Base May Not Be for Me

A couple of weeks ago I watched Vitalik: An Ethereum Story with my wife, and if you haven’t watched it yet I would highly recommend it. The creators did such a good job documenting the life of Ethereum, its creator Vitalik, and the core principles and values surrounding it. A wave of nostalgia took over me as I recalled the feelings I experienced when I watched my first smart contract go live on Rinkeby; a simple and very inefficient store of “posts” like a guestbook. When I saw messages recorded onchain show up on my humble website, I suddenly realized why blockchain and more specifically Ethereum could change everything. It’s why I decided to dive into this field of work and why I’m still passionate about it today.

Lately there has been a lot of controversy surrounding Base, a layer 2 blockchain built on top of Ethereum. It’s mostly revolved around the topic of “coins,” also more commonly known as tokens. In this post I’m not actually going to get into that debate, even though I certainly have opinions of my own. I believe there is something far more serious at play. Instead I will be recalling my history and background with Base, how I vouched for it relentlessly, and finally how I have become more hesitant.

I remember when I first heard about Base when it was announced. Similar to my Ethereum moment I understood how big Base could be. Sure it was almost identical to Optimisim Mainnet or any other OP stack, but the fact that it was backed by Coinbase made it more interesting. Here we have a professional and legacy crypto company that could truly push forward in the space. I was so excited about it that I couldn’t help but test it out as soon as I could.

For the longest time it felt like Base sat in the shadows, taking months to get momentum. I even wrote a blog post early on titled “How to Mint an NFT on Base,” something so simple that perhaps didn’t need a tutorial but there was literally nothing else out there walking through the process. It soon became part of the default SEO results and grew to be one of the more popular videos and blog posts I published that year. Soon Base started to improve its developer documentation and education, as well as builder support for those using it. Base was finally catching on.

Eventually Base became the default for everything I did onchain. Any tutorial or smart contract app I was building, I was doing it on Base. I loved the branding, the vision behind it, to bring the world onchain. Some of my more notable projects using Base included Cosmic Cowboys, where we utilized the speed and low gas fees to build an onchain game that used AI agents which made onchain actions even while you were not present. I also made efforts to bring more developers by building Hello Base, a simple interactive web app that explained the basics of Ethereum and Base, and how someone could get started quickly.

This period of being “based” probably went on for over a year, and more recently I started to get a bit uneasy about Base. There was this looming sense that something was off, yet I couldn’t put my finger on it. Occasionally the issue of Base’s centralized sequencers would surface. Generally I would ignore this kind of criticism, but instead of making moves to decentralize sequencers, Base recently announced App Chains. These are effectively another layer on top of Base to make transactions even cheaper and faster, but this also moves in the opposite direction of distributing the stack.

Other small things came up that threw me off a bit, from the fanaticism of some users in the space with heavy airdrop vibes, to the dwindling support to some builders in the space. While all of that is fairly debatable, the recent issue of tokens, aka “coins”, has changed much of my perspective. For those who may not have the context, the blockchain space has gone through multiple waves of speculation that brought tsunamis of liquidity. The NFT hype of 2022 could be considered one of these, where the price of jpegs soared to levels that made zero sense. Another more recent wave is the “memecoin” era that was made popular by the platform pump.fun on Solana. Here a token revolving around a meme is launched, pumped in price by speculation, then dumped by selling, and the cycle continues.

The push of coins is an attempt to rebrand tokens to be just ordinary content. The idea is that instead of posting a photo on socials, turn it into a coin. Every coin can have a photo associated with it, so why not? Instead of “liking” a post you can buy a certain amount. Zora was the first platform making this push as they pivoted from standard NFT posts to coins. I’m not here to convince you whether coins are good for the space or not. Experimentation is part of building onchain and it’s how we move forward. The true controversy in my opinion is how Base has been pushing this narrative.

Protocols and tools are built to solve problems. In the case of Ethereum it created a sandbox where the possibilities are endless. Of course Vitalik and the creators had motives for building it, primarily to help democratize internet infrastructure and promote individual autonomy. Outside of some general principles that they believed in, the team was pretty hands off. It was up to the people to decide what they would build. They built things like decentralized governance, tokens, loans, etc. People saw the ways our internet society was broken and came up with solutions only possible because of blockchain and Ethereum. The Ethereum foundation or it’s founders don’t push people to use it in a certain way, they just provide the tools and let the builders build.

My issue with Base and the coin narrative is that it’s pushing a particular agenda and use-case of blockchain. In their opinion it’s how they’ll solve the issues they see in the web2 creator economy. That’s a big opinion to carry and push upon your followers, and I would argue that it violates the relationship between a blockchain organization and its users. Coins are an interesting experiment, but they’re also being pushed by a few individual companies, some that so happen to be financially invested by Coinbase. I want to assume the best of all parties involved, but when it comes to money, capital, and how some people can get absolutely wiped by tokens, the hair on my neck stands up. Vitalik once wrote about what he sees as the values of Ethereum but also the blockchain community at large, and he included the following:

• Credible neutrality: base-layer infrastructure should be neutral, and in such a way that anyone can see that it is neutral even if they do not already trust the developers.
• Building tools, not empires. Empires try to capture and trap the user inside a walled garden; tools do their task but otherwise interoperate with a wider open ecosystem.

Before I started working in the blockchain space I was working at a local bank as head of the customer service department, and before that a teller. In both of those positions I saw how devastating the financial system could be on people. One of the more popular methods to make money off of customers was overdraft fees. If someone didn’t have enough money to pay for a transaction, you could go into a negative balance to have it approved, but it meant paying $35 each time you did it. Some people found themselves in a tight spot and ended up in a never ending cycle of going into the negative as much as possible to cover their bills and then paying it back when their deposits came in. The bank had their own risk calculations of how much a customer could go into the red, and sometimes it would tell them they weren’t allowed to have as much as they had the week before, and that meant a single mom couldn’t buy food or pay her electricity.

It was horrible to witness and participate in, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to switch careers. While teaching myself web development and programming I stumbled across Buildspace and their tutorial on how to build with Solidity and smart contracts. As I mentioned before, seeing those onchain messages and the logic of a smart contract totally blew my mind. I instantly understood the value of Ethereum and what it could mean for society, for the marginalized and the institutionally abused. Blockchain had the potential to democratize finances and the web, to put the power back in people’s hands. I never want to lose that vision and the values of Ethereum, and it’s why whenever I see a large institution start to pushing a standard or a way of doing something onchain, I get uneasy. Vitalik said it best in his post Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again,

It is very possible to build things within the crypto ecosystem that do not follow these values. One can build a system that one calls a “layer 2”, but which is actually a highly centralized system secured by a multisig, with no plans to ever switch to something more secure. One can build an account abstraction system that tries to be “simpler” than ERC-4337, but at the cost of introducing trust assumptions that end up removing the possibility of a public mempool and make it much harder for new builders to join. One could build an NFT ecosystem where the contents of the NFT are needlessly stored on centralized websites, making it needlessly more fragile than if those components are stored on IPFS. One could build a staking interface that needlessly funnels users toward the already-largest staking pool.

Resisting these pressures is hard, but if we do not do so, then we risk losing the unique value of the crypto ecosystem, and recreating a clone of the existing web2 ecosystem with extra inefficiencies and extra steps.

Do I hate Base? Absolutely not. I admire many of the innovations the team has created and I love the people who work there. Will I continue to use Base as my default chain? Also no. I will still have funds on Base and use it for some onchain transactions, but at this point in time I’m not sure I’m comfortable launching new projects or contracts on Base, and I will likely be eyeing other L2s or just raw Ethereum.

To those who work at Base that might be reading this now, I plead you to maintain credible neutrality. Don’t build another empire that simply mimics the old web we left behind. Give us the tools to build what the people want, not the narratives of a few companies. I want you to succeed, but our definitions of success might be different. Until that changes, Base may not be for me.