Base’s commitment to decentralization

Transcript

foreign [Music] happy Wednesday yeah Wednesday morning thanks everyone for being here I know it's a little early for a developer conference 10 30 in the morning I hope people weren't out too late my name is Jesse Pollock I'm here to talk about base's commitment to decentralization if you don't know what bass is uh bass is an ethereum layer too it's built on the op stack it's incubated by coinbase and our mission is to bring the next million developers the next billion users on

chain and what I'm here to talk about today is our commitment to decentralization so yeah like I said I helped create bass if you want to get in touch with me you can just scan that QR code we actually just rolled out fully on chain messaging you can use a bunch of different Messengers including coinbase wallet that's a great way to just Reach Out say hi ask questions get started Building on Base um so this talk we're gonna be talking about a few things first we're going to be talking about why base why did coinbase build base the second one we're talking about why decentralization why have we decided to build an essentialized ethereum layer 2 as a centralized business and then finally we're going to be talking about how decentralization what does it actually

take to make this thing decentralized when you're building it out of a centralized business finally I'll close with a few notes on how you can get started building on base and why we think this is a really exciting moment to to dive in um so first off y-base you probably know coinbase we've been building in the crypto economy for a long time I like to say that we have 130 billion dollars of tvl in an off-chain private L2 today and what we got to do is we got to figure out how do we bring that on chain and make it accessible to everyone else who's building in the crypto economy and fundamentally the thing that we believe as coinbase is that on chain is

the next online and let me break that down for you for a second if you look at the pre-internet era in the early 2000s we were in a place where if you're a developer you you had a pretty hard time building products for the world um really all you could do as an everyday person was consume information from centralized businesses the newspapers the banks um you were pretty siled wherever you were and then the internet came around and it was this crazy crazy thing you know it opened up for the first time the ability of anyone anywhere to build applications that anyone anywhere else could use and for information to flow across the world and operate in a truly Global way and that has what's enabled Twitter it's what enabled Facebook it's

what enabled Google it's what enabled WordPress it's what enabled us to be right here right now streaming this video from Paris France to hopefully thousands or tens of thousands or millions of people all over the world who are watching in but the problem with the online era is that even with information flowing freely around the globe you still couldn't do that with value you couldn't do that with ownership you couldn't build applications that anyone could use to transact with anyone else in the world and right now we are on the precipice of that changing and that's moving from an online platform to an on-chain platform which we believe is going to be the most powerful developer platform in human history because For the First time it's

going to allow anyone anywhere to build apps with value with money that allow anyone anywhere to participate in open global economy and there's a lot of evidence that this is already happening like really quickly this is a number of ethereum addresses it's going up into the right on-chain usage this is the number of on-chain developers you see a little bit more variability uh with the bow and bear Market but you know there's a lot of people here built in on a Wednesday in Paris flew all around the world to be here so I feel pretty optimistic about that and I think the thing that's been getting me the most fired up over the last six months is the number of use cases that are coming on chain right now we see advocacy coming on chain we see restaurants coming on chain we see

social media coming on chain we see messaging coming on chain we see gaming coming on chain literally everything is coming on chain right before our very eyes and all of that is being reflected in the number of on-chain transactions I think folks have probably seen this before the blue line is the number of ethereum transactions you see that that's basically been flat for the last little while that's because ethereum's been running at capacity and then just in the last two years you see that red line that's showing the number of Layer Two transactions and we started a little more less than two years ago at less than 100th of the number of ethereum transactions happening on Layer Two today we're at 2X and we're approaching 3x and soon we're going to be at 10x and then 100x this

number is going to keep going up and to the right and the crazy thing about all of this is we are still very far from everyone being on chain there's less than 10 million people in the world who are on chain today and there's eight billion people globally who are going to be on chain over the next decade and so base is in ethereum L2 it's built to enable those next generation of on-chain products and it's built to bring the next million developers the next billion users on chain and if we're successful this is what we're going to look like we're going to see that chart go up into the right it's going to grow and grow and grow and grow until the entire world's long chain so that's why base now the next question is why decentralize

and the the core question here is coinbase is a centralized business we have a centralized exchange and for the last decade we've been primarily building centralized products so why are we building a decentralized ethereum layer too and the key Insight here is that fundamentally at coinbase we believe that decentralization is the key thing that's going to enable an open global on-chain economy and then if we enable an open global on-chain economy we're going to enable better property rights so you can actually own the things that you own we're going to enable stable currencies so you don't wake up one day and have all of your money inflated away we're

going to enable free trade so you can transact with anyone anywhere in the world and I think most importantly we're going to create a Level Playing Field where regardless of where you are born regardless of where you are living right now if you have connection to the internet you get access to the same Services as everyone else and when we enable that open Global LNG economy we're going to improve economic freedom and economic freedom is really really good when you look at studies around economic freedom you basically see that with increased economic freedom all of the things we want to see higher life expectancy more literacy more businesses more happiness they go up into the right and all the things that we don't want to see they go down and so the tldr on why decentralized is simple

it's essentialization enables an open global on-chain economy an open global on-chain economy enables economic freedom and economic freedom makes the world a better place so that is why I decentralized now I'm going to talk a little bit about how decentralized um how are we building a decentralized ethereum layer 2 inside of a centralized public company in the United States and this has been a challenge you know we've been working on this now for a year uh the entire base Journey has actually been a little bit more than two years where we've been kind of exploring and building and trying to figure out what does it actually take in order for us to build this decentralized network

and as we've been building we have seen uh really three key challenges that we've run into and seen so the first is that the technology is still maturing from an L2 perspective the second is that base is launching from a centralized coinbase we have to figure out how to navigate that and then the third and I'm sure many people here are familiar with this is that the regulatory environment is still pretty uncertain right there's no clear rules and regulations that say this is how you do this so let me just walk through each of these challenges on the technology side we typically use this classification of stage zero stage one stage two Roll-Ups where stage zero uh Roll-Ups have a number of training

wheels and basically what that means is it means that they have additional points of centralization that allow us to ensure that if something goes wrong we can respond really quickly so that's a good way to get started but ultimately where we want to go is we want to get to a stage two roll up which basically means there's no training wheels and it's fully decentralized really building on the open decentralized characteristics of ethereum and if you look at the top 10 Roll-Ups today that's kind of what that chart is what you'll see is that we have many of them that are still in stage zero we have some that are stage one and we have none that are stage two and so that first big challenge is that the technology is still maturing and we needed to build base in the context of that maturation

the second Big Challenge is that we're launching base out of coinbase and while this has been done before right if you look at other l2s if you look at you know pretty much any other chain many of them have come out of centralized businesses you know op mainnet came from op Labs before it decentralized the optimism Collective arbitrum one came out of off-chain labs before it decentralized the arbitrum Dao but no one's done that out of a large public company based in the United States with all of the eyes of the world on it and so figuring out how do we decentralize base out of a public company with all of the eyes on us that's been the second really really big

challenge and then the third challenge is that the regulatory environment is still massively uncertain you know here's some headlines but I think all of you all probably feel it more than you see it right you feel it in the the complexity that you live with on a day-to-day basis when you're trying to build you feel it in the legal bills that you have that are tens of thousands of dollars hundreds of thousands of dollars that are taking away from Engineers that you could be hiring because you have to navigate the fact that our governments haven't caught up to this technology that is being built right now and all of this regulatory uncertainty it slows down innovation and it limits our ability to create that on-chain economy so those are the three

big challenges as we've looked at those three big challenges we have three commitments to decentralization that we are uh that we believe address those challenges uh and that we're excited to to stand behind in the years ahead so the first commitment uh uh the first commitment is a technical commitment is that we are technically investing in decentralization um the second commitment is a commitment to an open neutrality framework and I'm going to talk about this in a second but this is what allows base to remain open and permissionless for everyone to build on and then the third commitment is a commitment to funding public goods to

actually funding the infrastructure that makes base possible so talking about that first one the technical investment we started building base a little bit more than a year ago since then we have joined the op stack which is the underlying technology code base that powers based as the second core developer that means that we have a dedicated team at coinbase on base who are just focused full-time on decentralizing scaling increasing reliability of the op stack and there's four big things that we're doing right now the first is that we've dug in with the op Labs team and we've figured out how can we scale and make more reliable op gas op node those are the core clients that uh kind of run based today

and have served as the foundation for for the op stack the second and this is a new one is we've just joined forces with Paradigm on ref and we're going to be contributing to opreth which is the second client or a second client for the op stack that's going to increase client diversity and it's also going to enable us to have multiple fault proofs for the op stack running in parallel this is going to mean that when there are issues we have more resiliency and it's going to increase overall decentralization of the system the third big investment here is that we're currently in the process of Designing a Next Generation Security Council with the optimism Collective and the optimism Foundation that's going to secure base manage our upgrades and ensure that we are you know managing the

upgrade ability in the best way possible and then finally and this is one that I'm really excited about is we've spent the last six months building something called pessimism optimism pessimism and what it is is it's basically a watchdog it's an open source toolkit that allows anyone to monitor any op stack chain and detect anomalous events and respond to them instantly one of the really cool things about this is that we actually have a full invariant coverage in tests so we can look and see have we covered every single possible scenario that we think Could Happen have we run through it in a local environment and Trigger those monitors and then actually had a response that works and so this is fully

open source you can see it on GitHub it works for Bay it also works for every other op stack chain and and this is just what Basin coinbase are doing the exciting thing for me about the op stack is it's not just us and here's one example of that recently the optimism Foundation published what's called a mission or a request for proposals and the mission was how do we get a ZK approver built for the op stack this would allow us to transition base from being just an optimistic roll-up to also being a ZK roll-up or to even running an optimistic prover and a ZK prover in parallel we published that mission about six weeks ago and we've already seen proposals from incredible teams so we have risk zero who's

building a risk five uh EV ZK VM they've put a proposal o1 Labs who built Mina incredible technical team they put up a proposal and all of these proposals give us a line of sight to having a real ZK approver for the op stack in 2024. and I think that collectivism that decentralization the fact that there are many teams all over the world who are contributing to make base better and op mainnet better is what gets me really fired up and so with all of that hard work that we are doing we're excited to share that in 2023 we expect to progress based from being a stage zero roll up to a stage one roll up and then in 2024 we expect

to progress from being a stage one roll up to being a stage two Roll-Up and the cool thing is that's not just for bass that's also for op mainnet that's also for the Recently announced Zora Network that's also for the Recently announced public goods Network any roll-up or L2 built on the public uh public goods op stack is going to benefit from all of the technical investment into centralization that we're collectively making so that's the technical investment now let me talk about this open neutrality framework and this is a a big one um one of the things that's been really really important to us from the beginning is that base shares the open permissionless block space properties as

ethereum mainnet as optimism mainnet that's what allows us to have the open global economy that's what allows us to have developers and users who trust that when they build applications or when they use applications across These Chains they're going to get the same results and that they're going to be able to access them but building based out of centralized coinbase this hasn't always been a guarantee we've gotten a lot of questions of how are you going to do that how are you going to make this actually happen and so what we've worked on over the last seven months and really this has been us contributing and collaborating with the optimism Collective who's led the way is creating a neutrality framework that base is committing to publicly and this

neutrality framework covers a bunch of things but the key ones are we're basically saying that state transitions which are kind of how blocks are processing will be consistent across op chains that security that uptime that liveness must be upheld by operators like coinbase who are running base and then if we don't do those things there's going to be consequences and this neutrality framework is the thing that allows us to strike that balance of bringing base from a centralized business as a decentralized network and ensuring that we actually preserve those properties that are so critical and so with that neutrality framework in hand what we've then done is we've worked with the optimism Collective to

set up the base network from the way the upgrade keys are handled from the way the Challenger keys are handled to ensure that we remain committed to that neutrality framework so that coinbase is not a single point of failure so that coinbase cannot say we're just going to violate this thing and that's the end of it instead that we have multiple checks and balances that ensure that we protect that open permissionless characteristic of the block space and that we keep it consistent across base across op mainnet and across ethereum and so that's a high level overview there's a lot more details coming next week this has really been an incredible effort by the optimism Collective by the

optimism Foundation it's still in a draft phase this neutrality framework and they're going to be rolling it out next week to open for a community review Community input and base is already committed to whatever the community comes to from a process perspective so we're really excited to be standing behind that and to be ensuring That Base remains open permissionless for everyone so that's the second commitment the open neutrality framework the third commitment this is about funding the infrastructure it's about funding the public goods that make bias possible and we're excited to share that we're going to be funding base uh we're going to be funding these public goods directly from the way the base network

works so a portion of Base sequence or Revenue so every time you generate a transaction on base and you pay a fee will be routed to the optimism Collective to fund public goods and this is not going to happen behind the scenes this is actually happening fully on chain and so you're going to be able to go in you're gonna be able to go into ether scan or base scan and you're going to be able to say whoa here's my transaction here's the value from that transaction fee going into a vault here's that Vault being split and here's it being sent to fund public goods that's kind of the first of a Kind thing where we're doing a sort of value share in a fully public way from a public company to a decentralized autonomous organization to

fund public goods and so we're really excited about that we're also really excited that base is going to be joining the optimism Collective and we'll be fully participating in on-chain governance in the months and years ahead because we believe that participating on chaining governance participating in these decentralized processes is what's going to make decentralization possible in the long term we're also excited to share that this summer we're going to be doing our first round of Grants on base it's not something we've done before we're going to start small we got to get you know the feet our feet under underneath us um and so alongside that funding mechanism for public goods that's going to be continuous that will grow as base grows and will be routed through the optimism Collective we're also going to

be building more of that muscle ourselves to ensure that we are funding you know all of the great Builders who are coming to the base ecosystem and making a decentralized base uh open economy possible so those are the three commitments it's technical investment decentralization it's a participation in an open neutrality framework and it's funding of public goods now to close I just want to tell you a little bit more about how to get started building on base if you don't already know we opened base for Builders last Thursday on July 13th we are working towards opening base for everyone uh early August so that means that right now there's no uis there's no wallets

and we're working to onboard as many applications as many tools as possible so by the time that the users get there there's a ton of things for them to do and so if you're a builder you're deploying a Dap and you deploy in this period we have something called The Genesis Builder nft it's basically just a recognition that you were here early uh you you deploy your contracts you verify them in June you give us a little bit of information and we will AirDrop you the Genesis Builder nft that will signal you were here at the beginning you helped make bass in the open global economy happen we're also excited to be helping run a hackathon called super hack which starts August 4th this is done in collaboration

with optimism with Zora with World coin and a number of other teams and this is an awesome opportunity for everyone to come and build on base and to help us get this ecosystem going so please come and join uh super hack and in general I just want to put this chart back up we are at the beginning of something that's going to be incredible because over the next decade we are going to have we're going to go from having less than 10 million people on chain to having 8 billion people on chain and we're standing here right now or sitting here right now y'all are sitting here I'm standing here right now we're standing right here right now at the very very beginning of it and the message I want to leave you all with is

the time is now there's no time to wait and the thing that's going to make this curve go steeper and steeper is the work of All of Us coming together to create the new on-chain economy and to bring billions of people into it so it's on chain summer it's hot it's heavy it's time to build let's freaking go so that's me thank you very much if you want to get in touch you can connect with me uh message me there if you want to get started Building on Base you can also scan that QR code you'll get test netease you'll get a link to documentation and you I'm excited to build with all of you so with that thank

you very much for the presentation I think we have two minutes for questions [Applause] in the front oh hey thanks for that um so I just wanted to get a bit of a feel for the vision in terms of um you know accessing coinbase's users and bringing them into defy what what's the kind of General Vision because from externally at a high level it kind of looks like basically

you know you're going to set up reasonably friendly infrastructure that's less uh scary and daunting than you know what we've currently got um and obviously you know access your I don't know how many users you are you have but as you said before it was 130 billion TBR so what what's the general kind of idea there and what will that sort of I guess um you know coinbase coinbase approved uh D5 ecosystem look like for your for your user base yeah hello awesome um yeah great question um and I think you know when we think

about what our overall goal is it's to bring the whole world on chain like that is our North Star uh and that starts with the the you know tens hundreds of millions of users and coinbase those 100 billion dollars of assets um and so the way we're going to do that is just by simplifying the experience this is a place where I think base uh working with coinbase is going to be able to really push the limits of what we've done thus far right like because we have the underlying platform and because there is a wallet we can basically figure out what does it take to simplify that user Journey from the 10 steps today of I need to kyc I need to buy some eth I need to bridge the East I need to pick which chain I'm going to use I need to get the DAP that

I'm going to use and then I can finally transact to I have a cool product in front of me that I want to use let me just use it and so that's really what we're focused on is basically simplifying down that user Journey starting with the coinbase and base as the kind of like tracer bullet that makes it possible and then expanding that to every other client experience built on base um and so you know from a coinbase perspective what that means is that base is going to increasingly just be a default for folks you're going to still be able to use all the other infrastructure all the other chains but for folks who are just getting started they're gonna be able to use bass and that's just going to work out the box and from a base perspective we're excited to work with pretty much every

wallet to enable similar you know easy on ramping easy building and easy access adapts maybe time for one more question no more time no more time for questions no more questions awesome okay well thank you everyone thank you so much for coming have a great day [Applause] [Music]