- Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has made a case for Base in a Goldman Sachs meeting.
- The blockchain’s payment potential has received high praise from Armstrong.
- Base has rapidly grown in popularity in a very short time.
When the Coinbase-incubated Ethereum Layer 2 Base launched over a year ago, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong asserted that the project intended to become the broadband blockchain of Web3 with one-second transaction fees and one-cent fees. Just over a year later, the Coinbase chief believes the network has already achieved this goal, providing the foundation for unique use cases.
Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong Answers “Why Base?”
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has recently defended Base. In a reported Tuesday, September 10 Goldman Sachs conference, Armstrong asserted that Base and other Layer 2 chains like it now offer the best global payment rails.
The Coinbase chief made this claim by pointing out that efforts to bring down transaction fees and times had paid off.
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"it is a decentralized protocol built on top of Ethereum. And we made a big push to try to get the confirmation times down and the transaction fees down. And what I'm really happy to report is that we've now gotten that under one second and $0.01 for a transaction anywhere in the world globally. That makes crypto, I think, the best payment rail globally to date," Armstrong asserted, stressing that traditional financial rails either fell short in cost, speed, or global reach.
Armstrong suggested that this payment potential was unlocking greater innovation.
“It’s not just unlocking payments. It’s actually starting to unlock another category of applications,” he asserted.
Armstrong did not specify what these new categories of applications were but highlighted some possibilities, such as embedded social media micro-payments within transactions and hourly employee payments.
"if the world had a fast, cheap, global financial system that was decentralized, not controlled by any one country, I think a lot of friction would get taken out of the economy and you'd see a lot of growth. Even small amounts of friction that are reduced, you see huge increases in adoption," Armstrong surmised, citing the growth in messaging since it became effectively free.
The Coinbase chief’s arguments for Base come as the network has achieved rapid success quickly.
Base’s Home Run
Within just a year of its launch, Base is the second-largest Ethereum Layer 2 by TVL, with nearly $6 billion per L2Beat data at the time of writing. For context, Base ranks ahead of Optimism‘s OP Mainnet despite being built on the OP Stack.
While Base had seen significant attention at launch due to its ties to Coinbase, its growth entered into hyperdrive shortly after the Dencun upgrade that crashed fees on Ethereum Layer 2 chains.
According to Blockscout data, the blockchain now adds about 400,000 new addresses daily, up from below 100,000 before the upgrade. At the same time, daily transactions have jumped nearly 10x, from around 450,000 to 4 million, from an average of 1 million active addresses.
Much of the activity has been linked to memecoin trading as the network has been tipped as the home of retail on Ethereum.
On the Flipside
- Base has yet to achieve complete decentralization.
- Base’s success comes despite the network’s lack of a native token.
Why This Matters
Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong’s statements highlight the impressive growth of Base and the broader Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem in the past year and the potential of these projects to revolutionize everyday life.
Read this for more on Coinbase’s Base:
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