TLDR: Base has achieved Stage 1 Decentralization, a critical milestone in our journey to build an open and global onchain economy. We’ve done this by launching permissionless fault proofs and increasing the decentralization of our contract upgrade process with a security council. We believe that decentralization is critical to deliver on our mission of building a global onchain economy and are proud to have achieved this milestone.

What decentralization means for Base

Base’s mission is to build a global onchain economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom. We believe this is only possible on a decentralized platform. This is why Base is (1) built on Ethereum, the most secure and decentralized L1, (2) built on the open and permissionless OP Stack, and (3) upholds key Neutrality Principles.

We've been focused on continuously decentralizing, and today we're excited to announce that Base is now at Stage 1 Decentralization.

Achieving Stage 1 Decentralization means Base now has stronger security guarantees and reduced trust assumptions. With fault proofs and a decentralized Security Council in place, network functionality and upgrades are in the hands of a broad set of diverse stakeholders. This creates a more resilient foundation for apps, assets, and the global onchain economy on Base, so that:

1. Builders have infrastructure certainty — the platform can't change the rules unexpectedly

2. The network becomes more resilient, with no single point of failure

3. Everyone can participate in securing and verifying the network

Decentralization stages

Vitalik Buterin's decentralization framework lays out a clear path for Layer-2 rollups on Ethereum, like Base, to progressively and safely decentralize. This framework describes three stages of decentralization:

• Stage 0, or "full training wheels", is a stage where all rollup transactions are posted onchain, but the validity checks of these transactions are done by the chain's operator. State verification is centralized and dependent upon the chain operator.

• Stage 1, or "limited training wheels", introduces a running fault proof or validity proof scheme with the practical authority to accept or reject state roots. It includes a decentralized override mechanism controlled by a diverse set of stakeholders, reducing dependence on chain operators alone.

• Stage 2, or "no training wheels", represents full decentralization, where no group of actors can, even unanimously, post a state root other than the output of the code (except in clearly defined bug scenarios).

How we got to Stage 1 decentralization

Our path to Stage 1 decentralization involved two key milestones:

1. Fault Proofs on Mainnet

In October 2024, we launched Fault Proofs on Base Mainnet after close collaboration with Optimism to bring the OP Stack Fault Proof System to Base. Fault Proofs enable:

• Permissionless proposals: Anyone can propose claims about the state of Base, removing reliance on a central party for state verification.

• Permissionless challenges: If a faulty or fraudulent claim is made, anyone can challenge it within 3.5 days by running the open-source challenger software, with economic incentives for successful challenges.

This dramatically increased the decentralization of Base by allowing anyone to permissionlessly withdraw their funds from Base L2 to Ethereum L1 without relying on centralized actors.

2. Decentralizing upgrades via a Security Council

The final requirement to achieve Stage 1 Decentralization was to further decentralize control of contract upgrades. To do this, Base contract upgrades must now be approved by a diverse group of stakeholders from across the Ethereum ecosystem.

The Security Council for Base consists of 10 independent entities from various jurisdictions. To achieve consensus, the Security Council, Optimism, and Base collectively must reach at least a 75% approval threshold to implement a Base upgrade. This setup ensures that no single entity has enough power to control the upgrade process on its own. As a result, the group responsible for implementing upgrades, which currently includes Base and Optimism, is larger and more decentralized.

What’s next?

While reaching Stage 1 Decentralization is a significant achievement, our journey toward full decentralization continues. Looking ahead, we're focused on:

• Additional proof systems — We're working towards having multiple active proof systems live on Base, to further enhance security and decentralization. A promising avenue we are exploring is ZK-based fault proof systems.

• Advancing toward Stage 2 — We’re committed to further decentralizing and achieving Stage 2. We will continue taking steps toward that goal, including enabling the Security Council to provably detect and adjudicate bugs via the multi-proof system.

Today's achievement of Stage 1 Decentralization fulfills one of our key strategic pillars for 2025: "Base is for everyone." By decentralizing Base, we're building the foundation needed to bring everyone, everywhere onchain and creating a truly global economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom.

We're excited to continue building on the Base and Ethereum vision of a more open, decentralized, global onchain economy that is accessible to all.

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