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In the run-up to launching mainnet for its Ethereum scaling solution, Base, next week, Coinbase has enlisted mainstream brands like Coca-Cola, Atari, OpenSea, Pixelmon, and Showtime to offer daily mints of on-chain collectibles.
The mints will highlight "art, music, gaming, advocacy, and more" leading up to the August 9 launch for Base mainnet, Coinbase vice president of product Max Branzburg wrote in a blog post. The daily mints are part of what the company is calling "Onchain Summer."
The company also announced that it will be giving away more than 100 Ethereum in grants—worth approximately $183,000 at the time of writing—to teams building apps on Base.
Coinbase first said it was building an Ethereum scaling solution in February, making it the first publicly traded company to launch a layer-2 network on top of Ethereum. It's still the only publicly traded company to have done so.
Base will be “a rollup agnostic superchain powered by Optimism,” according to Coinbase. The company has been adamant that it will not launch a token for Base. But it's worth noting, that both Optimism and, its direct competition Arbitrum, initially launched their networks without tokens.
Optimism has since airdropped its OP governance token to early adopters of its network and Arbitrum had its own airdrop earlier this year.
When Coinbase announced its Base testnet, there was more than $6 billion worth of Ethereum on layer 2s, according to L2Beat. But in the past six months, that amount surged to more than $10 billion worth of ETH.
In that time, the San Francisco-based crypto exchange also attracted the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
On June 7, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Coinbase. In it, the U.S. securities regulator alleged that Coinbase—which has traded on the Nasdaq under the COIN ticker since April 2021—should have been registered as an exchange, clearing house, and broker and that it's been selling unregistered securities.
Since then, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong told the Financial Times that the SEC every asset available on Coinbase's exchange except for Bitcoin was a security and should not be available for trading.
"And, we said, well how are you coming to that conclusion, because that's not our interpretation of the law," Armstrong told the news outlet. "And they said, we're not going to explain it to you. You need to delist every asset other than Bitcoin."
Since the FT report earlier this week, Coinbase has clarified that it thinks parts of the interview lacked important context.
"The interview as published by the Financial Times omitted critical context regarding our conversations with the SEC in the US. Whether deliberately or as a result of an oversight, the author implied that the SEC ordered Coinbase to 'halt all trading of every crypto asset other than Bitcoin,'" a company spokesperson told Decrypt. "As stated by the SEC itself further in the article, its enforcement division did not make formal requests for 'companies to delist crypto assets.'"
Editor's Note: This article was updated to include a comment from Coinbase about the comments CEO Brian Armstrong made to the Financial Times.