The developers of the Base and Optimism networks have announced an agreement to share the management of the blockchain networks and their profits between the companies. Coinbase, in turn, has laid out a set of “principles of neutrality” it’ll follow to prevent Base from becoming centralized.
Representatives of Base, a Layer 2 protocol on the Ethereum network, have announced an agreement with Optimism Collective, the developers behind the Optimism L2 solution. As part of the partnership, the companies will co-manage the protocols and share profits to ensure the necessary level of decentralization.
According to Optimism Collective’s post, the cooperation is realized within the framework of the future rollups and L2 network — Superchain, which should unite all Ethereum L2 protocols into a single network.
The collaboration between Base and Optimism involves two main points that are meant to promote decentralization of both networks:
- Co-management. Base’s smart contracts can only be updated via a two-of-two multi-signature wallet account, where one signature is controlled by Base and the other by the Optimism Foundation. This means that Base can’t be updated without the consent of the Optimism team.
- Economy and long-term commitment. Base will donate 2.5% of its income or 15% of its profits to Optimism Collective. In return, Base will get a voice in the management of the Optimism protocol. To accomplish this, it’ll hold no more than 9% of the total amount of OP tokens participating in the DAO over the next six years, which is about 118 million.
The agreement also assumes that the management of Base will be transferred to Optimism’s decentralized security board as early as next year.
Will Robinson, CTO of Coinbase, promised that the cryptocurrency exchange would remain a neutral participant in the Base network. A set of “principles of neutrality” was published on Robinson’s behalf on the company’s blog, stating that Coinbase will not:
- custody or control the cryptocurrency that users bring to the Base network;
- alter the order of transactions for its own benefit;
- misuse any non-public information obtained from Base.
The Base network was launched on August 9. Technically, it’s built on OP Stack, an open source developer toolkit that underpins the Optimism ecosystem. According to Dune Analytics, as of August 24, almost 1 million new users have already joined the Base network.
