Morning Minute: Base Breaks Up With Optimism

Morning Minute is simply a regular newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The investigation and opinions expressed are his ain and bash not needfully bespeak those of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.

GM!

Today’s apical news:

• Crypto majors rebounded 1-3%, with SOL leading; BTC astatine $67.4k

• CME to connection 24/7 crypto futures & options trading starting May 29

• The 3rd White House gathering connected stablecoin output shows small progress

• Federal justice successful Tennessee blocks state-level enforcement against Kalshi

• PUNCH meme soars 200% to $32M arsenic the monkey goes viral

Coinbase’s Base is going independent.

Much to the chagrin of the Superchain.

Base, the largest concatenation successful the OP Stack Superchain, announced Wednesday it’s ditching Optimism’s tech stack successful favour of a afloat in-house codebase called base/base.

OP fell arsenic overmuch arsenic 20% connected the news.

Base published a blog station titled “A new, unified stack for Base Chain,” announcing it volition consolidate its sequencer, proofs, and each halfway infrastructure into a azygous Base-managed repository.

Previously, Base relied connected codification from Optimism, Flashbots, and Paradigm dispersed crossed aggregate teams and repos. The caller stack replaces Optimism’s optimistic proofs with Base-specific TEE/ZK proofs (Base V1 hard fork, coming soon), and removes Optimism from the Base Security Council, replacing it with an autarkic signer.

Two much hard forks are planned, with Base V3 timed astir Ethereum’s upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade.

There volition beryllium nary disruption for extremity users, but node operators volition request to migrate to base/base releases.

“The ngo Base launched with is the aforesaid ngo we person today: marque it the champion spot to physique and onboard the adjacent cardinal radical into the onchain economy. We knew that this required creating a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly location for anyone, anywhere, to physique connected apical of. To get determination quickly, Base launched arsenic an OP Stack chain.”

“To accelerate innovation, scaling and security, Base is evolving its foundational bundle by moving to a unified, Base-operated stack.” - from the Base announcement

Here’s the fig that tells the full story: Base has historically generated implicit 90% of the Superchain’s full revenue. That’s the gross that flows to the Optimism Collective—not to Coinbase, not to Base.

For years, Base has been the motor powering idiosyncratic else’s token.

Now that’s astir to change.

Base is $3.85B successful TVL and the ascendant L2 by activity, and present it volition person much power implicit its economical future.