Coinbase's 'Base' Powering Layer 2 Summer

Today on the show we welcome back Jesse Pollak. Jesse is the Head of Protocols at Coinbase and the Creator of Base. Base plays the important role of trailblazing the future of Layer 2's and doesn't let it's centralized parent get in the way of innovation. Can Base be the spark that kicks off "Layer 2 Summer"? ------ 🚀Join Ryan & David at Permissionless in September. Bankless Citizens get 30% off https://bankless.cc/GoToPermissionless ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | TRACK & MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠ 👾POLYGON | VALUE LAYER OF THE INTERNET https://polygon.technology/roadmap 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 9:00 Public Perception of Base 10:12 Why is Base a Big Deal? 14:34 Investing in Decentralization 16:11 Trailblazing for an Entire Industry 20:52 A New Level Of Collaboration 23:41 Contributing Fees to Public Goods 30:46 Layer 2 Summer 35:17 Wen Mainnet? 42:07 Onchain vs On-Chain 45:07 Closings and Disclaimers ----- RESOURCES Jesse Pollak https://jessepollak.com/ Build on Base https://base.org/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  That's the vision.

• 0:01David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Scale Ethereum together. And it may be that we're creating all of these kind of mini-chains or, you know, Base and OP Mainnet and Zora Network and PGN, even Arbitrum 1 and Scroll and all these things. But the thing that we're all contributing to is scaling Ethereum and bringing billions of people onto Ethereum. And that is the rallying cry. It is about coming together to create a new platform that can create a new, open, global economy that can change the world.

• 0:38David Hoffman?

  Bienvenue à Banglais Nation. Today at ECC, I talked to Jesse Pollak of Base. It's interesting that everyone seems to associate Jesse Pollak with Base. He's actually at Coinbase, building Base. And that actually is a difference. One of the nuances that we unpack in this show about Base, of course, is that Base is its own independent chain being incubated by Coinbase, but it is not Coinbase. It is a decentralized, or will be, a decentralized Layer 2 incubated by perhaps one of the largest centralized company in crypto, but will eventually be cast off on its own to join the superchain, the OP stack superchain. So we unpack a lot of these conversations. Of course, we're all very excited about the seemingly, knock-on-wood, incoming Layer 2

• 1:23David Hoffman?

  summer. And I feel like I start this conversation off here, that Base, the Layer 2, is at the spearhead of what might be a Layer 2 summer. And of course, Layer 2 bull market is what that really means. Coinbase is going to funnel, potentially, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users and developers onto Base. At the same time that all of these other Layer 2s have been building out their own groundwork, the ZK rollups, the ZK stack, Polygon, Optimism, all of these things have been growing roots for the past three or four years now. And with Coinbase funneling people into this industry through Base, these are the ingredients that have gotten so many in the Ethereum community excited for a potential Layer 2 summer. And so we talk about this.

• 2:05David Hoffman?

  We talk about what Coinbase is doing to not only pioneer the Layer 2 For the outside world, but also contribute back to the layer two ecosystem, specifically through the OP collective. And soon in the short term future, we're going to be hearing from Ben and the optimism team about something called the law of chains. Base is an OP stack chain that makes it a part of the OP collective, the optimism collective. And this is just a really important point. Coinbase is a centralized organization that is forking the OP stack, but meaningfully being a part of the OP collective, part of the base validator fees. The fees that Coinbase receives for operating the base chain is going to go to the OP collective, the optimism collective, which of course also goes to retroactive public's good funding.

• 2:50David Hoffman?

  And so not only are they pushing forward the frontier of the OP stack and contributing to the code base with things like Rust Ethereum, they're also donating the revenue, part, a share of the revenue to the OP collective. And so it's just such a strong commitment to the values and the ethos of layer two of Ethereum through the optimism system. The beauty of this is that Coinbase is allowing base to be optimism, not Coinbase. They are allowing base to be governed by optimism and contribute to the fees and being a part of the whole public good system that is powering optimism. And I think that is such a good move by Coinbase because it's such a firm vote of confidence

• 3:28David Hoffman?

  for both layer twos, but also just a permanent political and technical bridge into the world of decentralized technologies, into the world of decentralized finance and this whole blockchain system that we know and love. I think you can tell, maybe I speak for, for many of us in the Ethereum ecosystem, that Jesse's just become a fantastic leader. Everyone in the layer twos has really appreciated all the effort that he has done, both for Coinbase and for the layer twos. I really hope you enjoy this episode with Jesse. And if you are enjoying all of these ECC interviews and all the other abroad interviews that I have done while all at all of my conferences, consider going to Permissionless. Permissionless is the next conference that is out there. It is September 11th through 13th.

• 4:10David Hoffman?

  It is the conference that me and Ryan and the rest of the Bankless team collaborate with Blockworks, who know a thing or two about throwing conferences. And so it's the only conference that Ryan actually goes to is the one time of the year that actually do see Ryan on a consistent basis. And so maybe Paris is too far from you. Maybe all the Asian conferences are too far from you. Maybe, maybe Dev Connect is too intimidating, but you just want to go to what might be familiar? Well, you're a listener of Bankless and what I think Permissionless is fairly called, a reunion of all historical Bankless podcasts, guests and episodes and all the other fans that are listening to Bankless. And so if you want to step into the world of conferencing, which there's immense value there and immense fun, Permissionless, September 11th through 13th, Austin, Texas.

• 4:54David Hoffman?

  It's my first time in Texas. It's going to be my third time meeting Ryan. And so if you meet Ryan for your first time, you're only two times behind me. And so there's a link in the show notes to get started getting a ticket for Permissionless. If you are a Bankless citizen, you get 30% off of your Permissionless ticket, which basically means that Bankless citizenship pays for itself if you go to Permissionless. So I look forward to seeing all of the Bankless listeners there, just like we did last year, and hopefully again for every single year after that. It is the Bankless reunion, the Bankless meeting place. And so I'm very, very excited about that. Conferences always get me very excited. But I know you ought to be excited for this particular conversation with Jesse Pollak from BASE. So let's go ahead and get right into that conversation. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Kraken, our preferred crypto exchange for 2023.

• 5:37David Hoffman?

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• 6:23David Hoffman?

  Introducing Polygon 2.0, the value layer for the internet. For too long, the limitations of blockchains have held back app development and stifled user adoption. The internet allows anyone to create and exchange information. What's missing is a "value layer" that lets anyone exchange, store, and program value. That's where Polygon 2.0 comes in. Polygon Labs has unveiled a series of innovations that will radically alter the Polygon ecosystem and Web3 as a whole. By leveraging groundbreaking ZK innovations such as Polygon ZK-EVM, the next iteration of the best-in-class Plonki2 proving system, and a first-of-its-kind ZK-powered interoperability layer, Polygon 2.0 will give users and devs unlimited scalability and unified liquidity. Right now, there is a Polygon improvement proposal regarding a potential ZK-powered upgrade of Polygon Proof of Stake.

• 7:08David Hoffman?

  If approved, Polygon Proof of Stake would become a Layer 2 ZK-EVM veridium. So make your voice heard on this proposal by joining the Polygon Discord today. You have a chance to help the Polygon community give the internet the value layer it deserves. Enter Mantle, an entire ecosystem dedicated to the adoption of decentralized, token-governed technologies. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first DAO-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle Network, a brand-new, high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built differently from the other Layer 2s that you may be familiar with. Mantle asks the question, "How would you build a Layer 2 if you had the technology of 2023?" Mantle Network is a modular Layer 2, built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data

• 7:51David Hoffman?

  availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80% compared to other Layer 2s, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle Treasury is one of the biggest DAO-owned treasuries in DeFi, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub-communities from around Web3 onboarded to help the growth of Mantle, like Game7 for Web3 gaming, or EduDAO for the world of DSci, and Bybit for TBL and liquidity in OnRants. So if you want to build on the Mantle Network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone-based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle.

• 8:33David Hoffman?

  If you want to get started working with the first DAO-led Layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz, and follow them on Twitter at @zeroxmantle. Bienvenue à Bankless Nation. We are here at ECC, the third ECC since I think all of this crypto mania has really gotten started. And things are only getting crazier with Coinbase launching Base soon, TM. I'm here with Jesse Pollak. Jesse, welcome to Bankless once again.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Thanks, David. Glad to be here. Hey, Bankless Nation. Glad to be here, talking to all y'all.

• 8:59David Hoffman?

  So if you look at the reception of Base on Twitter, it's insanely positive. How is it in real life?

• 9:06Speaker 00

  It's been awesome. I mean, we've been so excited about the number of builders who want to be coming and building with us. And so, you know, I think when we were kind of in the pre-testnet phase, we had a little bit of trepidation of like, how are people going to receive this? What's the response going to be? And I think it's landed really well. I think people have understood our kind of strategy for decentralization. They've appreciated the way we are collaborating so deeply with optimism, leaning into Ethereum, scaling Ethereum. And I think they see how Base can really help bring the next million developers, next billion users on-chain. So it's been awesome.

• 9:41David Hoffman?

  I think that the story of Base is, hopefully, a microcosm of the story of Layer 2s at large as well. There is a growing, boiling sentiment among the Ethereum clan that we're on the cusp of a Layer 2 summer. And perhaps Base is actually the spearhead of that. Maybe we could just take a moment. I know we've had this conversation every single time you've been on Bankless in the last like year or so. But let's just go through just like, why is Base different from all the other Layer 2s? We have optimism. We have Arbitrum. We have the ZK rollups.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 10:12David Hoffman?

  Base is just another rollup.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 10:13David Hoffman?

  Is it? Why is it unique?

• 10:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think first off, we do think that the pie is massive, right? And so what we're really focused on is collaborating with everyone to grow that pie. And make it so we go from the less than 10 million people we have on-chain today to 8 billion people over the next few years. And so that's definitely the focus. In terms of the place where I think Base is going to be able to differentiate, I think the intersection of Base and Coinbase is really an opportunity for us to kind of get the full end-to-end experience working, right? And that's not to say that Base will exclusively work with Coinbase, right? Like Base is going to work with every wallet. It's going to work with every DApp. But I think having that kind of like testbed where we can say, okay, what does it look like? To distill down this user experience from, you know, 12 steps to do something and a bunch of really complex

• 10:57Speaker 00

  infrastructure choices that users have to make to I want to do a thing, it's done. I think that's kind of the experience that we're really driving towards. I think once we get that down, what we're going to be able to do is we're A, going to be able to bring all the Coinbase users and all the Coinbase assets on chain, but then B, I think we're going to have a template that's going to be able to bring all of the next million, 10 million, 100 million, billion users on chain.

• 11:21David Hoffman?

  And this is of course bullish for Coinbase because if people want to be like, hey, what's that DeFi thing? Coinbase has the answer for that.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  Exactly, and not just DeFi things, you know, I think we're really excited about DeFi, but we're also excited about all of the kind of emerging consumer use cases that are happening on chain. I mean, increasingly, we're seeing gaming on chain, we're seeing food on chain, we're seeing music on chain, we're seeing art on chain, we're seeing media on chain. Like, everything is coming on chain. And I think building a platform and building experiences that enable that for everyone, that's what it's all about.

• 11:52David Hoffman?

  Can we talk about what's it like for a, probably the largest centralized company that we have in crypto, to build a decentralized network? So like, how is that interface? Because is Base Coinbase? Or is Coinbase and Base a partnership between two separate entities? Can you like parse apart that a little bit?

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I had a main stage talk today at ECC. The goal with Base is to build a decentralized open network. And the reason why we think decentralization is so important is because decentralization is fundamentally what enables an open global on-chain economy. And an open global on-chain economy is the thing that's going to increase economic freedom globally. And economic freedom globally means a better world. It's like, that's the through line. It's like decentralization enables the open global economy, enables increased economic freedom, enables a better world. Actually getting there, absolutely a challenge. I think there's kind of like three primary axes of that challenge. The first is that the technology is still relatively early, right?

• 12:53Speaker 00

  If you look at all of the rollups across the space, I mean, you kind of stack them up against the stage zero, stage one, stage two, kind of categorization. Talks about training wheels. I think you'll see that many of them are stage zero. Some of them are stage one. There's no stage two. And so making sure that we're actually contributing there, that's, I think, a really important challenge. The second big challenge is that we are launching out of a centralized company, right? And one thing that I think sometimes gets overlooked is we're not the only people who've done this, right? Like, if you look at other rollups, you know, Optimism, Mainnet, Arbitrum, those also launched out of labs companies, right? OP Labs, Offchain Labs.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  But we are the first publicly traded, large-scale US brand to do this. And I think that that does definitely have increased visibility, increased challenges in certain ways. Increased opportunity, too. Increased opportunity, too, absolutely. I think we're paving the way. And I think what you've seen over the last four or five months since we started talking about Base is that a lot of other people are kind of following in our footsteps. You have more and more OP stack chains coming out. You have more and more folks who are saying, wow, is this a way for us to bring our users on chain? So I'd say that kind of like launching is the second challenge. I'd say the third challenge is just that we're still operating in a really unclear and ambiguous policy environment, regulatory environment, right? Like, everyone, and I think you probably experienced this, the whole crypto community experiences this,

• 14:18Speaker 00

  like, we're spending more time and energy on lawyer fees and policy efforts than we are on innovating. And that's a really, really hard context, especially when a company like Coinbase is so kind of at the front of that policy effort. And so I'd say those are the three big challenges. We've done a bunch of things to kind of address those challenges. We're investing really heavily on the technical decentralization side, you know, investing in OP GET, the client, and building OP REST with Paradigm in a collaboration, building open source monitoring tools like Pessimism. We have a whole team just dedicated to OP stack core development, because we joined as a second core developer.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  We also are committing to neutrality framework that Optimism has been like working on. It's still in the draft phases. They're going to be opening up for their whole community to kind of weigh in on and contribute. And they'll be talking a lot more about that. They're really leading the way. But we've kind of said, hey, we're going to hold base to these neutrality standards because that's what's going to enable us to keep base open and permissionless. We've also set up the network, you know, in the initial way we've launched it such that it is sufficiently decentralized to actually adhere to those neutrality standards. So that Coinbase nor kind of the base team is a single point of failure in the system. And then I'd say the third, the third big way that we're really kind of addressing those challenges is we're creating sustainable funding mechanisms for base

• 15:43Speaker 00

  to fund the public goods and the underlying infrastructure that actually makes it all possible. So we're going to be contributing a portion back of our sequencer revenue to fund public goods through the optimism collective. We're also starting to spin up our own kind of public goods grants programs, starting some of those in August. I think all of those pieces, the technical investments, the neutrality investments and the funding investments are going to be able to get us that decentralization that's so critical for base in order to enable that open global on-chain economy.

• 16:11David Hoffman?

  I think a big theme of your answer just now is twofold. It's really about trailblazing in two different ways. One is Coinbase is directly interfacing with a lot of the infrastructure and pouring in resources to make the infrastructure to support base better. And the beautiful thing about that is that it's reproducible across chains. And it's also trailblazing in a signaling sense, as in planting a flag like, hey, we're, we're, we're making a chain. We're going to make it decentralized and we're not going to silo it. We're going to be building bridges to the rest of the ecosystem. Can you talk about just like the trailblazing nature of this whole project and what you're hoping to get out of that and just signal to the rest of the industry?

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  I'm just like getting a little emotional as you say that. It's, um, you know, I, at the end of 2021, I kind of stepped into a new role and the goal was figure out how to bring Coinbase on-chain. It's like a 4,000 person public company.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  There's not a roadmap for that.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  There's no like, here's what you do to bring the company on-chain. And the first year was like wandering in the dark, like literally just throwing things against the wall and failing. And, uh, you know, they actually, uh, we, we shut down like my team at some point where it was like, you've tried enough, like try again. Then kind of out of the ashes of that shutdown, me and a couple of people started to be like, what if we had one more shot? What if we took the learnings and we did it one more time? And that was, that was base, you know, it's like the developer platform that we needed for the first few tries. And then the last year has been

• 17:54Speaker 00

  just trying our best to do what we think is right and what we think aligns with the ethos of crypto and the ethos of Ethereum. And again, there's been no playbook, like no one told us, here's how you launch a decentralized network out of a public company. Instead, we've just tried to bring together really smart, hardworking, thoughtful people inside of Coinbase. Um, and then what, what I like to call the super team of people outside of Coinbase, um, across OP Labs, across the Optimism Foundation, across all these other teams who are starting to build on the OP stack, you know, Zora, Gitcoin, uh, Cello, um, countless other teams who are contributing here.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  And we've tried to just be like, what do you guys think? How do you think we should be doing this? How do we think, how do you think we should be leaning into the values of crypto and Ethereum? And I don't think we've been perfect. And I'm sure we're going to make mistakes in the months ahead and years ahead. And

• 19:01Speaker 00

  it's been really, really hard trying to figure it out. But I'm, I'm really proud of, um, the decisions we've made thus far, the way we've learned from some of the early mistakes that we've made. And I do think that we're having a positive impact on showing the world that it's possible to come on-chain. That whether you're a small company or a big company, this platform, the on-chain platform, offers so much new opportunity because for the first time, it fundamentally puts everyone on the same playing field. And says, if you're a builder in the United States or in Paris, or in Kenya, or in Venezuela, or, or wherever.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  You can build an app that anyone else can use. And if you want access to financial services and you're in any one of those countries, you can access the same financial services. And that opportunity, the equality of opportunity, the impact from an economic freedom perspective, it's worth trailblazing for. It's worth fighting for. It's worth doing fricking hard things that none of us know how to do. And all we can do is just figure it out, try our best, make mistakes, learn. I think that's, that's our ethos with Base. It's like one foot in front of the other. Bring the world on chain.

• 20:23David Hoffman?

  I, I think a reason why so many people find themselves in the crypto industry, after they get in here, they kind of understand that their old, the old institutions are crumbling. They're not really serving to the best, sometimes to the best of their ability. They're not really serving the needs of the people of the world. The, the institutions of old are just decaying. And what's cool about and optimistic about the future of crypto that I think so many see, that I definitely see, and I think you see, is that we are offering new platforms to build new institutions. And we also, we also have new institutions that look and feel like our old institutions, like Coinbase. It's a new crypto bank and it does better things than old banks, but it's still the same form, form factor. Not to, not to belittle everything that Coinbase has done, but when you tell me that Coinbase

• 21:08David Hoffman?

  and Zora and the OP Collective and OP Labs and anyone building an OP stack chain has formed, I don't know what it's like, like a Telegram group of, of, what did you call it, the super team? And building this new foundation, that feels like a new institution, something, a new system of collaboration. That feels like the new, the net new form factor.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Totally. And, and there's no, like, to be clear, there's no Telegram group where there's like a cabal of us like coordinating, right? Like. It's around open source code, right? Like, we started building Base without talking to the OP Labs team or Optimism, because we looked at the code and we said, "This is open source, it's MIT licensed, we can do whatever we want with it." And we started. And I know from talking to other teams that that was a similar experience that they had, where they just started. And then there's infrastructure for letting us communicate with each other, right? Like, Optimism has incredible governance processes that they're building out slowly but surely. Citizens House, the kind of whole missions process that they're starting to do, the Token House and the delegate platform there.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  But I think mostly what's happening is people are rallying around code, and they're rallying around the public goods that enable us to build this new economy, and they're seeing that their values align with other people who are building with them, and they're just creating in a permissionless, interoperable way. And that is, it's a beautiful thing. It's a little scary at times, right? Because, you know, going back to your original question, or not original question, but earlier question around like, "How does Base differentiate? Or how's Base different than all these other rollups?" Like, we don't know yet. I mean, we do know, right? Like, there's obviously ways that Base is different, but also, we're all doing different experiments and like, trying to figure out.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  But I think the thing that I'm keeping in my mind throughout all of this is that our ultimate vision is to scale Ethereum. That's the vision. Scale Ethereum together. And it may be that we're creating all of these kind of mini-chains, or, you know, Base and OP MainNet and Zora Network and PGN, even Arbitrum 1 and Scroll and all these things. But the thing that we're all contributing to is scaling Ethereum and bringing billions of people onto Ethereum. And that is the rallying cry. It is about coming together to create a new platform that can create a new, open, global economy that can change the world.

• 23:41David Hoffman?

  Part of the collaboration between Coinbase and the OP stack decentralized network of the collective, the collective is the right word, was the decision to contribute some of the sequencer fees of Base to public goods. Can you just talk a little bit about that decision and why that's such an important part of the story?

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it just felt... Obvious to us kind of from the beginning, right? It's like if you look at the ethos of impact equals profit. And you look at the models that we've started to build where we have new funding mechanisms for public goods. The idea that Coinbase would benefit from those technologies or Base would benefit from those technologies and not contribute back almost felt laughable. And so I think kind of from the beginning, we took it as a given that if we were going to be building on this technology, we were going to be contributing back to it and we were going to be funding it. And not just the OP stack, but all of the public goods that make crypto possible, whether it's Ethereum, whether it's the underlying Linux infrastructure that makes Ethereum

• 24:42Speaker 00

  possible, like all of that stuff deserves to be funded. And today, we don't have good funding models for it. But I think the thing that's exciting for me is we're starting to build sustainable sources of income to fund it, right? Like Base is going to drive more transactions and those transactions are going to drive more revenue and those revenues are going to drive more funding. And then we're starting to build new and novel systems for funding, right? Like I had the privilege of participating as an individual, not as representative of Base or Coinbase, in the latest retroactive public goods funding round with the Optimism Collective. And it was unlike anything I've ever seen before. And it wasn't perfect, right?

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Like this is round two. It started out with like, you know, like Vitalik and 15 other people, like, you know, trying to figure out what's worth funding. This one, I think, was like 70 people. You know, we, you know, looked at 300 projects, people ranked them, you know, I shared my distribution, people, you know, had thoughts and feedback. Everyone's distributions were different, everyone's methodologies were different. But it was like 75 brilliant people being like, how do we do this right? And that process? I mean, it was, it was inspiring. And now we're going to do it again, right? Like retro PGF3 is coming, 30 million OP, which is...

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Thirty, thirty-three million dollars, yeah. So some, some large amount of funding. And we're gonna, you know, I've already been looking at the way they're starting to run it. And it like, we're four, four months later and they've already made a huge number of improvements. And so that iterative process of like...

• 26:27Speaker 00

  We're gonna fund, we're gonna experiment, we're gonna learn, we're gonna fund, we're gonna experiment, we're gonna learn, we're gonna fund, we're gonna experiment, we're gonna learn, until we have literally rebuilt the world on chain. That's what it's all about.

• 26:41David Hoffman?

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• 27:24David Hoffman?

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• 28:05David Hoffman?

  a programming environment upgrade, developers can write smart contracts in Rust, C, C++, and many more coding languages. Arbitrum empowers you to explore and build without compromise. Visit arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app on Arbitrum. Are you planning to launch a token? Is your token already live? And are you granting your employees and contractors vesting token awards? And are you trying to figure out how to take care of taxable events for your team? Toku makes implementing a global token incentive award simple. With Toku, you will get Unmatched legal and tax support to grant and administer your global team's tokens. Toku will help you navigate across the lifecycle of your token from easy to use pre-launch token grant award templates to managing post-Cliff taxable events with payroll.

• 28:49David Hoffman?

  For legal, finance, and HR teams, it's a huge, complex task to have to comply with labor laws, payroll and tax obligations, tax reporting, and crypto regulations in every country that you employ someone. It's difficult, time-consuming, manual, and costly, and it's drawing more attention from global regulators and governments. Toku makes it simple for leading companies in the space: Protocol Labs, Hedera, Gitcoin, and many more. So if you want some help navigating the complex world of token compliance, go to toku.com/banklist or click the link in the description below. Yeah, I think that really fits in with this whole Layer 2 Summer that we're all anticipating. We all feel like we're on the cusp of slowly but surely. We did retroactive public goods funding 2.

• 29:31David Hoffman?

  I told a team, like, "Hey, if you got retroactive public goods, tweet at me and I'll retweet it." So I was just retweeting all of these, like, all these teams, getting somewhere between $1,000 and like $50,000. Yeah. And it was, it felt like, I was reminded of Andreas Antonopoulos' meme of the Festival of the Commons. When more people use the same systems, it actually improves. This is the nature of open source. Yep. But now, when you inject economics into the Festival of the Commons, all of a sudden, you have retroactive public goods funding. And then you have that, like, raining little rewards on all of these projects that are asking for funding to build the collective. Yep. And when I saw retroactive public goods 1 and 2, I was like, "Man, that is actually kind of a drain on the OP token."

• 30:13David Hoffman?

  Because these Layer 2s, they're so young, it's still like coming basically out of VC funding to start this whole thing. But then if you tell me that the base OP stack chain is contributing some of its validator rewards, the sequencing rewards to the collective, along with Zora Chain, along with the Lattice Chain, along with the OP mainnet chain, and you're also about to tell me that there's probably 10 more OP stack chains in development that we haven't heard about, and we're on the cusp of a Layer 2 Summer, all of a sudden, that seems, that feels very, very Festival of the Commons to me, and it seems, it makes me optimistic.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm optimistic. It's building. It's all coming together and I think it's happening this summer. Layer two summer, on-chain summer. It's it's summer and the builders are feeling the energy, you know, like the moment is now. I think we've been waiting a long time for the infrastructure to be ready. But it's ready and the apps are here and builders are here and we're going to bring the next million and 10 million and 100 million and billion users here as well.

• 31:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, knock on wood, but we there is wood right here, so we do it, but we're seemingly that we're out of the hopefully we've bottomed on the whole regulatory onslaught towards crypto. Things seem to be tilting in our favor and one of the things I've been talking with Ben Jones and Kevin Milwaukee about for the last year is public sustainable public goods funding is one of the best ways to legitimize crypto to the public. When we can start funding systems and public infrastructure that no other system has, all of a sudden crypto becomes extremely favorable.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 31:46David Hoffman?

  And we've had crypto has had its, you know, we've had our troubles. 2022 wasn't so great. 2017 wasn't so great either, but slowly but surely we seem to be building our own foundations to stand on that are provable and verifiable, that we can show the world that this is what we were trying to get at the whole time. Sorry about 2022, but we've got this now.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 32:07David Hoffman?

  Can you can you talk a little bit about how Coinbase wants to take that public, take that message public? And maybe how base can can help that that narrative spin?

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I think if you look at kind of the messaging coming from Coinbase and the work that Coinbase has been doing, particularly on the like policy and branding side, I think the story we've been telling is that it's time to upgrade the system. We have been leveraging these systems for our economy for the last many years that are decades old, you know, they're 50 to 70 years old and they they kind of suck, right? Three to five days to do anything, you know, expensive to send money to anyone. And I think we see on-chain as a new platform that lets us upgrade the system. And the story that we want to tell the world is upgrading the system is really fricking good.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  And it's going to let us do a lot of the stuff that people hate doing in a way that's way better. And it's going to make a lot of people's lives better. And that The utility that is emerging on-chain in this new upgraded system is here. It's here now, and that's worth standing before. You know, you've seen our Stand With Crypto campaign with the shield. We're continuing to kind of pound the table on that. We're continuing to work with policymakers to help them understand why upgrading the system is right, why utility is here, and what the utility actually is. And I think all of that is starting to kind of turn the tide.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  And it's, you know, being, I think, amplified by the fact that we are lucky, especially in the United States, to have, you know, a series of governmental systems that have checks and balances. And I think we're starting to see that those checks and balances are working, right? We just saw the XRP ruling happen. You know, if you look at Coinbase, we see that that was a W for the industry. And that's right, right? Like that, we need to have more judges who are weighing in and saying, hey, like, let's look at the laws and let's evaluate them. And that's what we're excited to have the conversation about with the, you know, ongoing conversation between Coinbase and the SEC. Another big one that I was really excited about was the pool together case,

• 34:19Speaker 00

  where the judge threw out the case and said, like, no. You know, like, actually, you can't just go after this team that's trying to innovate because you thought it was a good idea to sue them. And those kind of, those moments where we see our systems working, as we've known they've worked, they're supposed to work, but we maybe haven't quite seen it yet.

• 34:43David Hoffman?

  Slow, slow.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  It's slow.

• 34:45David Hoffman?

  And in that slowness gave us lack of assurances, like, are they gonna do it? Is it gonna be right?

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And, you know, there's gonna be a lot more choppiness ahead, surely, and a lot more learning and a lot more growing and working and helping policymakers and regulators understand why these systems are important. But I'm optimistic. I'm really optimistic. I think that in the United States and globally, we're gonna end up with common sense regulations that protect consumers and that let innovation flourish in the on-chain economy.

• 35:17David Hoffman?

  Let's talk a little bit about the details. Is mainnet, is there a mainnet date out there? Or is that, is that public?

• 35:22Speaker 00

  So, we opened up mainnet for builders last Thursday.

• 35:25David Hoffman?

  Builder mainnet's open.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  So, if you are a builder and you're deploying smart contracts, you can go, you can bridge ETH, you can send ETH to portal基base.eth and it'll bridge it over to base.

• 35:34David Hoffman?

  Real ETH.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Really?

• 35:36David Hoffman?

  On real base.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  On real base. You can go to docs基base.org. That'll give you all the guides. There's node providers, there's data providers, there's developer tools. Everything you need to build is open right now. And the reason why we've opened up for builders first is we want to make sure that we can just focus on builders for a period. And so, we are-

• 35:55David Hoffman?

  You have to build the rides before you open the park.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  You gotta build the rides before you open the park. And with Coinbase, you know, we have a lot of folks who would want to come on the amusement rides. And so, we want to make sure that there's some good rides there. And so, that's what we're focused on right now. I've been here in Paris, just talking to builders, helping them get into the weeds, helping them figure out like what they need, helping them deploy. And we're gonna stay focused on that for another couple of weeks. And then, early August, we'll be sharing a date soon. But early August is what everyone is kind of cranking towards. And so-

• 36:31David Hoffman?

  Full, full mainnet.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  Full mainnet.

• 36:33David Hoffman?

  User mainnet.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  User mainnet, everyone, open access.

• 36:35David Hoffman?

  Rides are open.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Rides are open. Early August, we got a lot of other stuff coming after early August. That's gonna be exciting.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  And one thing to note, just for all the builders out there, is we're, we're running this campaign where if you deploy your DAP, you verify your contracts, you can earn the Genesis Builder NFT, which is just a commemorative NFT that's gonna signal that you deployed early in this builder window. So, you can find that at builder基base.org. We've already had, you know, hundreds of people apply for that for their DAP. That's been awesome to see. And I think we're excited to keep supporting builders and then start making our way towards everyone coming on chain. And I, I think-

• 37:20Speaker 00

  The thing to know is, you know, it's gonna be fast and it's gonna be slow, right? Like, yes, we're going to bring a ton of people on-chain. We're gonna bring a ton of really cool use cases on-chain. It's gonna happen this summer, and we're here for the long run. You know, I think Coinbase's greatest strength, which will show up in Base as well, is that we have been here for 12 years now, and we will be here for the next 12 years. And we will keep building, we will keep supporting builders, we will keep supporting users, and we will keep ensuring that this on-chain economy that we believe is gonna transform the world for the better is gonna get built.

• 37:56David Hoffman?

  One of the things I'm optimistic about, and maybe you can provide more clarity on this, is that we always need new developers in this space. We are not yet saturated with developers. And Base opens up its doors towards the developers, but right now it's the developers we already have. What I'm hopeful for is that when Coinbase signals like, hey, there is an environment, a blockchain, Coinbase-approved blockchain that you can tinker with, maybe we can bring on some new developers from Web2. Can you talk about your efforts around that?

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, 100%. And, you know, if you look at the data today, I think there's something like 30,000 to 40,000 on-chain developers, and there's 30 million developers in the world. So that is

• 38:32David Hoffman?

  A different number.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Three orders of magnitude, four orders of magnitude. And so we've been doing a lot to try and kind of create on-ramps for people who are traditional Web2 developers who wanna be coming into crypto. The first thing we did was, we launched Basecamp, which is a fully self-guided curriculum where you can learn how to do smart contract development. You can find that at base.org/camp. As you kind of learn, you'll earn little NFTs that show the progress that you've made. And it takes you kind of all the way from, I've never written a smart contract before, to I'm writing like a pretty complex stack. So that was the first thing we did. We're also right now piloting internally what we call Base Bootcamp, which is a full bootcamp.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  We're starting with internal Coinbase employees, helping kind of the folks who've been building, you know, more traditional Web2 infrastructure at Coinbase, start to build on-chain apps. And then we're actually gonna be opening that up more publicly. So we're gonna be having Kind of a guided curriculum that will help people like kind of learn and grow. And then I think we're also, you know, helping folks who are using some of our other developer products. You know, Coinbase has a pretty big developer product suite, Coinbase Cloud, where we have staking APIs. We have trading APIs, we have exchange APIs, we have a wallet as a service product. All of those we kind of see as entry points where folks maybe start doing kind of more traditional web two APIs

• 39:57Speaker 00

  or integrating their crypto, you know, integrating wallets into their web two apps. And then we kind of gradually pull them over until they're writing smart contracts. They're building on base and they're helping create kind of the foundations of this new economy. So a lot more work to do, you know, we got to get from 30,000 to 30 million. But I think we're off to a pretty good start.

• 40:16David Hoffman?

  One of the recent releases out of Coinbase was that Coinbase wallet soft like wallet as a service system, where you could just like as an API for wallets is like the best way to describe it. Maybe that is what it is.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  That's exactly what it is.

• 40:28David Hoffman?

  Nice. Def points, def points.

• 40:32David Hoffman?

  How does that integrate with base like and how does that kind of just fulfill the vision that we want?

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So base is a supported network in there. So you can get started integrating WASD into WASD is like wallet as a service.

• 40:43David Hoffman?

  WASD.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  WASD. You can get started integrating that into your app. It's really built for folks who are looking for an out of the box, you know, API for wallets that can kind of reduce the complexity for users, help folks who have like already existing username and password. Just drop a wallet into their app and then run things on base. So it's, you know, we just brought that kind of into general availability, continuing to build out that product. But it and base are supposed to work really well together.

• 41:13David Hoffman?

  Beautiful. Jesse, you hinted that there are some things coming after mainnet that you just said exist. Is there any more I can get out of you about that?

• 41:21Speaker 00

  Nothing, nothing more today. We'll be talking about it more. I think it's. We're feeling summer, it's on-chain summer, there's so much energy, there's so much cool stuff being built on-chain. And I think the thing that we are excited about is helping new people discover that. Helping folks see that on-chain is not just about finance, it's not just about trading, it's not just about de-gening. It's about doing all the cool stuff that you know and love from your day-to-day life in a new way, in a way that's accessible to everyone, everywhere in the world. That's what it's all about. And so, that's what we're focused on, starting in August, after the mainnet opens for everyone. And we're excited to be, you know, bringing the world on-chain.

• 42:07David Hoffman?

  I think astute listeners will notice the way that you're using that word "on-chain." You're not talking about "we're going on-chain," or "that is going to be on-chain." It's just like, it's on-chain, we're on-chain, we're going on-chain.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 42:22David Hoffman?

  Can you talk about the importance of that phrase and why using it in that very just casual manner? Like, I think the way that you're using it is just like, you're assuming that people know what it is implicitly, which is eventually how that's going to become true. And it's like, just like how we want our blockchains to become invisible, we want accepting of the word "on-chain" to also be just assumed. Can you just talk a little bit about that?

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think the thing that we're, like, that I kind of think about with on-chain is online, which was, you know, in the late 90s, not something that anyone did, right? Like, it was on-dash-line, and you were like, "are you online?" Like, "are you e-mail?" Like, "hit me on my, like, i-dash-phone," right? Like, that was even later. But I think that, once we kind of made it into the 2000s, and now, obviously, today, it's like, online is just a part of our existence, right? Like, you say this is online, like, online shopping, online movies, online... It just is.

• 43:20David Hoffman?

  It turned into online shopping, it turned into online stuff, and now we're just called shopping.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Now we're just called shopping.

• 43:25David Hoffman?

  Now it's just shopping.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, it's true. And I think what we've seen over the last, you know, many years in crypto is I feel like we've kind of been like looking for the way to talk about crypto, right? We started with Bitcoin, because that was all there was. And then it was crypto.

• 43:40David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  And then it was like blockchain, you know, and we had that weird like blockchain phase. And then it's been Web 3, but like, no one, no one likes Web 3. It's like a hard...

• 43:53David Hoffman?

  It was good for a moment, and then we ruined it.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  And I think on-chain is like, it's the first thing that I say to people and they intuitively understand it. And the second I say on-chain like online, they're like, oh, oh. It's like new, but also familiar. And I think we just got to will it into existence.

• 44:15David Hoffman?

  I think that's right.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Right? We just got to will it into existence. We got to will into existence that on-chain is this platform that powers incredible experiences for all of us all the time. And it's going to be a fundamental part of the world. And like online, it will go from on-dash-chain, which is where it was, to on-chain now, which is where it will be probably for a decade. And then sometime next decade, it'll just be shopping.

• 44:40David Hoffman?

  Yep, it'll just be shopping. Jesse, this has been fantastic. It makes me very optimistic about the future of what we've got. And being optimistic in a bear market, I think is just the best place to be. So thank you for guiding us through this conversation and getting Base to mainnet soon, TM.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  I appreciate that. You know, I like to say we were in a crypto winter, and then we had builder spring, and now it's on-chain summer. So I'm feeling optimistic. It's time to build. Thank you for having me.

• 45:07David Hoffman?

  Bankless Station, you know the deal. Crypto is risky. Layer 2s are risky, probably. New Layer 2s, you know, there's something there. But we are headed west no matter what. We're also headed on-chain, so we will see you there. This is the frontier, it's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.