Is Coinbase’s Layer 2 a Total Scam?
PLUS: Happy 8th Birthday, Ethereum
GM DOers! 😎
Let’s begin by congratulating Ethereum on its 8 year anniversary. 🥳
What an achievement – in only 8 years, Ethereum has managed to…
… and has become somewhat deflationary – aka there’s less and less Ethereum on the market every day – a trend which will only intensify in the bull market. 🚀
Ethereum is ultra sound money and en-route to become the settlement layer of the internet. 🌐
That’s been made clear in only its first 8 years… Can’t wait to see what’ll happen in the next 8. 👀
Share your congrats with Ethereum by replying to this email with a GM and we’ll pass your GMs over to Vitalik ASAP. 😏
But let’s get to today’s topic 👉 Coinbase’s Layer 2: BASE! 🔵
Because what else could we write about rather than an Ethereum L2, a day after Ethereum’s anniversary? 🤷
Read more about Ethereum scaling & L2s in our PRO report here.
Now… Base has recently opened its mainnet to developers and it managed to draw attention due to 2 reasons:
Altcoins are pumping by tens of thousands of % 🤯
There’s rumors that you can only bridge TO and NOT from Base 😨
We’ll tackle all of this and more today. But first, a recap on BASE. 👇
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What Is Coinbase’s BASE? 🔵
Introduced on February 23rd, Base is meant to be “an Ethereum L2 that offers a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly way for anyone, anywhere, to build decentralized apps.”
Their goal: To scale Ethereum to a point where it can support the future 1 Billion+ web3 users. 🚀
Upon launch, Base chose to build using the Optimism (another Layer 2) stack. Essentially, Coinbase copy/pasted the Optimism code and made its own Layer 2. 🤔
And guess what!?
It wasn’t only allowed (because the OP code is open source), the Optimism team insisted and helped Coinbase launch its L2. 🤯
Can only happen in web3. 😅
Regardless, fast forward to July 13th, and Base announced that they’re launching their mainnet to developers to come and build. ⚒️
Their goal was to attract devs who can not only build on Base but also share their feedback, so Base can optimize its chain to be ready for when they officially launch for the public in early August. 🔜
We’ll tell you what the opportunity is in regards to Base, but first let’s talk about what happened in the 2 weeks that Base has been open to devs. ⏬
Why We Need 1 Million Layer 2s
Base is just one of many Ethereum Layer 2s. ⛓️
We believe that in order for Ethereum to accommodate the billions of web3 users, there needs to be millions of layer 2s.
See our reasoning behind this claim in our podcast. 👇
Meteoric Altcoin Rises ☄️ & Bridging FUD 😨
Check this out…
XPEPE, BASED, LADYS, SHIT, BEAN, BRIAN, BOT – only a few examples of memecoins that have seen INSANE growth on Base. 🤦
This industry is twisted – in the last 24h (at the time of this writing), LeetSwap, the main DEX on Base saw a volume of $236M. 🤯
That’s a third of Uniswap’s $688M in the last 24h – but keep in mind that Uniswap supports a variety of chains. 🫠
And also remember that Base is only open for developers, which means that it’s not super easy for everyone to bridge to Base and start trading shitcoins…
Despite the hurdles, Base has become the new crypto casino – and this was expected.
Whenever there’s a new shiny thing, people tend to FOMO into it. We saw it most recently with Threads (Meta’s Twitter), which hit 100M users in its first few days.
The hype dried out just as quickly (there are only a few million active users on Threads today) and the same will happen for Base.
At some point (most likely very soon), the memecoin hype will die on Base and people will get caught up in the hype, losing very valuable $ETH.
Don’t let that be you!
At the time of this writing, 35,339 ETH (a cool $66M) has hopped over to Base, with most of it sinking into memecoins. 😬
Not ideal. Especially considering the fact that there’s FUD regarding the Base bridging.
Rumor has it that once you go Base, you can't go back – meaning that once assets flow into Base, they can't be bridged back.
But this is untrue!
Jesse Pollak (Head at Base) clarified this by saying that there’s no UI for bridging your assets back right now, because Base is focused on developers, not on bridging users back and forth.
The ability to seamlessly bridge back and forth will be available within the first couple of weeks of August.
I don’t think they expected such a level of degeneracy to happen on their chain this early on. 😅
Anyway, here’s a thread that’ll help you bridge your assets back to Ethereum.
Now that FUD is out of the way, and you’re caught up on the trending shitcoins on Base, let’s talk about how YOU can capitalize on the Base opportunity. 👇
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PRO Advice For Builders 🧰 and Investors 💰
The takeaway should be clear: Don’t get caught up in the hype cycle. With every new, shiny thing, it tends to only last so long until people get rekt. 💥
Don’t let that be you. Let’s get into the specifics of how you can both stay safe and capitalize on the opportunity. ⏬
As always, the following section is exclusive to our PRO members.