue drying up amid the crypto bear market. At the same time, other lines of business with profitable potential began to grow, such as staking and other services. Base, the protocol that Coinbase intends to “decentralize” over time, could become a cash cow for the company, which has long wanted to diversify its balance sheet.
sincerity.
To spur development, Coinbase and its venture capital arm, Coinbase Ventures, will offer an undisclosed amount to a grant program for Base-based software engineers.
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competition
Coinbase has long had a strategy of contributing technology and guidance to the crypto industry, including dedicating 10% of its cash holdings to venture capital, but not all of those strategies have panned out. For example, its non-homogeneous market (NFT) platform has been struggling to carve up market traffic since its launch last year, despite Coinbase's golden name on its head.
The release of Base also coincides with an increasingly fierce and complex competition in the Ethereum scaling market. Earlier this week, data tracked by L 2B EAT showed that Arbitrum One processed more transactions than Ethereum, becoming the first Rollup to surpass Ethereum mainnet in daily transactions. The series is valued at $1.2 billion. And Optimism, the second largest Rollup and a major competitor to Arbitrum, was valued at more than $1.6 billion in a Series B last March.
Meanwhile, several competing projects are working on Ethereum-compatible “zero-knowledge Rollups,” aka zkEVMs that promise to change the Layer 2 landscape, such as Scroll, Polygon, Matter Labs, and ConsenSys. Some industry experts believe that Rollups powered by ZK cryptography are the most promising ways to scale Ethereum, as they have the potential to improve the existing Later 2 blockchain in terms of speed and security.
Polygon said it will release its zkEVM on March 27. Last week, Matter Labs invited developers to register to deploy their applications on its zkEVM zkSync.
Despite the rapid development of zk technology, Jesse Pollak, head of the Coinbase protocol, said in an interview with Blockworks that the difference in technology does not define the product, and how to deploy the details is the key. A key goal of Base is to create technology that can be easily upgraded, and this goal is one of the main reasons why Coinbase chose Optimism as its partner, especially the modular solution of OP Stack.
Pollak said: "We believe that in the future, we may launch Rollups that have both zk components and Optimism components. At present, what is important is to build the technology stack in a way that can be easily upgraded. The reality is that you need to build infrastructure so that Blockchain works well."
Pollak also mentioned that since last year, Coinbase has been working on proto-dank sharding (EIP 4844), an upgrade to Ethereum that will reduce Layer 2 network fees to 10-100 times the current level, EIP 4844 is expected to be finalized this summer.
