Dialogue Base: The explosive growth of social startups, which track will it focus on in the future?
Base may issue a bounty, who has the chance to receive it?Author: Loopy, Odaily Planet Daily
In July this year, Base, a Layer 2 scaling solution built by Coinbase, was opened to developers and officially launched its mainnet on August 10.
The Base network is built on the OP Stack, connecting to the Ethereum network and sharing security and resources. At the beginning of its launch, Base quickly gained market attention thanks to the myth of the BALD token skyrocketing overnight; the SocialFi application friend.tech further pushed Base into everyone's view—friend.tech not only ignited the social track but also rapidly increased Base's TVL.
Recently, CoinGecko released a report analyzing the changes in TVL and market share of several Layer 2 solutions this year. In just a few months since its launch, Base has become the fifth largest Layer 2 network.
From the changes in market share, it is clear that Base has become the fastest-growing Layer 2. Data from DeFiLlama shows that Base's TVL has now surpassed $300 million.
Currently, there are many Layer 2 solutions in the crypto market. How can Base break through in this fiercely competitive track? It requires a flourishing ecosystem and the successful creation of "hit products," and of course, the brand effect brought by Coinbase is also very important.
According to incomplete statistics, there are currently over 100 projects in the Base ecosystem, with a relatively complete scale, where infrastructure occupies a significant portion, including but not limited to bridges, on-ramps, wallets, oracles, and node providers.
In addition to native projects, many well-known brands have also expanded their businesses to the BASE chain through multi-chain deployment, including well-known projects like Uniswap and OpenSea.
Last week, Bangkok hosted a week-long event called "Blockchain Genesis and 2023 Thailand Blockchain Week." Odaily Planet Daily interviewed GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS, the head of Base for the Asia-Pacific region, on-site to discuss the current status and development of Base.
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS has previously worked for well-known companies such as Facebook and Blackberry. Interestingly, before joining Base, he served as the Southeast Asia president of the popular social application Tinder. With Base's significant success in the social field, could GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS's experience at Tinder be a contributing factor? Is this just a coincidence of fate?
The following is the transcript of the conversation
Odaily Planet Daily: The Layer 2 market is highly competitive. How does Base maintain its competitiveness in this market?
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS: The purpose of Layer 2 is mainly to scale the Ethereum network, and I believe each Layer 2 has its specific use case. Therefore, to maintain competitiveness in this fierce market environment, how to leverage Layer 2 technology is the most important.
For Base, we are striving to attract the next billion users. Thus, our goal is to become the friendliest Layer 2 platform, bringing more innovation and engaging use cases.
Odaily Planet Daily: What specific measures has Base taken to attract more developers?
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS: What we are discussing is not just about narrative and technology. The Base chain will empower developers to build on our platform. We are working to optimize the OP Stack to make it more scalable, which is also to ensure Base can achieve broader adoption.
Moreover, Base has a unique advantage—it was incubated within Coinbase, which is a well-known brand and a large publicly traded company in the crypto industry. Therefore, I believe Base has a high level of trust and credibility, which is also a unique advantage of Base.
Odaily Planet Daily: What areas will Base focus on supporting?
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS: This is a very important question for Base. Base was just launched at the end of August, and our mission is to attract the next billion users into the on-chain world.
To achieve this goal, we are still exploring the best path. We have seen the success of SocialFi—such as friend.tech—but we have also seen more use cases based on DeFi and gaming, with many infrastructures being built on Base.
In any case, Base does not have a clear positioning in vertical tracks—I think this is very unique. Because to achieve the goal of attracting the next billion users, efforts are needed from various aspects, fields, and tracks.
Odaily Planet Daily: There is a viewpoint that there are already too many Layer 2 solutions, and perhaps one day there will be more chains than applications. What is your perspective on this issue?
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS: There are indeed many Layer 2 solutions, but I don't think the situation of "too many Layer 2" will occur.
I understand that everyone is currently trying to expand the Ethereum network through Layer 2. Now we have various Layer 2 technologies. Over time, only a few Layer 2 technologies with very clear use cases and importance will remain. Therefore, we are still in the early stages.
As part of the Layer 2 ecosystem or Layer 2 protocol, we just need to work together in one direction—to make it easy to use and encourage people to use on-chain use cases more frequently.
Odaily Planet Daily: Are there any major events coming up for Base in the near future?
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS: There will be some major events in the coming weeks.
First is the Optimism bounty. Since Base is built on the OP Stack, any developer building on Base can apply for the Optimism RetroPGF to receive a bounty.
Secondly, we have just launched the Base Builder grant, aimed at those developers who are already building on Base and trying to innovate further.
In addition, there are some other things coming up. Overall, we are trying to attract a large number of blue-chip dApps to Base, so that everyone can easily use their commonly used dApps on Base.
