Scaling Ethereum Summit | Base: Bringing the next billion users onto Ethereum - Jesse Pollak

foreign [Applause] [Music] next up I want to bring on Jesse to talk about everything Bass you probably saw a lot of this over the last week and if anything this is all Twitter and crypto Twitter was talking about so I'm gonna give him the stage here to talk about how we bring in the next billion users into the web3 ecosystem welcome Jesse thanks Karthik hello everybody and two dragon claws to Kevin filter amazing great talk really love that um we're excited and grateful to be working with the optimism team uh I'm ready to dive in we're going to bring the next billion users to crypto just to quickly reintroduce myself I'm Jesse I'm the kind of first contributor to base I lead All Things based day to day um and I'm gonna do kind of eye level overview of kind of what is uh our vision with bass and coinbase for kind of how the Unchained economy and architecture has been developed then I'm going to share a little bit more detail about what is based and then I'll close with a few minutes of uh kind of like how do you build on base how can you build on base during this hackathon over the next few months or a few weeks and then if we have time which we may not uh we'll do some q a but uh excited to be here thank you each Global uh for having me thank you hackers around the world for um you know scaling ethereum so uh quickly just a refresher coinbase what is coinbase you've probably used bitcoinbase.com or base wallet um we've been building in the crypto economy for 10 years I I like to say we have 110 million users and 80 billion tvl um that tvl right now is primarily stored in off chaincoinbase.com that is custodial um but one way I've increasingly been thinking about that off cane custodial coinbase.com is almost like a roll-up or like an L2 it's just a really bad one it's private uh it is centralized uh it's not transparent um and a lot of what I've been thinking about for the last many years is how do we move our users our sets out of that kind of private L2 that doesn't work as well as it could and into new on-chain systems that give our users more flexibility uh more autonomy more agency and bring them into this kind of burgeoning crypto economy that works so excited to be helping to build and I think as we're thinking about making that move for our customers the thing that's really motivating Us in this thesis that onshade is the next online and so I want to kind of quickly talk about what does that actually mean uh we at a high level think about um uh kind of the last 40 Years of kind of building applications in three phases uh the first phase with kind of pre-2000 which was the offline application development phase um this is when people were writing you know code for computers or mainframes um at that point information and money was still very much managed by Central Gatekeepers uh and the folks who were building applications were moving really slowly uh and only they had so much reach you know you would write an app you'd put it on a floppy disk or a CD and then the best you could do is distribute it to everyone and hope that they opened up that piece of mail and put it in their computer um but but for the most part they didn't and that meant that newspapers and Banks were the way you could really really kind of influence people and then the internet happened and it was this crazy thing uh and for the first time information became permissionless and this created a whole new wave of Animation uh we had millions of developers all over the world and anyone anywhere could build apps for the internet that anyone anywhere could access and developers started moving 10 times faster than they could before we saw the rise of uh Twitter or Facebook we saw the creation of video chat of streaming uh literally what we are doing here right now it's only possible because of the online era unlocking information to be a permissionless thing that anyone could build on and yet money still had Gatekeepers if you wanted to build an application that touched money or value you had to interact with banks you had to interact with the government you could not build something Global for the people and we believe that right now we are sitting on the precipice of the next big change and that is moving forward online economy into an on-chain economy and moving to the first time for a world where money has Gatekeepers and in value as Gatekeepers to a world where both money and information for the first time are permissionless and anyone can build on them and in that world anyone anywhere you wherever you are in the world are going to build applications that use value that use money that use information that anyone anywhere can act as and once again we are going to see another 10x 100x growth in the amount of impact that developers like you can have on a day-to-day basis and so coinbase has been building for this on chain future for a long time we started in 2012 at the time there was no smart contract there was only Bitcoin we made it the easiest place to buy Bitcoin and then really starting in 2018 we began thinking about how do we go bigger how do we become more on chain we launched usdc we launched coinbase wallet we launched CBE if we launched the DAP wallet the coinbase app all of these things gave our customers a real on-chain experiences and and were built by developers who were writing into our contract building on this on-chain platform and with the launch of Base which I'll talk about in a second which is our ethereum L2 we are uh catapulting ourselves into the next phase of this on K feature and starting to create a platform that makes it easy for coinbase developers and developers globally to be building on chain and as we started thinking about base the thing that actually motivated us and the thing that got us to building an L2 was a process that we ran in 2022 where we tried to say okay everything's moving on chain we see that this is going to be an incredibly high impact uh new venue for developers to build what is that actually going to look like and how does coinbase fit into it and after a year of kind of digging we took away three key takeaways the first key takeaway was that evm is going to be the primary developer platform that most developers are building applications for um this came from working with internal teams working with external teams observing that today evm has 10x the Dead the doubts TBL compared to any other platform and that lead is only growing and so as a result of that observation what we've decided to do internally at coinbase is build all of our unchain products evm first both for our developer tools so our internal teams have really easy way paved Road for getting started building on chain but also for our user-facing products so everything works for all of the incredible evm power products that y'all are building so that was the first big takeaway the second big takeaway was that ethereum is going to be the primary L1 it's going to be the thing that provides security decentralization neutrality uh and it's going to be a thing that enables scaling on top of it and so for the last year coinbase and base have been investing in scaling ethereum um we've done that through contributing to something called eip4844 which is an upgrade to ethereum that's going to make it so roll up like optimism and bass and Arboretum are 10 to 100 times cheaper than they are today and get us closer to what we think about as kind of the magical Fee number which is less than a cent for the average transaction and then the third takeaway and this was one that was actually pretty surprising to us or different than where we started is we started thinking about this assuming that there would just be one L tube and that the most important thing for us was kind of picking the right L2 and I think after a lot of thinking you're working and talking with teams we ended in a place where we believe now that there's actually many of these things and that they're going to work together they're going to interoperate they're going to standardize and they're going to scale ethereum collectively then that as coinbase our duty is to contribute to that and that is why we're launching base in collaboration with optimism on the open source op stack so that we can start to have the tools that are freely available to anyone anywhere to build and scale Layer Two on top of ethereum and we can ensure that those tools work for everyone and create a platform on top of which we could have many chains that interoperate seamlessly together and so with all that context of our on-chain vision our North Star is how do we bring a million developer and a billion users on chain and base is our contribution to that and so if you haven't heard it already if you didn't see the blue death on Twitter um bases in ethereum L2 that's built to scale the crypto economy it's powered by the op stack um it's empowered by coinbase which I'll talk about in a second it's a fully open ecosystem so anyone can build there coinbase will seed it with our users our assets our our infrastructure but then the magic of what will come on base will come from all the developers everywhere including y'all it's low cost uh we're gonna have some some cool rewards that we do for developers we're building there and it's all secured by ethereum one thing that I want to dig in on is that component of empowered by coinbase what does that actually mean when I say empowered by coinbase what that actually means is if you look at the coinbase products today we are increasingly starting to um create opportunities for organic distribution of our user base those 110 million users to Applications and so this image on the left you'll see this is our new web 3 page if you go to coinbase.com web3 this is what you'll see these are it's basically an app store and it's ratings it's reviews it's uh search that allows any of our customers to start to find the best apps that they want to use and over the next year we're going to be building more and more of these tools and the goal is to make it so that any user can access any app with a safe trusted easy to use interface and that we actually bring those customers developers like y'all that as you find product Market fit you can grow your business and so that's the organic part of empowered by coinbase the the other side of empowered by coinbases we're also starting to build uh what we call paid tools or acquisition tools and so on the top left you see a few ads uh that's coin Ledger that's looks rare we believe that there's an opportunity for us to rebuild the infrastructure of kind of advertising to make it more open more transplant more accessible to anyone and to use that as a way of bringing the 110 million users that we have to the incredible application developers like y'all and so the easiest way to think about it is imagine you build a lending product and you have you know 50 million TV out and your goal is to grow to a billion TBL and what you find is that there's a certain class of users maybe people who have a certain amount of money or hold a certain amount of assets um that are really High return on investment for your protocol if you can get those users they'll use your protocol they will put their Assets in it they will help you grow your business and you're willing to pay for that and this is kind of the thing that we're seeing for businesses forever if they find product market for when they find product Market fit uh they're willing to pay to acquire the users that are going to be incredibly valuable to that what we want to do with coinbase is we want to make it so for anyone who finds those users who starts to understand who these users are we can give you access to the users and we can do it in a way that protects their privacy we can do it in eliminate that lives up to the best kind of values of decentralization and transparency that coinbase uh has worked to embody over the last many years and we can also do it in a way that delivers real value to your business and so when we say empowered by coinbase what we mean is our goal is to through organic and paid distribution take the 110 million users that we have in the coinbase people system today and bring them to developers like you so that you can grow your business you can grow your protocol and you can help us get to not 100 million users but a billion users then 5 billion users using the Unchained crypto economy every day foreign the first thing is basically going to be fully permissionless and it's going to gradually decentralize this is something that people a lot of people have asked we believe that bass must extend and inherit the permissionlessness of ethereum um and so that's why we're working with optimism that's why we're prioritizing decentralization there's three big axes on top of which we think about decentralization the first is block building the second is protocol upgrade the third is validator set um and we're going to be making significant progress on each of those this year and and defending the kind of permissionlessness of ethereum uh in base as a layer two talking a little bit more about that relationship with optimism um bass is built on the op stack if you haven't heard of the op stack or you didn't watch Kevin's talk just now uh it's incredibly powerful open source toolkit it's MIT license which means that anyone can use it Fork it update it contribute to it and we are joining as the second core developer of the op staff and what that means is that bass and coinbase are going to be taking our resources and putting them into an accelerating the roadmap of the op stock across things like security decentralization scalability um and what that means is you are going to have a better toolkit for building your own chains if you want to and the change that you Deploy on like base and optimism mainnet are going to be faster lower cost and more secure the second thing that we're doing is finding this collaboration uh is we are contributing a portion of the sequencer revenue from base uh to the retroactive public goods funding model that optimism has been pioneering and what this means is we're taking our money and we're putting it into funding those public goods that make base possible make ethereum possible make the internet possible and we believe that this is a critical thing for everyone to be doing uh as they're starting to contribute to their shared platform that is scaling the the on-chain crypto economy and then finally the third thing is we're going to be working with optimism and ethereum to Champion this decentralized on-chain crypto economy I just mentioned it we're making base uh permissionless it is a a key component of what we believe the infrastructure of this crypto economy will be and ensuring that that infrastructure means remains open to everyone in the world is is an absolute top priority for us a little bit more color a timeline if you haven't already seen it we launched the test net for base uh two weeks ago you can go start building on that today at base.

org I'll share a little bit more about how to get started in a second we're working towards the mainnet in uh Q2 uh we're going to start with the Genesis that's going to be more quiet where the chain will start running and then we'll gradually build towards a more go loud launch where all the coinbase products are can be integrated as well as a ton of other ecosystem Builders and then as we progress through two three um we'll have more rapid improvements uh to the security the the costs the decentralization of the chain um and the key takeaway to know there is you can start building on Base today and anything you start building up Base today is going to be on track to launch sometime in the next few months as we bring the the test net to made now so now I want to dive a little bit more into how can you build on base there's two steps the first is that you have to bridge some assets to base uh base is running on the base test net is running on growly uh ethereum girly so if you go to bridge.base.org you can take your girly assets uh and you can Bridge them uh it's really easy it goes pretty much instantly uh from girly to bathe and at the other side you'll have ethereum on the basically Network that you can use for gas um if you don't want a bridge that's okay too uh coinbase has faucets that you can use if you go to coinbase.com faucets you can really quickly get uh 0.1 girly eat per day and that will get you started with deploying contract if you don't want to go to coinbase.

com or you want more barely 10.1 oh wow missing the slide where'd it go that get deleted oh we gotta go back sorry there we go if you want more than one girly um let me get there again if you want more than 0.1 girly eat uh every day or most days I am tweeting saying tweet on me with your ens name uh and I'll send you one girly um and so if you go to twitter.com Jessie Pollock right now you'll see the top tweet or one of the most recent tweets uh and you can just reply to that with your ens name and I will get you started with one girly eat and so last kind of closing component if you're if you want more information on how to get started we have some guides you can scan this QR code uh and that will take you to a guide for using hard hat for using remix we're updating and improving this content every day um so keep going to docs.base.

org and we will make that happen and so with that I'm done five minutes early uh and I don't know if car tape is around but we could open it up for questions uh or we can wrap early that will allow us to a question this is uh this is a Hot Topic in the sense that there's so much Channel around it but uh everybody's just been busy and just managing all the info so um I have a couple questions and uh as people kind of type your questions and channel I'll feel them too well my my first question to you is obviously you talked about how people can build and why are you doing it but how do you actually define success here is this is this to you the fact that you get to measure coinbase brought in millions of users or is the fact that ethereum itself became bigger or or something different or makes a belt what yeah is considered good yeah so if you look at the crypto on like crypto economy today I think we have a few million people who are using crypto on a daily basis or maybe less than that uh one to two million people who are using crypto on daily basis I think the highest level success is like five billion people are using crypto on a daily basis and so how do we get there our thesis is we need to make it easier for developers to build useful applications too much of crypto has been about kind of trading historically uh speculation and we're just entering the point where we have the infrastructure to for developers to build non-speculative applications and we want to make it really really easy for developers to do that um and so our kind of North Star there is a million developers uh and I am overly ambitious maybe but my goal is to get a million developers this year uh through working with folks like Global um third web all the incredible kind of folks they've been working with so the first measurement is like can we get to a million developers who are building on base and contributing to the tomorrow crypto economy and then the second one is can we make it really really easy for users to actually use those applications so when developers build useful applications developers can just do it without thinking and it's a no-brainer and it feels as easy as any product that they would use today and I think that's where like coinbase comes in we're working really closely with the coinbase team but also the rainbow team and the frame team and other wallet teams to make it so that the experience of users actually accessing applications on base is is my very easy and that's where the kind of billion user goal will come in and my goal is again a really ambitious but ability next year and so that's what we're gonna be looking at like when I wake up every morning I'm like what are we doing to get to developers and a building users today and we want those people to be obviously coming through base but then going everywhere in the broader kind of ethereum super chain we think about base as a bridge not an island uh something that actually enables people to come from off chain to on chain but then through interoperability at the chain level people and then support across the coinbase products will make it so that users can transact wherever they want so if they say hey I want to go use this application over there we want to help them do that oh no that's amazing I I think one thing that I like already is that you are in a way baking in the fact that this has to coexist with everybody else and not uh my own thing um yeah I mean you think otherwise I think coin made so we're just one part of the broader crypto economy and y'all are the people who are building we're the ones who you know have been building and we're going to create infrastructure but y'all are going to be the one who create the applications that billions of people want to use I'm so excited all of you are here today to be doing that I think that's a wonderful note to add on and uh we kind of get to see this live in the next uh six months and uh and get more deaths to build on it and see if they can break things so you can fix them and uh some days I go faster it's amazing thanks everyone uh docs.base.orgbase.org if you want one free base girly test that you find me at twitter.com Jessie pawlik reply to the Tweet that's right there and I will get that to you with your ens amazing well thank you so much Jesse and looking forward to seeing what people build on base thanks everyone all right see ya