What Is Base? A Deep Dive Into the Base Layer 2 Ecosystem

Base has gone from an internal Coinbase experiment to one of the most active blockchain networks in the world, processing more daily transactions than Ethereum mainnet and accumulating billions in total value locked. In 2025 alone, it captured over 60% of all Ethereum Layer 2 revenue and processed more than $17 trillion in stablecoin volume. But how did a corporate-incubated Layer 2 earn the trust of crypto-native builders, and what makes the Base ecosystem worth paying attention to in 2026?

Here's everything you need to know.
(or just bridge to Base now and dive into the ecosystem!)

Base didn't emerge from a white paper or a venture-funded startup. It started as an internal pitch at Coinbase.

In 2021, Jesse Pollak, then a senior engineering leader at Coinbase, was considering leaving the company. Instead, he walked into a meeting with CEO Brian Armstrong and proposed something ambitious: a Coinbase-incubated Layer 2 blockchain built on Ethereum. The idea was to take everything Coinbase had learned about onboarding mainstream users to crypto and channel it into open, permissionless infrastructure that anyone could build on.

The team spent roughly a year experimenting and failing before landing on what would become Base. Built on Optimism's OP Stack, Base launched on testnet in early 2023 and went live on mainnet on August 9, 2023. The launch kicked off with "Onchain Summer," a month-long cultural event celebrating onchain art, music, gaming, and community.

Within months, Base had surpassed 4 million active addresses and was regularly processing more transactions per day than Ethereum Layer 1 itself.

Understanding Base means understanding its creator.

Jesse Pollak's path into crypto started early. He first encountered Bitcoin in 2012, and it stuck. He went on to found Clef, a startup building passwordless identity solutions for crypto companies, which he ran for five years before Coinbase acquired the company in 2017.

At Coinbase, Pollak rose quickly. From 2017 to 2021, he led all consumer-facing engineering, overseeing the teams that built Coinbase's core retail app, Coinbase Pro, and Coinbase Wallet. He grew his engineering org from three people to 250. By 2022, with those products stable and scaled, he was ready for a new challenge. Base was it.

What sets Pollak apart from many L2 founders is his product-first philosophy. He's consistently framed Base not as a "Coinbase chain," but as a neutral, open-source platform designed to bring the next billion users onchain. That emphasis on accessibility, developer experience, and real-world consumer use cases over pure DeFi speculation has become a defining characteristic of the Base ecosystem.

In October 2024, Pollak joined Coinbase's executive team and took on leadership of Coinbase Wallet alongside Base, further unifying the company's onchain strategy under one vision. CoinDesk named him one of their most influential people in crypto for 2023, and his influence has only grown since.

Pollak has also been a vocal champion of the Superchain concept: the vision that thousands of interoperable L2 chains, all built on the OP Stack, can collectively scale Ethereum into a truly global settlement layer. It's an ambitious bet, and Base is its most prominent proof of concept.

A few milestones stand out in Base's rapid trajectory from launch to L2 leader.

Onchain Summer (August 2023): Base's launch wasn't just a mainnet deployment. It was a cultural moment. Onchain Summer brought together artists, musicians, builders, and brands to mint, create, and transact on Base. It set the tone for what the ecosystem would become: not just a DeFi chain, but a home for onchain culture.

Surpassing Ethereum in daily transactions (2024): By early 2024, Base was consistently processing more daily transactions than Ethereum mainnet. The chain crossed $4 billion in TVL for the first time in April 2024, becoming the third-largest Ethereum L2 by value locked.

Aerodrome and the DeFi flywheel: The launch of Aerodrome, a ve(3,3) DEX that became Base's liquidity backbone, was a turning point for DeFi on the chain. Aerodrome alone generated over $160 million in revenue in 2025, anchoring a broader ecosystem of lending, yield, and trading protocols.

Virtuals and the AI agent wave: Base became a hub for AI-agent experimentation in 2025, with Virtuals Protocol generating over $43 million in revenue as a launch platform for AI agents. This positioned Base at the intersection of two of crypto's hottest narratives: consumer apps and AI.

Farcaster and onchain social: The growth of Farcaster, a decentralized social protocol with deep Base integration, helped establish a genuine onchain social layer. Combined with Zora for media and content, Base developed a social and creator ecosystem unlike anything on competing L2s.

Revenue dominance: By 2025, Base was generating 62% of all Ethereum L2 revenue. In raw terms, that was $75.4 million from January through December, up from just $2.5 million in December 2023 alone.

Base's momentum hasn't slowed heading into 2026. If anything, the scope has expanded.

At BaseCamp 2025 in Stowe, Vermont, the team dropped two major announcements. First, Base confirmed it is exploring the creation of a network token. This represents a significant philosophical shift for a chain that had previously operated without one. No specifics on distribution or utility have been shared yet, but the signal is clear: Base is thinking about long-term decentralization and community alignment.

Second, Base announced an open-source bridge between Base and Solana, marking the chain's first major cross-ecosystem interoperability move beyond the Ethereum-native Superchain.

The 2026 roadmap, published on the Base blog, is organized around three pillars: global markets, payments, and builders. On the markets side, Base is building infrastructure for tokenized equities, commodities, perpetuals, and prediction markets, targeting sub-second settlement at sub-cent cost. For payments, the focus is on scaling stablecoins with privacy features and enabling stablecoin-denominated transaction fees across the network. Base processed over $17 trillion in stablecoin volume in 2025 across 26 currencies and 17 countries, and the 2026 plan aims to go further.

For builders, Base is investing heavily in agent-native infrastructure like smart accounts, CLI and MCP tooling, and the x402 payment standard. These tools are designed to let both human developers and AI agents transact and build on the network. Notably, 75% of all x402 transactions have already settled on Base, signaling early traction for the standard. The chain has also expanded its ecosystem programs, including Base Batches (which has funded 50+ teams) and growth incentives tied to user acquisition and liquidity.

The GENIUS Act, the U.S. stablecoin legislation signed into law in 2025, has also been a tailwind. Pollak has spoken publicly about the significance of regulatory clarity for stablecoins, calling it a prerequisite for the kind of mainstream adoption Base is building toward. With compliant stablecoin infrastructure now in place, Base is positioned to capture institutional payment volume in a way that wasn't possible even a year ago.

As of April 2026, Base's TVL sits around $4.4 billion, with weekly transaction volume regularly exceeding 7–10 million transactions. It recently surpassed $5 billion in TVL briefly following the OP Stack v2 integration, which introduced AMM hooks and native account abstraction. Monthly active users peaked at 34.5 million in mid-2025 and continue to rank among the highest of any L2.

Base is significant because it represents something crypto has struggled to produce: a consumer-grade Layer 2 backed by real distribution. Coinbase's 100+ million verified users give Base a built-in funnel that no other L2 can match. Onchain activity can become a byproduct of Coinbase product usage, a structural advantage that competitors have to fight much harder to replicate.

At the same time, Base's commitment to the OP Stack and the Superchain vision means it isn't building in isolation. It's contributing to a shared, interoperable rollup ecosystem alongside Optimism, Mode, Zora, and others, creating the conditions for seamless cross-chain movement of assets and users.

That interoperability is exactly what makes bridging infrastructure so critical.

If you're looking to move assets to Base from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, or other supported chains, Across is the fastest and most capital-efficient way to do it.

Across uses an intent-based bridging architecture that matches users with relayers who front the capital on the destination chain. That means you receive your assets on Base in seconds, not minutes. It's the bridge trusted by sophisticated DeFi users for its speed, low fees, and security model rooted in UMA's optimistic oracle.

Whether you're bridging ETH, USDC, or other assets to take advantage of Base's growing DeFi ecosystem, mint on Zora, trade on Aerodrome, or participate in the next wave of onchain apps and AI agents, Across gets you there faster. No waiting around for finality windows, no overpaying on fees. Just fast, secure transfers powered by an intent-based architecture that's purpose-built for the multi-chain future.

Bridge to Base with Across.