The world according to Base
A link to a searchable database containing 400+ projects building on Base
The market feels like it’s in free fall.
But rather than dwell on all of the uncertainty triggered by plunging prices, I want to share a project I’ve been working on.
This project is a result of my curiosity and the need to answer some basic questions about Base, the wildly popular layer 2 from Coinbase.
Hopefully, it can be a reminder that while it is easy to get distracted by dramatic market movements, Open Money is really about building a better internet.
In the simplest terms, a better internet encourages more peer-to-peer transactions, reduces friction and overhead, allows people to easily create, own, and share digital assets and artifacts, and is evenly distributed because open access means better ideas and new opportunities.
So with all of that in mind, I set about trying to get a better handle on how Base works and what kinds of problems it is solving.
The result of that exploration is a database of projects and companies that are actively building on Base and/or using Base functionality to optimize their operations.
As this database came together, I thought other people might get some value out of it too, which led me to the decision to share it.
The database contains a few hundred project entries. Some of them might sound familiar because they are established crypto projects looking to leverage the scaling made possible by Base. Others are new, and being built specifically because of the fast and cheap transactions enabled by Base.
The database is organized by a system of category tags so you can search for projects that interest you. It also has info about the project’s website, blog, and social media to make DYOR a little bit easier.
What is Base and why does it matter?
If you’ve been around for a while, you know that one of the biggest issues with getting more people into crypto is onboarding.
Just getting started — setting up a wallet, finding the right assets to buy, figuring out basic op-sec, etc., is enough of a barrier to entry that most people say “no thanks.”
In the past, the onboarding focus was mainly talked about in the context of crypto consumers…the “road to mass adoption” and all of that.
But one of the interesting things about Base is that it’s made it easier to onboard more developers to crypto and web3. More developers leveraging fast, cheap transactions enables all kinds of new ways of operating onchain.
Also, as wallets become a key linchpin to emerging onchain systems, the one-two punch of easier-to-use smart wallets and super fast and almost free transactions makes it easier and more practical to use onchain systems.
I’ve written a bunch about Base before, mainly because it provides a glimpse into the current crypto/onchain zeitgeist.
To get caught up check out this post:
I think Base is a cool project and has enabled some great new functionality. That said, I still think there needs to be a lot of research into how the economics enabled by Base will play out long term.
The builders of Base are known for saying that the ecosystem will never have a token. That positioning is a refreshing change from the Wild West marked by the carcasses of ICOs and rug pulls by greedy token lords.
At the same time, tokens do provide a pretty important governance and liquidity service for truly decentralized projects, and in the case of Base, the functions of a token are replaced by a corporation.
Not sure how this all plays out big-picture-wise, but in the meantime, I hope the database can be useful.