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Base

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Base
Base
Image: Base brand graphic via base.org
typeEthereum layer 2 (OP Stack)
operatorCoinbase
founderJesse Pollak
mainnet launchAugust 9, 2023
tokennone, no native token

Base is Coinbase's Ethereum layer 2 network, opened to the public on August 9, 2023, whose actual cultural history has run through a chain of memecoin cycles from the BALD launch week rug to the 2026 Cobie era BASECAT run.

Contents
  1. 1 The chain
  2. 2 BALD and the launch week rug
  3. 3 Onchain Summer
  4. 4 The Farcaster and Degen era
  5. 5 The Brett era
  6. 6 Toshi and the Base cat lineage
  7. 7 The 2025 quiet stretch and Jesse Pollak's admission
  8. 8 The 2026 Cobie era
  9. 9 References

Base is Coinbase's Ethereum layer 2 network, announced in February 2023 and opened to the public on August 9, 2023. It has no native token of its own; Coinbase owns and operates the chain directly, unlike the separately tokenized model used by Robinhood Chain. Base's actual cultural history has run almost entirely through memecoins rather than its intended DeFi and payments roadmap: BALD, a launch week rug that traded on nothing but hype and a joke about Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's bald head, gave the chain its founding trauma before the public mainnet had even opened. Degen (coin) and Brett carried the 2024 meme wave, a lineage of cat mascot coins running from TOSHI through BASECAT carried the 2026 one, and in between, Base cofounder Jesse Pollak publicly admitted his multi year bet on social products had failed, handing the consumer facing Base app to Cobie in July 2026.

The chain

Base runs on the OP Stack, Optimism's open source rollup framework, and was announced in February 2023; a permissioned developer mainnet went live in mid July 2023 before the network opened fully to the public on August 9, 2023. Base has no native token of its own. Its revenue runs on sequencer fees: Coinbase has reported the chain generating roughly 30 million dollars in sequencer fee revenue over a single 30 day stretch, which annualizes to about 360 million dollars a year. Base originally agreed to share 2.5 percent of its total sequencer revenue, or 15 percent of its net profit, whichever was greater, with the Optimism Collective, in exchange for up to 118 million OP tokens (about 175 million dollars) over six years, a relationship that had paid out over 16 million dollars by the time it ended. On February 18, 2026, Coinbase confirmed Base would migrate away from the OP Stack entirely, to a proprietary "unified, Base operated stack," ending the Optimism revenue share; OP's token fell about 32 percent on the news, and Base had reportedly accounted for 96.5 percent of the Optimism Collective's total gas fee revenue. OP Labs CEO Jing Wang called it an expected "short term hit," and the new Unified Base Stack reportedly still shares 99 percent of its code with the OP Stack and related infrastructure such as Reth and Flashbots.

BALD and the launch week rug

Base's actual first meme moment predates its own public launch. BALD deployed on Base on July 30, 2023, from a wallet that had bridged 12 million dollars of ETH onto the chain that same day; the name mocked Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's bald head. The rug came the next day. Decrypt reported the deployer pulling over 25.6 million dollars of liquidity after a price surge of "over 3,000 percent" in a single day, followed by a 92 percent crash. A Halborn retrospective gives a different, overlapping accounting: about 23 million dollars drained, the deployer's own net profit at roughly 5.9 million dollars, and a peak paper valuation near 68 million dollars off a reported 4,000,000 percent, 24 hour surge. Cointelegraph, capturing a same day interim snapshot before the drain had finished, recorded a smaller figure still, 1,034 ETH, about 1.9 million dollars, pulled against an 85 percent decline and a 289,000 percent surge in 14 hours. These are not one number measured three ways; they are three different measurements of a fast moving event, liquidity pulled at different points, peak paper valuation, net profit, an interim partial read, and none should be quoted as "the" figure for what BALD did. Because Base had not yet built an official bridge back to Ethereum, users who had moved funds in were effectively trapped, which press coverage cited as part of why the token kept trading despite having no website or interface. dlnews also reported that a serial rug puller launched 29 similar scam tokens on Base in the same window, per onchain analytics platform Scopescan; BALD was the biggest launch day rug, not the only one.

The deployer's identity was never confirmed. Wintermute researcher Igor Igamberdiev floated former Alameda Research co CEO Sam Trabucco, a former colleague of Sam Bankman-Fried at the firm, as the more likely wallet owner, citing activity timing that matched Trabucco's own tweets and a shared FTX deposit address, while stating plainly he had "no hard evidence." A separate onchain thread traced by ZachXBT ties the deployer's wallet to a 2021 payment of 50,000 dollars made to crypto investor Mike McDonald over a lost chess world championship bet. The token's own developer denied wrongdoing to Cointelegraph: "I didn't sell a single token at any point since deployment. Just added/removed 2 sided liquidity and bought," before conceding the point when told that removing liquidity is functionally the same as selling. No further development or identification has surfaced since 2023; the deployer's identity remains an open, unresolved question, not a settled one. A Chinese language corpus retrospective independently remembers BALD as Base's "first wave" meme and draws the comparison CT still makes years later: Base and Robinhood Chain as structurally similar, institution launched chains whose public debuts were each defined by meme frenzy.

Onchain Summer

Base's own marketing answer to BALD's chaos was Onchain Summer, a month long campaign of daily NFT mints launched to coincide with the August 9, 2023 public mainnet opening, run through Coinbase Wallet with more than 50 brands, platforms, and creators including Coca Cola and Atari. The campaign minted more than 700,000 NFTs across over 268,000 unique wallets; Coca Cola's own "Masterpiece" NFT collection on Base reportedly made over 500,000 dollars. One retrospective estimate, not independently confirmed elsewhere, put roughly 68 million dollars of ETH bridged to Base and about 200 million dollars in trading volume by the day of the public launch, a figure crypto press and CT both partly attribute to BALD's hype spilling directly into launch day.

The Farcaster and Degen era

DEGEN launched on Base in January 2024 as the Farcaster social protocol's tipping token, and its market capitalization passed 160 million dollars in March 2024 after Coinbase put it on its public listing roadmap; it went on to spawn Degen Chain, a layer 3 built on Base. Full details, including the January 2024 launch, the March 2024 roadmap jump, the May 2024 50 hour Degen Chain outage, and the 2026 sunset of Degen Chain, are in Degen (coin). Degen's tipping mechanic is repeatedly cited as the moment Farcaster briefly looked like a genuine social distribution engine for Base, a narrative later echoed, without the underlying social layer, by BASECAT's own Base app follow signals in 2026.

The Brett era

BRETT launched in February 2024 and became the first meme coin on Base to pass a 1 billion dollar market cap that June, peaking around 2.3 billion dollars on December 1, 2024 as Base's unofficial mascot coin; full details, including the disputed April 2024 fair launch allegations, are in Brett. By August 2026, BRETT traded near 36 million dollars in market cap, about 98 percent off its peak, per that article's own sourcing.

Toshi and the Base cat lineage

Base's cat mascot tradition predates BASECAT by three years. TOSHI, a fair launch meme coin with no presale, no team tokens, and its full 420.69 billion token supply circulating from inception, launched on Base in 2023. Its name and identity draw on two things at once: a nod to Satoshi Nakamoto, and Coinbase cofounder Brian Armstrong's own cat. TOSHI reached an all time high near 0.0023 dollars in January 2025 and trades today on Coinbase itself, alongside Binance Futures, OKX, Upbit, KuCoin, and Phemex, though Phemex's own writeup cautions that "Toshi is not officially endorsed by Coinbase" and any "flagship" framing is community narrative, not confirmed company positioning. Full sourcing and current figures are in Toshi. TOSHI is the direct precedent for the "Base cat" pattern that BASECAT ran again in August 2026: a community mascot cat with no official Coinbase affiliation that nonetheless gets read as Base's unofficial identity.

The 2025 quiet stretch and Jesse Pollak's admission

Through 2025 and into early 2026, Base's consumer strategy bet heavily on social products built around Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and creator coins, an approach that Base cofounder and lead Jesse Pollak later said failed to gain lasting traction. On July 15, 2026, Pollak wrote at length about the failure, in his own words: "the first quarter of 2026 was a punch in the face." He went on: "we made the right bet on builders, but obviously the wrong bet on social... farcaster, zora, miniapps, and yes, creator coins, disintegrated completely. I was wrong." In the same post he announced the handoff: "i've handed the base app back to the coinbase mothership, where my now good friend @cobie will be taking it from here," and said he would refocus his own attention on Base's underlying blockchain infrastructure: trading, stablecoin payments, and AI agents. Pollak added a wry aside on memes specifically, noting "(1) base (and i) love memes and (2) brian probably won't ever bullpost memes on the tl (this activity is illegal once you're over 40 years of age)," and reframed the app's new mandate as "trading means every asset. tokenized stocks, memes, app coins, whatever you want to trade." He closed with a direct apology for the prior era's obsession with social tokens: "hopefully we can shut up about content coins now. i was wrong and i'm sorry!" This period lines up with BRETT and DEGEN both sitting roughly 98 percent below their 2024 peaks by August 2026, as meme coin attention broadly rotated to Solana launchpads through 2024 and 2025.

The 2026 Cobie era

Cobie's path to the Base app seat ran through Echo, the crypto investing platform he founded in 2024; Coinbase acquired Echo for about 375 million dollars in cash and stock, a deal announced October 21, 2025 that separately included a 25 million dollar NFT purchase whose burn clause obligated Cobie to revive his UpOnly podcast (full sourcing in Cobie). Under Cobie the Base app pivoted toward a multichain trading model, adding prediction markets and planned perpetual futures rather than staying narrowly focused on the Base ecosystem. Three days after taking over, on July 18, 2026, Cobie posted his own blunt assessment of what he had inherited: "Obviously CB/Base has burned a lot of user goodwill w those users thru some unforced errors, including today." The same 2026 stretch also produced $BRIAN, a coin whose supply mostly landed in Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's own wallet, a saga documented in full in Brian Armstrong.

Base activated its native B20 token standard on mainnet on July 8, 2026, at 18:00 UTC. Unlike an ERC20 deployed as a Solidity contract, B20 runs as a precompile inside the node itself, giving issuers built in controls including transfer policies, role based permissions, supply caps, and freeze and seize powers. o1 (b20.o1.exchange) launched as the first launchpad built natively on B20, and within 72 hours of B20 going live it reported 8,045 tokens created, 14 million dollars in DEX volume, and 12,423 holders, with early activity skewing heavily to memecoins: roughly 2,000 tokens created in a single 7 hour window on day one, and $B20ONE recorded as the first meme token minted on the standard. This is the platform BASECAT itself launched through in mid August 2026 (see BASECAT), which by August 21, 2026 was being read alongside a wider "cat season" running in parallel across chains, CT lumping BASECAT in with Cash Cat, the mascot coin of Robinhood Chain, and a Solana token called $cate.

CT reads the 2026 posture as a deliberate reversal from the 2023 and 2024 wild west era. Trader CryptoTalkMan's running theory in August 2026 is that Base "learned from what happened with previous memes" and is "not going to fuck it up" this time, pointing to B20's built in issuer controls alongside the sequence of Cobie, Base's Chief Business Officer, and Jesse Pollak all publicly following the BASECAT account. This is a trader's interpretation, not a confirmed Coinbase strategy statement. By August 20, 2026, trader iruletrenches was framing it as an active comeback: "@base is clearly making a comeback, only this week we've had: $LFI rip 4x from the bottom to 15M, $BASECAT 500x to 20M, $RATSPEAK is still sitting below 1M and I'm pretty sure it's gonna see a violent repricing."

References

See also
  • Believe Believe is a Solana launchpad founded by Ben Pasternak that let anyone create a token by r
  • Binance Binance is the largest centralized crypto exchange, whose listings function as the termina
  • Birdeye Birdeye is a Solana native crypto data aggregator founded in 2021 that provides token char
  • Bloom bot Bloom is a multichain Telegram trading bot known for sub second Solana execution, AFK auto
  • BonkBot BonkBot is a Solana Telegram trading bot tied to the BONK ecosystem, whose fees are used t
Category: Platforms
Last updated 2026-08-21