Base Officially Reaches Stage 1 Decentralization – What's Next For Popular Layer 2?

Coinbase-developed Layer 2 blockchain Base announced Tuesday that it has reached Stage 1 decentralization, marking a key milestone in its journey toward pioneering an open, global onchain economy.

The milestone was reached by launching permissionless fault proofs and also increasing the decentralization of its contract upgrade process with a security council.

Base, which was designed to enhance Ethereum's scalability and speed, has empowered the decentralization application (dApp) development even without a native crypto token.

Base's journey to Stage 1 decentralization

Before reaching its latest milestone, Base first launched its Fault Proofs on Base Mainnet in October, enabling permissionless proposals and permissionless challenges.

Since anyone can now permissionlessly withdraw funds from Base L2 to Ethereum L1 (Layer 1) without depending on centralized actors, Base's decentralization has dramatically increased.

Also, Base has upgraded its system via a security council, which consists of 10 independent entities from various jurisdictions.

By requiring Base contract upgrades to be approved by a diverse group of stakeholders from across the vast Ethereum ecosystem, Base has achieved further decentralized control.

What it means for Base

Base envisions a global onchain economy that prioritizes innovation, creativity, and freedom, and to achieve this mission, a decentralized platform is necessary.

Through its Stage 1 decentralization milestone, Base now has a stronger security system and trust assumptions are reduced.

• Infrastructure certainty – Base builders can be rest assured that the platform can't change rules unexpectedly.
• Increased resilience – Improved decentralization ensures that there is no single point of failure.
• Improved participation – Everyone can now participate in securing and verifying the network.

Through the establishment of a decentralized security council and the empowerment provided by fault proofs, Base's network functionality and upgrades are now in the hands of a broader set of diverse stakeholders, allowing for a more resilient foundation.

Base: Toward a decentralized, more secure future

Moving forward, the blockchain is focused on working towards having multiple active proof systems live on Base, which will further enhance both security and decentralization.

It is also looking forward to advancing to Stage 2 Decentralization, which represents full decentralization, as per Vitalik Buterin's decentralization framework that provides a clear path for Layer 2 rollups on the Ethereum chain.

Base's latest achievement builds on its commitment to ensure that no single entity controls the chain and strengthens its vision of an accessible, open, and decentralized global onchain economy.