By dalz on Skatehive
The Coinbase chain, Base has gained traction in the last year, emerging as one of the top L2 on Ethereum. I’m not even sure should it be called L2, as from my perception it’s more of an L3 than L2. Coinbase wants to give its users more toys to play with and onboard the users of the exchange to the Base chain. Instead of users using Coinbase to buy crypto and then transfer it to another chain where they do all the defi, NFTs and other stuff, keep them in the ecosystem by offering them this company chain. The chain itself is opensource, built with the Optimism technology. However, from my understanding Coinbase is running the chain by themselves, meaning one validator/block producer. I’m not totally sure how exactly this works and if there more validators, or options for other to support the chain, but in both cases it’s a single entity show. What this means is that basically if they want, they can censor transactions, freeze funds etc. without any consent from other parties. They can be