In this episode of OP Radio we're joined by Jesse from Base, a Layer 2 rollups incubated by Coinbase and built on the OP Stack, and Ben Jones, co-founder of Optimism. We went over Base's early success, the shared values underpinning the collaboration between Base and the Optimism Collective, some of that collaboration's details, and more.
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Optimism Links:

Website: https://www.optimism.io/
Twitter: @optimismFND
Mirror: https://optimism.mirror.xyz/

Welcome everybody to another episode of OP Radio.

We've got 2 very special guests with us here today for a special edition of OP Radio.

I'm going to go ahead and just let them introduce themselves.

If you don't know who they are, maybe we'll let Mr.

I'm Ben with Liquid Founders and Optimism.

If you didn't catch, I should post music in my free time.

And hey everyone, I'm Jesse, creator of Bass.

And in my free time right now, I just work on building, bringing things on chain, bringing the world on chain.

I'm about to go for a run after this space.

Yeah, I'm a kind of like run every day type of person.

Well, in case you missed it, y'all, we released some important announcements today.

And we're going to go over that in more depth and detail from 2 of the key architects here on the space today.

So I think the way I'd like to get this started, let's just take a step back.

I'd like to direct this question at Jesse.

Jesse, BASE mainnet has been live for over about a week now.

Maybe in your words, I'd just like to maybe have you explain what is BASE for the people who may not know.

So for those who are listening in and don't know what BASE is, but are in this space, which I imagine is a small set of people, but BASE is an Ethereum layered...

You never know who could be listening later on.

BASE is an Ethereum layer 2, It's open and permissionless.

It's built on the OP stack in collaboration with Optimism.

And our mission is to bring the next million developers and the next billion users on chain.

We launched the testnet in February, spent 4 months just hammering that, making sure that we were as hardened as possible and making sure that we could launch a mainnet in a decentralized structure.

We've been kind of participating in this whole movement of on-chain summer for

Today is Optimism Day in Onchain Summer, which has been exciting.

I got to talk with Bingee and the team earlier on our kind of Onchain Summer stories.

And yeah, we're just excited to be building the future of the internet with y'all.

And Jesse, I've heard that you say this ambitious goal before, which is bring a billion users on chain.

I wonder if we could just take a step back and I want to ask you, why is that important?

Like why do we want to bring a billion people on chain?

And I think, you know, this is, there's, there's the kind of like meta reason or the abstract reason and the specific reason.

The abstract reason is we think that when people come on chain or the evidence suggests that when people come on chain, they're going to have increased economic freedom, and that's going to make the world a better place.

I think like tactically, anecdotally, like I every day talk to people.

And what I hear from them is coming on chain changed their lives.

Whether that's an artist who was previously working a desk job, who could now make money from selling their digital art on chain, or a musician who could do the same thing and earn more than their Spotify streamings, or a person who has never had access to a real stable financial system, and now has access to a whole host of financial products, including stable coins and Ethereum that enable them to build a better business and to take care of their money better and support their family better.

I think fundamentally what we're seeing is that this new platform is a positive force for good in everyday people's lives.

And we want to make it so that everyone in the world has access to that.

And everyone in the world can benefit from it.

Yeah, the way I kind of think about it is like on chain.

And you've said this before, Jesse, but on chain is the next online, but with greater sovereignty.

You know, I think before the online era, we were all just getting talked at, right?

The news and the movies, like everything was 1 way, you could really just read.

And for the first time, we could also write like we could share our stories with the world.

But everything that we were doing was still getting written into a massive corporation that took the control away, took the ownership away, whether it was Facebook or Twitter or Google or TikTok, we gave up ownership of our creativity.

And I think in this new on-chain era, for the first time, we can read, we can write, and we can own.

And the creativity, the products we build, the businesses we build, the things that we build, the identities we build, when we put them on chain, they remain ours.

And that is this fundamental shift that we think is going to transform the world for the better and really bring about the next era of the internet.

I love the way you phrase that and man, that gets me excited.

Okay, so Jesse, I wonder if we could just go over, has there been any early victories or wins?

I know BASE's mainline has been open for a week or so, but what have you seen as far as traction?

What are you excited about personally over the last?

I think that we've kind of been blown away.

We set a bunch of goals at the beginning of the quarter in terms of activity, builders, economic kind of value flowing into base.

And we broke all the goals in the first 2 weeks.

1 thing that I was really proud of was 2 days ago, we crossed Ethereum.

So we did more transactions on base than Ethereum did 2 days ago.

The same day, all L2s did 5x more transactions than Ethereum.

I think 1 just data point to share is 2 years ago, like literally exactly 2 years ago, we were doing on L2 1 100th of the transactions of Ethereum.

And today, 2 years later, we are doing 5x the transactions of Ethereum.

That's a 500x increase over the last 2 years.

If you go to l2beat.com and look at the chart of activity growth, what you see is that it's just up and to the right, up and to the right in kind of like the greatest growth curve that I've ever seen in crypto.

And I think I'm just so excited and grateful for base to be getting to contribute to that and getting to play our part in growing Ethereum layer to growing the super chain and bringing the world on chain.

Jesse, I'm curious, did this Did this early activity beat even your wildest expectations?

And so I would say there was a part of me that was holding out hope that like, we would bring hundreds of millions of people on chain this summer.

Like, you know, like, really, it would all come together and the the the

Was gonna start and like, everything was just gonna go locked and loaded.

You know, I probably gave that like a 5% chance.

But there was some part of me that was like, there's a chance that that happens.

But I think beyond that, like the 95, like best case scenario that I was thinking about in the absence of that, this is far and away exceeded my expectations.

I think we've been so grateful And yeah, just excited about the way the community has responded, the number of like products that have launched.

And I think the thing that has probably made me the most happy is it just feels like people are having fun on chain for the last few weeks.

And a lot of that's around base, whether it's base paint that XYZ, where you have all these pixel artists all around the world creating art or story-based where people are telling stories or friend tech where people are, you know, getting to connect with their friends and private group chats.

There's like, it feels like a lot of energy just around creativity and fun and, you know, using this new platform to create things that people just want to interact with because they're awesome.

And to me, that feels a lot like the early days of the internet.

And when the internet really started working with like Tumblr, and I just like, I feel like that's the energy we want.

We want to be creating more fun on chain.

And we're just glad to be a part of that.

So, you know, aim for the stars and reach the moon, I guess, as they say.

Well, I want to ask Jesse another question which is basically like, I'm very curious for like I, you know, I think I had a similar thing where like it was clear that Bass was gonna be something big and it's very exciting to see that come to fruition.

I'm curious also, like, what some of the, like, what a non, what some of the surprises are outside of that, you know, like, what is the next big, like, what have we learned from this that, like, we as a community can improve with the base, you know, from the base launch?

Are there things standing out to you that's like, oh man, we've learned something big here?

I mean, I think that the big thing that stands out to me is that we just have a lot more work to do.

Like, I'm so excited about the progress and momentum and growth that we've seen, but I also spent 30 minutes on Monday night onboarding my whole extended family to base and doing on-chain summer and getting them to kind of experience that, you know, that's from my 23 year old cousin to my 95 year old grandfather.

And most of those people have never like owned crypto in a self custodial lot before.

And we've done a lot of work over the last 6 months to make that easy.

I feel like it's gotten 10x better over the last year, but we still need to make it another 10x better to make it really the case that someone can go from never having interacted with crypto to seeing something they want to do on chain, and being able to do that in less than 60 seconds.

And so I think my big takeaway is like, this is day 1, we now have the technology in order to build incredible product experiences with low cost layer twos with better wallets and wallet infrastructure with identity stuff that's starting to come online.

But I think we now need to kind of put all those pieces together and keep refining them day over day until that experience for a new person and experience for people been using crypto every day is just totally seamless.

And so that's what I'm now focused on kind of turning my eye towards.

It's like, how do we just create that feedback loop and keep iterating until these products are really, really incredible?

Hell yeah, I'm so ready for Coinbase wallet based synergy to just explode.

I just did a we just had an all hands for the whole Coinbase company today.

You know, it's like 4000 people and like on Tin Sovereign base was a big part of it.

And, you know, the big message that we shared with the company was kind of exactly what I just said.

But 1 of our big learnings here is like we have a lot more work to do to make all these things great.

And I think there's just so much energy right now inside of Coinbase to do that work and to prioritize the small fixes and the big fixes that make all these experiences just totally fly.

And candidly, like that energy wasn't there a year ago.

But having this new platform and having this kind of reason for us to make that push and make that investment, I think is catalyzing a massive change inside this, you know, large public company and is having a really, really positive impact.

So, so grateful to have the opportunity to do this and to be working with y'all to make this all happen.

Moving right along here, I want to hear from Ben.

Ben, I'm not sure people fully understand just how big BASE joining the Optimism Collective is.

I'd love to hear from your perspective, from the Optimism Collective's perspective, what base joining the superchain means?

You know, I think something that you said earlier, Jesse, that really resonated with me was talking about base did crazy numbers and the sum of all L2s did even crazier numbers, you know?

And I think most fundamentally, what the introduction of BASE means for us as a collective is, I mean, and I think very similar to the message of the groundwork's been laid, it's time to take it to the next level.

You know, that's true on the product side, That's also true on the infrastructure and scaling side.

Ultimately, everything that we do with optimism, it should be centered around positive sum behavior.

Like, if you take the perspective that the collaborative and coordination tools that trustless chains bring to the table, part of the optimistic outlook on what that's going to do is bring in positive synoptoms, where the sum of the parts is, you know, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, right?

So ultimately, most fundamentally, what Bayes, I think, really just makes crystal clear is the fact that it's time for us to have a bunch of chains, which is very, very exciting.

We've now had multiple L2s break the Ethereum transactions per day mark.

And the next step is to get lots of them doing that all the time.

So ultimately, I think the most important thing is that it's about positive same behavior.

And if we're really going to take crypto to the masses, no 1 chain is going to do it.

And it's going to be, you know, it takes a collective.

I mean, there's a lot of different ways to answer that question.

To me, the most fundamental piece of it is going positive some and getting a bunch of parts that add up to be greater than the whole.

And that's what I think we're seeing in spades with base.

And I'm curious also to hear from you, Ben, you know, when, when this collaboration was in its early phases, when you were thinking about it, I know there were probably some questions that it prompted that needed to be answered.

Could you share some of those questions that needed to be answered before, you know, we could reach a day like today?

Sure, yeah, I mean, I think there's a, I mean, there were certainly a number of questions for us to figure out.

I think the most important 1 was like, is it time to do this positive something?

Like, fundamentally, what we're building is a public good.

And that means that anyone can take it and run with it and do whatever they want with it, right?

So 1 part of the question was like, it's like an identity crisis of like, oh, optimism for a very long time now has been this 1 singular chain.

That is a world of multiple chains, right?

And so 1 question was just like, How do we, you know, effectively, how do we embrace that as a community?

And I mean, I guess even a more fundamental question was, did we embrace that?

And then the question was, like, how do we embrace that?

And the answer is the super chain in some ways, right?

Like, you know, Carl went up on DevCon, in my co-founder DevCon and gave the talk on the super chain and said, there's gonna be a bunch of these chains that are all gonna work together.

But I think 1 thing I'm incredibly thankful for to be able to work with someone like Jesse and the rest of the base team on, is like actually turning from like theory into practice, right?

Like we actually had to figure out how is this going to work, right?

Yeah, so to me, it was just like, basically it was, okay, we're going multi-chain.

I think we're making big strides to answer that.

Yeah, and I would love to hear from Jesse.

Jesse, we released some information today about the details of this partnership.

But I would like to just ask you, what in your mind is the glue that's holding this together?

Or in other words, what are the sort of underlying fundamental values that enabled us to answer these questions together?

Yeah, well, I'd say it's primarily that we're based in optimistic.

But I do think that optimism is a big part of it.

And a fundamental belief that if we work together, we can do things that no 1 else has ever kind of believed are possible.

Maybe break that down a few levels further.

I think 1 thing is like this positive sum nature, where it's like, if we want to go far, we should be going to get, you know, There was an alternate version of history where Coinbase went and said, hey, we're going to build our own L1, or we're going to build L2, and we're going to just kind of go off on our own.

Instead, we said, hey, let's create based on the OP stack.

Let's do it in collaboration with Optimism.

Let's build this super chain, because we think that's going to take us further than where we could go if we were just going to do this by ourselves.

I think the second big 1 is that we really, I think both believe that decentralization really matters.

And you see this in the kind of news that we're sharing today, like we're not launching base at a point where there's any 1 party, including the base core team at Coinbase, that could violate key kind of decentralization primitives and commitments that we're making.

And that was a really, really important thing for us.

And it felt like in working with optimism, we could actually make that commitment to decentralization really mattering.

And then I think finally, the last thing is this kind of belief that like the users come first.

And the most important thing that we can be doing to support users in the next generation of this internet is creating base and OP mainnet and the super chain in such a way that we preserve the open permissionless nature of Ethereum block space.

Because at the end of the day, that is what enables everyone everywhere, regardless of where you are born, regardless of where you live, to have access to the same things.

And that's that level playing field that, you know, going back to the beginning of our conversation, puts everyone on a level playing field, gives them increased economic freedom, and I think will make their lives and the world a better place.

So that kind of value alignment, I think that was really what has made this collaboration really possible.

And I guess maybe 1 last note that I'll add on to that is, I think 1 of the things that has really characterized our collaboration thus far is a humbleness in that we don't have all the answers.

Like we, you know, worked on this law of chains and base contributed to it.

And we shared the first version of that a week ago or 2 weeks ago.

And we need input, we need feedback from the community, all of the things that we're doing right now.

I think it's coming from a place of prioritizing users, prioritizing decentralization, prioritizing that positive some-ness, but it's coming with an attitude of this is our best starting point that we believe in, but also it's a place that we want feedback on.

And I think that openness to learning, the openness to being wrong, the openness to believing that we can do better with contributions and feedback and perspectives from the community, that really has made it so with the value alignment, we've been able to really collaborate and work well together.

Obviously, a lot of details to be hashed out.

But yeah, just as you said, Jesse, because of that underlying value alignment, user first, the importance of decentralization, those details got answered.

I feel like it made me realize 1 question that I didn't say in the beginning, which was actually like, pretty important to nail down for us was like, kind of do we trust these guys?

And to be quite honest, like, what we are doing with the super chain and with the OP stack is not going to be universally shared.

And there are people that are going to take the decentralized software that we've built, wrap it in degrees of hidden centralization, and really just be trying to like land grab and not actually do the damn thing that we're setting out to do.

So yeah, I just want to express a massive gratitude to like Jesse and the rest of the base and coinbase teams to like, really taking this seriously.

I think it's not even a given that a large Fortune 500 company is going to understand the value propositions and the fundamental good nature of decentralization.

So I'm really appreciative that just y'all's team personally was ready to go on that and then we can build something

Yeah, we're blessed to have been collaborating 1 super team 1 super dream building the super chain

I think the moment we knew was when Jesse you approved the little B meme during the base launch.

Getting into the details a little bit more, I think people are definitely curious to hear.

I would love to hear from Ben on sort of what the details of this partnership entail.

Do you want to take a crack at that, at explaining what is this law of chain thing?

I mean, the first thing to say, of course, is that it is a V0.1.

Just like Jesse said, it's going to be critical to get community feedback.

And it is not something that is an official governing document of the Optimism Collective yet.

It is a proposal from the Optimism Foundation to update it.

So I spoke a little bit earlier about the sort of multi-chain identity crisis of optimism is 1 extreme way that you could call this, which is basically, how do we understand our role as a collective when we move from a world with 1 chain to having many chains?

And ultimately, where that answer lies for us is that we have to, it's a responsibility for the community to shift from basically governing a single protocol, OPMainnet, to governing a shared standard that is used by many protocols, like Base and like OPMainnet, and potentially others.

So most fundamentally, I would say That is the sort of fundamental answer to the optimism identity crisis of what is optimism becoming.

Ultimately, it has to evolve from having a single implementation of a chain to being a standards body that governs a standard that is shared by many.

And then to the question of what ultimately is the law of chains, what I say there is really not the bulk of the law of chains.

Really, what the bulk of the law of chains is talking about the governance implications, and really, I think, the governance responsibilities that the community has to uphold for this all to work.

What I mean is that When you move to a situation where there's a single standard being governed, the number of stakeholders go up.

We're now in a position where base is a very, very, very, and the entire base community is a very, very extremely important stakeholder within the optimism ecosystem.

And there's a responsibility that comes with governing upgrades to another chain like that.

And it's basically to give those stakeholders the protections and what they deserve.

So that's a little bit about what the law changes.

And effectively, what it does is it tries to enumerate all of the stakeholders.

And then it defines what we think are the critical things that we have to be neutral about and basically that we have to protect for the sake of all of these new stakeholders that are joining.

So the number 1 thing is that the users should come first.

That was like Jesse mentioned already, and that's a key section of the law of chains, is that it's critical to protect the users above them.

That is the true essence of the decentralized block space that we're here to produce.

It's also incredibly important, for example, for an entity like base itself to be defined, which isn't any 1 particular user.

It's the people that are running 1 of these chains.

And so it's very important for those people to also be effectively protected and have things like their own economic sovereignty, and have the ability to make reasonable protocol decisions about their particular chains.

So yeah, there's a little bit of ramble, a little bit of overview.

Basically, the TLDR, we move from governing 1 chain to governing a standard shared by many.

And there's a whole lot of responsibilities and, you know, protections that is critical for governance to uphold when we move to that world.

And that's what the law of change tries to talk about.

And I think from the base perspective, 1 of the things that was really important to us about the law of chains was just ensuring this commitment to neutrality.

See all Optimism Collective transcripts on Youtube

OP Radio #44: Base Mainnet & The Superchain