Crypto exchange Coinbase has revealed its launch date for Base – the Ethereum layer 2 blockchain designed to make transactions faster and cheaper than the underlying network.
As of today, users can begin bridging ETH to base, with dapps “across the on-chain eco” starting to enable Base support.
As published in a blog post from Base on Thursday, the Base mainnet will go live “for everyone and everything” on August 9.
To commemorate the launch, the firm also announced “Onchain Summer” – a month-long festival by 50 creators and developers with a daily showcase of novel things that can be done on-chain.
Participants in the festival will be open to ~100 ETH in grants from Coinbase, spread across participants in four different events: Onchain Summer, Build on Base, Stand With Crypto, and Base Accounts. The company will also host a virtual hackathon – Superhack – from August 4 to 18, which includes another $125,000 in prizes.
“Our mission has been clear and consistent: bring the next million builders and billion users onchain,” said Base. “We believe that change is an onchain future that enables an open, global economy that increases economic freedom and puts everyone on a level playing field.”
Base was announced in February as a “bridge” for new crypto users into the crypto economy. Besides Ethereum, it’s designed to provide interoperability with and access to products on other L1 and L2 networks, such as Solana.
The platform was built using the Optimism (OP) stack and leverages the power of rollups, a method of cheaply batching transactions together off-chain before settling them on-chain.
Unlike other Ethereum scaling networks such as Optimism, Arbitrum (ARB), or Polygon (MATIC), Coinbase stated from the outset that it has no plans to release an accompanying token for Base.
That said, those who bridge their ETH to Base may receive both an ETH reward and a commemorative NFT for their efforts. This can be done using a iety of methods, including through Onchain Summer’s website, Coinbase’s app, and using Base Bridge, among other things.
Base is compatible with multiple wallet apps, including “Coinbase Wallet, Rainbow, Safe, Brave, Rabby, Frame, Exodus, Trust Wallet, rhino.fi, and Frontier,” according to Base.
