Bankless - Coinbase's 'Base' Powering Layer 2 Summer

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

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  

Biennue of Bankless Nation today at ECC, I talked to Jesse Pollock of Bass. It's interesting that everyone seems to associate Jesse Pollock with Bass. He's actually at Coinbase, building Bass. 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 two,

incubated by perhaps one of the largest centralized company, crypto, but will eventually be cast off on its own to join the super chain, 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 two summer. And I feel like I start this conversation off here, that base, the layer two, is at the spearhead of what might be a layer two summer. And of course, layer two bull market is what that really means. Coinbase is going to funnel potentially thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of

of thousands of users and developers onto base at the same time that all of these other layer twos have been building out their own groundwork, the ZK roll-ups, 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. We talk about what Coinbase is doing to not only pioneer the layer. two's 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. 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 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 contributing 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 for both layer two's, 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 many of us in the Ethereum ecosystem that Jesse's just become a fantastic leader. Everyone in the Layer 2s has really appreciated all the effort that he has done, both for Coinbase and for the Layer 2s. I really hope you enjoy this episode with Jesse. And if you are enjoying all of these ETH-C interviews and all the other abroad interviews

that I have done well at all of my conferences, consider going to Permission List. Permissionless is the next conference that is out there. It is September 11th through 13th. 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. And it's a 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 DevConnect 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 re-refermitted. union 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, 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. 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, 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 Pollock from base.

So let's go ahead and get right into that conversation. But first, at one which talks about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Cracken, our preferred crypto exchange for 2023. We all need to get our boomer Fiat bucks into the world of crypto, into the world of layer two's, and perhaps you can use Cracken, our preferred exchange, to get that done. So let's go hear from them right now. Cracken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years. Dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto, Cracken puts an emphasis on security, transparency, and client support, which is why over 9 million clients have come to love

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If you want to get started working with the first Dow-led layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyZ and follow them on Twitter at ZeroX Mantle. Bienvenu, Bankless Nation. We are here at ECCC, the third ECC since I think all of this Cryptomania has really gotten started and things are only getting crazier with Coinbase launching base soon. TM. I'm here with Jesse Pollock. Jesse, welcome to Bankless once again. Thanks, David. Glad to be here. Hey, Bankless Nation. Glad to be here. Glad to be here. It's talking to all y'all. So if you look at the reception of base on Twitter, it's insanely

positive. How is it in real life? 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. I think they say, see how base can really help bring the next million developers, next billion users on chain. So it's been awesome.

I think that the story of base is hopefully a microcosm of the story of layer two's at large as well. There is a growing, boiling sentiment among the Ethereum clan that we're on the cusp of a layer two 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 twos we have optimism we have arbitram we have the zk roll-ups yeah base is just another roll-up yeah is it why is it unique 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 DAP. But I think having that kind of like test bed 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 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. And 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 to million, 100 million, billion users on chain. 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. Exactly. And not just defy 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's all about. Can we talk about what's it like for 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? Yeah, absolutely. And, And 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 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? If you look at all of the roll-ups across the space and you kind of stack them up against the stage zero, stage one, stage two kind of categorization, which talks about training wheels. I think you'll see that, you know, 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 sense. 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 roll-ups, you know, optimism, main net, Arbor Trump, those also launched out of labs companies, right? O.P. Labs, off-chain labs. But we are the first publicly traded large-scale U.S. brand to do this. And I think that that, you know, 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 our footsteps you have more and more op stack chains coming out we 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 experience this the whole crypto community experiences this like we're spending more time and energy on lawyer fees and policy efforts than we are on like innovating. And that's a really, really hard context, especially when, you know, 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 OpGeth, the client, and building op-reth 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. We also are, you know, committing to a 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 to. 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. 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 I'd say the third big way that we're really kind of addressing those challenges is we're creating sustainable funding mechanisms for base 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. 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 is reproducible across chains. And it's also trailblazing in a signaling sense, as in planting a flag, like, hey, 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? Yeah. I'm just like getting a little emotional as you say that. It's, you know, 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. There's not a roadmap for that.

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, you know, they actually, we shut down, like, my team at some point where it was like, you've tried enough, like trying it. And then kind of out of the ashes of that shut down and me and a couple people started be like, what if we had one more time? What if we took the learnings when we did it one more time? And that was based, you know?

It's like the developer platform that we needed for the first few tries. And then the last year has been 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. And then what I like to call the super team of people outside of Coinbase, 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, Selo, countless other teams who are contributing here. and we've tried to just be like, what do you guys think? How do you think we should be doing this? 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 it's been really, really hard trying to figure it out. But I'm really proud of the decisions we've made thus far, the way we've learned from some of the early mistakes that we've made. And, um,

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 wherever, 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 freaking 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 our

ethos with base. It's like one foot in front of the other, bring the world on chain. I think a reason why so many people find themselves in the crypto industry, after they get in here, they kind of understand that the old institutions are crumbling. They're not really serving, sometimes to the best of their ability, they're not really serving the needs of the people of the world. Their 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 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 factor, not to belittle everything that Coinbase has done. But when you tell me that Coinbase and Zora and the OP collective and OP labs and anyone building an OP Sack chain has formed, I don't know what it's like a telegram group of, what? What'd 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 net new form factor. Totally. 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 license, 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, you know, incredible governance processes that they're building out slowly but surely, you know, the citizens house, the kind of whole missions process that they're starting to do, the token house and the delegate platform there. 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 aligned 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 earlier question around like how does base differentiate or how is 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. 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, you know, 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. Metamask has something

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Toku.com slash bankless or click the link in the description below. 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? 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, your 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 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? Like, this is round two. It started out with, 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 rank 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 33 million dollars

yeah some large amount of funding and we're gonna I've already been looking at the way they're starting to run it and like four months later and they've already made a huge number of improvements and so that iterative process

of like we're going to fund we're going to experiment we're going to learn we're going to fund we're going to experiment we're going to learn we're going to fund we're going to experiment

and we're going to learn until we have literally rebuilt the world on chain. That's what it's all about. Yeah, I think that really fits in with this whole layer two 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 too. I told a team like, hey, if you got a retroactive public goods, like tweet at me and I'll retweet it. So I was just retweeting all these teams, getting somewhere between $1,000 and like $50,000. Yeah.

And it felt like I was reminded of Andreas Antonopoulos's meme of the festival of the commons. When more people use the same systems is actually improved. This is the nature of open source. 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, reigning little rewards on all of these projects that are asking for funding to build the collective.

And when I saw retroactive public goods one and two, I was like, man, that is actually kind of a drain on the O.P. token. Because these layer twos, 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 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 two summer,

all of a sudden, that feels very, very festival of the commons to me. And it makes me optimistic. Yeah, I'm optimistic. It's building. It's all coming together. And I think it's happening this summer. Layer 2 summer, on-chain summer, 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 the builders are here, and we're going to bring the next million, then 10 million, then 100 million, then billion users here as well. Yeah, knock on wood, but there's wood right here, something to do it, but it's seemingly that we're out of the, hopefully, where we've bottomed on the whole regulatory onslaught. towards crypto. It seems things seem to be tilting in our favor. And one of the things I've been talking with Ben Jones and Kevin O'Walky about for the last year is 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. And 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 out the whole time. Sorry about 2022, but we've got this now. 100%. Can you talk a little bit about how Coinbase wants to take that public, take that message public and maybe how base can help that narrative spin? Yeah, absolutely. I think if you look at 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. They're 50 to 70 years old and 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 freaking good. Yeah.

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. And it's, you know, being, I think, amplified by the fact that we're lucky, especially

in the United States, to have, you know, 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 coin mates, we say that, that was W for the industry. I mean, that's right, right? Like that we need to have more judges who are weighing in and saying, hey, 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 ongoing conversation between Coinbase and the SEC. Another big one that I was really excited about was the pool together case, 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 moments where we see our systems working,

as we've known they're supposed to work, but we maybe haven't quite seen it yet. Slow. It's slow. And in that slowness gave us lack of assurances. Like, are they going to do it? Is it going to be right? Absolutely.

And, you know, there's going to 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 going to end up with common sense regulations that protect consumers and that let innovation flourish in the on-chain economy. Let's talk a little bit about the details. Is there a mainnet date out there? Or is that public?

So we opened up mainnet for builders last Thursday. Builder mainnet open. So if you are a builder and you're deploying smart contracts, you can go, you can bridge Eath, you can send ETH to portal.Base. And it will bridge it over to base or you can. Real Eath. Really? On real base. On real base. Okay. We can go to docks.dbase.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 have to build the rides before you open the park. You got to build the rides before you open the park. And with Coinbase, you know,

we have a lot of folks who we 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. getting into the weeds, helping them figure out what they need, helping them deploy. And we're going to stay focused on that for another couple weeks. And then early August, we'll be sharing a date soon. But early August is what everyone is kind of cranking towards. Full main net. Full main net. User main net. Everyone, open access. Rides are open. Early August. We got a lot of other stuff coming after early August. That's going to be exciting. And one thing to note just for all the builders out there is 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 going to signal that you deployed early in this builder window. So you can find that at builder.base.org. We've already had, you know, hundreds of people apply for that for their DAP. And 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 think the thing to know is, you know, it's going to be fast and it's going to be slow, right? Like, yes, we're going to bring a ton of people on chain. We're going to bring a ton of really cool use cases on chain.

It's going to 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 going to transform the world for the better is going to get built. 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 improved blockchain that you can tinker with. Maybe we can bring on some new developers from Web 2. Can you talk about your efforts around that? Yeah, 100%. And if you look at the data today, I think there's something like 30 to 40,000 on-chain developers, and there's 30 million developers in the world.

So that is 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 Web 2 developers who want to 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 do smart contract development. You can find it at base.org slash 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 staff. So that was the first thing we did. We're also right now piloting internally what we call base boot camp, which is a full boot camp. We're starting with internal Coinbase employees, helping kind of the folks who've been building, you know, more traditional Web 2 infrastructure at Coinbase. start to build on-chain apps. And then we're actually going to be opening that up more publicly. So we're going to be having kind of a guided curriculum that will help people, like kind of learn and grow. And then I think we're also 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 2 APIs or integrating their crypto, you know, integrating wallets into their Web2 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've got to get from $30,000 to $30 million. But I think we're off to a pretty good start. One of the recent releases out of Coinbase was that wallet as a service system where you could just like as an API for wallet is like the best way to describe it. Maybe that is what it is. That's exactly what it is. Nice. Dev points.

step points. Let's go. How does that integrate with base? And how does that kind of just fulfill the vision that we want? Yeah, absolutely. So base is supported network in there. So you can get started integrating WAS into WAS as a service. WOS. 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 we just brought that kind of into general availability, continue to build out that product. But it and base are supposed to work really well together.

Beautiful. Jesse, you hinted that there are some things coming after Maynet that you just said exist. Is there any more I can get out of you about that? Nothing more today. We'll be talking about it more. I think we're feeling summary. 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 main net opens for everyone. And we're excited to be bringing the world on-chain. 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. Can you talk about the importance of that phrase and why using it in that very just casual manner? 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. You just talk a little bit about that. 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. Right. And you were like, are you online? Like, e-dash mail, 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 2000s, and now obviously today, 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. And it turned into online shopping. It turned into online stuff. And now we're just called shopping. Now we just call shopping. Now we just call shopping. 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. Right. Because that was all there was. And then it was crypto. And then it was. And then it was

like blockchain you know and we had that weird like blockchain phase and then it's been web three but like no one yeah no one likes web three it's like a hard it was good for a moment and then we ruined and i think on chain is like it's the first thing that i say to people and they intuitively understand it yeah and the second i say on chain like online they're like oh oh oh it's like new but also familiar And I think we just got to wheel it into existence. I think that's right. Right? We just got to wheel it into existence.

We got a 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. 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 it's just the best place to be. So thank you for guiding us for this conversation and getting based to main net soon, T.M. I appreciate that. 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. Banking station, you know the deal. Crypto is risky. Layer two is risky, probably new layer twos. 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.