Coinbase announced the launch of their new layer 2 called Base which the company says will be strong enough to attract over a billion users. The announcement came after an ominous social media promotion featuring a blue dot and nothing more, leaving many to speculate what they were planning to reveal. 

The new layer 2 by Coinbase begins a new chapter for the company which has survived the bear market of 2022 and the massive fallout from the FTX collapse, proving to be one of the more resilient and responsible crypto companies available. 

New layer 2 base

Base is a layer 2 network that operates on the Ethereum blockchain and is meant to be a developer-friendly platform for creating Dapps. The company decided to build its platform on the Ethereum blockchain because of its strong security and reliability compared to most other blockchains which comes as no surprise. 

The company is emphasizing the ease of the platform because it gives developers access to tools and products created by Coinbase. This added level of familiarity and support by the company will help developers push the boundaries of decentralized applications according to the company. 

They also state that their EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) will be significantly cheaper than other layer 2’s on the Ethereum network with gasless transactions that will make it easier to build on Ethereum, which is infamous for its high gas fees that have burdened users and developers in the past, causing them to seek alternatives such as Solana and Polygon. 

Moreover, this layer 2 is also open-source, giving developers a much easier route to innovate on the platform. Open source is often seen as complementary to web3 because of its ability to remain decentralized, with projects being community-led instead of by a corporate hierarchy that is more common in web2. 

Bringing in new users

One of the big standouts from the announcement is Coinbase’s massive ambition to bring over a billion users to web3. Even at the height of the crypto bull run in 2021 over one billion users still seemed like an unrealistic goal, and after all of the problems that plagued the web3 industry in 2022, it seems almost impossible now. 

The company states that in order to bring such a massive amount of new users to the space, they will need to provide an easier, cheaper, and safer platform. While this is true, the general opinion of cryptocurrency has been completely tarnished and needs to be included in that list as well. 

No Base token?

Fortunately, Coinbase has made one key decision that could make their Base layer 2 effective - they are not releasing a native Base token. While many people might have preferred to see a new token come out to profit from, tokens of this nature have nearly destroyed the reputation of the crypto industry, with tokens like FTT and LUNA becoming worthless.

It appears that Coinbase has put some serious thought into this and has made the right decisions by not making native tokens because many of them were not pegged to any sort of real value and that discovery caused many of them to collapse.