Coinbase (COIN), the large publicly-traded U.S. crypto exchange, announced that its new blockchain Base has gone live, marking the start of a new era of public companies running their own distributed networks. Base was already live for testing by developers, but Coinbase officials said it would be open to the public as of 12 p.m. ET on Wednesday, and that time has now passed, said Jesse Pollak, Coinbase’s head of protocols.
Pollak noted that there were already 100 dapps already deployed or ready to go on the new network. In order for Coinbase and crypto and this work that we’re doing to have the impact that we all want, we need to move from the place where this is speculation to a place where this is integrated into every part of someone’s day-to-day existence, he said.
In connection with the Base launch, Coinbase announced plans for an Onchain Summer promotion with corporate partners including Coca-Cola, to show off the new project’s capabilities. The new Base network is technically a “layer 2” blockchain built atop Ethereum, using the OP Stack software from another popular layer 2 network, Optimism.
According to the crypto analysis firm L2Beat, even prior to the public debut, there were already $139 million of deposits locked into apps and protocols on the new Base network. This amount of total value locked or TVL – a common metric for evaluating blockchains and protocols – is enough to rank Base as the fifth-largest layer-2 blockchain.