The brief
- Base (2023) became the largest Ethereum L2 by transactions and passed L2BEAT's Stage 1 safety bar in 2025.
- Bought Deribit, the top crypto options exchange, for about $2.9B in 2025.
- Joined the S&P 500 in May 2025. Holds the coins for most US spot bitcoin ETFs.
Technical approach
Base is an optimistic rollup
Base posts transaction data to Ethereum and assumes results are right unless challenged. Anyone can dispute a bad withdrawal.
Flashblocks
Base streams partial blocks every ~200 ms within each 2-second block, so apps get confirmations almost instantly.
Passkey smart wallets
Coinbase Smart Wallet signs with passkeys kept in your device's secure chip, instead of a seed phrase you must write down.
x402
An open protocol that lets websites and AI agents pay per request in stablecoins, reviving the web's 'Payment Required' code.
Coinbase, two programs
Updated 29 May 2026
Research & demos
- May 2025
Open standard for stablecoin payments on the web, usable by AI agents.
- Feb 2023
Announced Coinbase's L2 on the OP Stack and a plan to decentralise it step by step.
Open technical problems
- One sequencerOpen
Coinbase alone orders Base transactions. It could censor or reorder them short-term, and if it fails Base stalls.
- Depends on trading volumePartially solved
Fees still swing with crypto cycles. Coinbase is diversifying into stablecoin, staking and derivatives revenue.
Peers
Company & funding
- Listed
- COIN (opens google.com)NASDAQ
- HQ
- US
- Founded
- 2012
Partners & customers
- Partner
Co-launched USDC in 2018 and shares its reserve income
- Partner
Base is built on the OP Stack as part of the Superchain
- Customer
Coinbase custodies iShares Bitcoin Trust assets
People
- Brian Armstrong (opens en.wikipedia.org)Co-founder & CEO
- Emilie ChoiPresident & COO
- Jesse PollakCreator of Base