Coinbase's (NASDAQ:COIN) Base, the popular layer-2 network, is now a “stage 1” rollup, the company said on Wednesday, setting up the network for its path towards complete decentralization.
The transition to a “stage 1” rollup comes as other layer-2s have also reached that milestone, making these networks less reliant on centralized entities.
The move means that Base will now have a security council, a network of ten “independent entities, which we chose from all around the globe,” said Tom Vieira, the head of product at Base, in an interview with . “These are folks from the Base ecosystem and from the broader Ethereum ecosystem,” who will help approve certain network upgrades if needed, Vieera added.
In addition, fault proofs are permissionless now on Base, meaning anyone can verify or check the state of transactions from the network without relying on a central entity.
Achieving the so-called stage 1 rollup status stems from a post from Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin, where he categorized platforms according to their degree of decentralization, with stage 1 having certain guardrails or "limited training wheels", and sacrificing on certain elements of decentralization for security and speed.
Buterin originally shared this framework in 2022 when rollups started becoming more popular. A few years later, he expressed his concerns around their security, so he wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he would only publicly speak about a layer-2 network if it had reached (at least) stage 1.
Base was launched by centralized exchange Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) in August 2022, and since then has become the largest rollup, according to L2Beat, with $11.72 billion locked in the protocol. Now, the largest layer-2 network will be less reliant on Coinbase itself.
