TL;DR: The Base Ecosystem Fund, led by Coinbase Ventures, aims to invest in the next generation of onchain projects building on Base. We received over 800 applications for our Base Ecosystem Fund, and we’re excited to announce our first six investments today: Avantis, BSX, Onboard, OpenCover, Paragraph, and Truflation.

The Base Ecosystem Fund was launched earlier this year to invest in the next generation of onchain projects building on Base. In March, we shared a Request for Builders to highlight key primitives we were excited to see exist onchain, and today, we are thrilled to share our first six investments.

With well over 800 applications submitted, we’re grateful for the passion and effort so many builders put into their applications and are delighted to support this first wave of teams on our shared mission to bring the world onchain and increase economic freedom around the world.

Avantis
Avantis is an oracle-based synthetic derivatives protocol where users can trade crypto and real world assets with up to 100x leverage, and earn yield as a market-maker by providing USDC liquidity. We are fans of Avantis for their simple design (USDC only) and thoughtfulness around risk management (tranches and flexible locking).

BSX
BSX is building a decentralized limit order book for users to go long and short with leverage. We believe onchain trading should be supported by various market structures – whether that be AMMs, order books, or any other novel structure. We are excited for BSX to combine the best of CeFi trading experiences (e.g. cross-collateralization, powerful cross-margining, improved front-end, limit orders) with the best of DeFi (such as self-custody directly on Base).

Onboard
Onboard provides an onchain, self-custodial path for users to onramp and offramp crypto in a peer-to-peer manner through their own MPC wallet and smart contracts. We believe this onchain fiat-to-crypto approach is critical to foster a more inclusive financial system for developing markets, including Africa where Onboard is currently based.

OpenCover
OpenCover is the first L2 insurance aggregator that works with underwriters like Nexus Mutual to protect DeFi users against onchain risks such as smart contract hacks and oracle failures. OpenCover is also leading the charge on providing users with onchain insurance options at the point of transaction to make onchain risk management easy and affordable for all.

Paragraph
Paragraph is an onchain creator platform that helps creators publish, share, and build a business around their content, using permissionless protocols to supercharge growth and earning potential. We are excited to see Paragraph utilize novel onchain mechanisms such as enabling creators to turn posts into collectibles, send newsletters to wallet addresses, monetize via recurring memberships, and tap into decentralized social protocols (e.g. Farcaster, Lens, XMTP) to build and foster their communities.

Truflation
Truflation is an onchain financial oracle that provides automated and independent daily inflation reporting (i.e. CPI) by compiling data from 18M+ points and 40+ data sources in real-time. In our view, this represents a much higher fidelity picture of inflation in contrast to the current methodology which has had minor changes since 1998 and reports just once per month. We appreciate the importance of having an impartial third party like Truflation reporting on important financial metrics and making them easily accessible onchain.

We are grateful to work with these exceptional teams to advance the Base ecosystem and bring more builders and users onchain, but the journey doesn't end here. We are actively seeking more pioneers to join this Based journey. Apply and become part of the next wave of builders driving innovation on Base.