In December, the Base core team came together to reflect on our first year of building and focus on what’s ahead. Fueled by learnings from Coinbase teams and ecosystem collaborators, we're excited to share what we’re focusing on in 2024.

We welcome thoughts, feedback, and input — if you have ideas, please join us in /base on Farcaster and share them!

Our Mission in 2024: To build a global onchain economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom

A little over a year ago, when we started working on Base, we wrote out our first mission for our efforts: enable incredible products by creating a world-class onchain developer platform. As we brought Base to mainnet and began to bring builders and users onchain, we realized that this developer platform is really only one part of accomplishing what we’re working towards. It’s the technical foundation that enables builders to deploy their creativity onchain, and for users to discover new ways of transacting and ownership. But those pieces—apps, users, and the ability to transact easily—are equally critical to bringing Base’s vision to life. What we’re looking to build is bigger than a technical foundation. We’re building a new internet, and a new economy.

With that in mind, we now think about Base as an economy composed of three parts: a developer platform (Base as the underlying infrastructure), an app ecosystem (all the apps that are built on Base), and a capital market (users and liquidity flowing through the apps—e.g. ETH, USDC).

Alongside this new framing, we’ve also been inspired by the thinking from folks like Vitalik about how we can continue to embrace cypherpunk values and further the mission that Coinbase originally set out to achieve. Combined, we’ve now repositioned our mission to reflect the opportunity that lies ahead: to build a global onchain economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom. As we head into the new year, this mission is the bedrock of our actions and aspirations as we work to bring the world onchain.

Our high level focus for 2024

With this new mission in hand, our strategy for the year ahead is structured around four core pillars, each reflecting our commitment to a specific aspect of building a robust onchain economy:

• Decentralize and scale to enable everyone, everywhere to come onchain: Our commitment to decentralization and scalability is our top priority, with a focus on achieving fast, affordable transactions on a secure, decentralized L2.

• Build a powerful developer platform that enables anyone to build world-class onchain products: Our long term north star is to develop a platform that enables over 1 million builders to come onchain, helping them create products that change the world.

• Nurture a vibrant ecosystem of apps that gives consumers, creators, and businesses a reason to be onchain: We aim to attract over 1 billion people to a flourishing ecosystem of applications that enable the next wave of global creativity and innovation.

• Foster a deep capital market that powers the interconnected, onchain economy: We are focused on establishing Base as a pivotal component of the onchain economy through a robust and deep capital market, as well as seamless interconnection to other Ethereum L2s, as well as other L1s.

What we’re building

Drilling a bit deeper, we’ve broken down this strategy into a number of initiatives that we’ll be executing against in the year ahead. These are in no particular order and they are not fully inclusive of all the core team’s work, as well as all the hard work that the broader ecosystem is doing on and around Base to bring the world onchain.

Accelerating decentralization while increasing network availability

We're committed to continuing to advance our decentralization efforts, while in parallel ensuring that the network can operate with a high degree of availability (targeting 99.99%). As the economy of Base continues to grow, the reliability and trust that decentralization and availability bring are absolutely paramount. This includes:

• Partnering with Optimism to launch fault proofs and take Base to a Stage 1 rollup

• Increasing the redundancy of the Base sequencer setup and open sourcing our learnings

• Collaborating on alternative fault proof implements to make progress towards Stage 2

• Supporting the launch of the Optimism Security Council

Driving down fees across the board

We believe that driving down fees to <$0.01 is absolutely critical for continuing to enable onchain innovation. Accomplishing this will require continued innovation at both Ethereum L1, where we’ve been helping lead the way with EIP4844, as well as at the L2 and EVM layers. Our efforts in 2024 will include:

• Launching EIP4844 on Ethereum, as well as support for Base and other OP Stack chains

• Contributing to research & execution for the next phase of danksharding, including PeerDAS

• Optimizing OP Stack and transaction-specific compression to further drive down costs

Making smart wallets the default

We believe that smart wallets are required in order to make onchain apps accessible and useful for everyday people. This is a hard path — and will require years of work — but we believe that 2024 is the year we turn the corner. Our efforts this year will include:

• Expanding ERC4337 adoption via bundler and paymaster standardization and funding

• Supporting exploration into efforts like EIP3074 and EIP5003 to migrate existing wallets

• Partnering closely with Coinbase (and other large apps) to transition them to smart wallets

Making it dead simple to on and offramp

We believe that coming onchain should be easy. We also believe that getting onchain shouldn’t require you to rewrite your whole financial life - you should be able to come onchain and barely notice. And we’re going to make that the case in 2024, for everyone, everywhere.

• Getting world-class on and offramps to Base for as many markets as possible

• Working with partners to bring local currency stablecoins to Base

• Enabling apps and L3s, L2s, and L1s to connect into Base to leverage these on and offramps

Bringing Coinbase onchain — and using those lessons to help others

Base came from Coinbase and we will continue working closely with their teams to bring the company onchain. We share a vision for how we can increase economic freedom and believe the best way to do that is to bring Coinbase’s existing and new users, assets, and products onchain.

• Making Coinbase and Coinbase Wallet best-in-class ways to access Base

• Building onchain user benefits into Coinbase’s existing product suite

• Expanding Coinbase Verifications to enable apps to leverage real world identity

• Supporting the Coinbase team in launching 10+ (!!) inflight onchain products

Making the Superchain seamless and effectively governed

Today, navigating the ever-expanding L2 world is still too challenging for both developers and users. In partnership with Optimism, we’re excited to massively simplify this and enable seamless experiences across the Superchain.

• Rolling out the first phase of interoperability to enable communication between OP chains

• Continuing to refine and improve the Law of Chains and Optimism RPGF

• Participating in Optimism Governance to uphold the Base and broader ecosystem values

Supporting builders and creators to come onchain

Alongside all the work we’ll be doing on the core Base protocol, Base is nothing without the people who build on Base. And we’re excited to give them better tools and more resources as we head into the new year. In the year ahead, we plan to:

• Continue to iterate on and expand our Base Grants program, as well as Optimism RPGF

• Enable developers to build better gasless experiences with seamless paymasters

• Empower the next generation of builders to learn how develop onchain with Base Camp

• Elevating creators and the platforms they use to create onchain with Onchain Daily and more

• Support the fast-growing decentralized Base leadership, including folks like Based MGMT

We’re incredibly fired up as we enter 2024. And we have ambitious plans — but we can’t accomplish them alone. Base is what it is today because of the builders all around the world who have contributed to bringing it to life. We are so excited to keep building with you. If you have ideas, thoughts, comments, or suggestions:

• Join us in /base on Farcaster and participate in the conversation

• Say hello in Discord and share your thoughts

Explore joining the Base core team at base.org/jobs