By Tyler Warner
5 min read
Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.
GM!
Today’s top news:
Coinbase’s Base is going independent.
Much to the chagrin of the Superchain.
Base, the largest chain in the OP Stack Superchain, announced Wednesday it’s ditching Optimism’s tech stack in favor of a fully in-house codebase called base/base.
OP fell as much as 20% on the news.
Base published a blog post titled “A new, unified stack for Base Chain,” announcing it will consolidate its sequencer, proofs, and all core infrastructure into a single Base-managed repository.
Previously, Base relied on code from Optimism, Flashbots, and Paradigm spread across multiple teams and repos. The new 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 independent signer.
Two more hard forks are planned, with Base V3 timed around Ethereum’s upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade.
There will be no disruption for end users, but node operators will need to migrate to base/base releases.
“The mission Base launched with is the same mission we have today: make it the best place to build and onboard the next billion people into the onchain economy. We knew that this required creating a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly home for anyone, anywhere, to build on top of. To get there quickly, Base launched as an OP Stack chain.”
“To accelerate innovation, scaling and security, Base is evolving its foundational software by moving to a unified, Base-operated stack.” - from the Base announcement
Here’s the number that tells the whole story: Base has historically generated over 90% of the Superchain’s total revenue. That’s the revenue that flows to the Optimism Collective—not to Coinbase, not to Base.
For years, Base has been the engine powering someone else’s token.
Now that’s about to change.
Base is $3.85B in TVL and the dominant L2 by activity, and now it will have more control over its economic future.
This pretty much had to be done to maximize revenues, and certainly a prerequisite for any BASE token launch plans.
And interestingly enough, the rumor mill has been heating up about BASE token launch plans for 2026.
So overall, it’s a win for Base, a loss for Optimism and neutral for end users - unless it accelerates that BASE token launch…
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