Base Chain to Abandon OP Stack for Unified Infrastructure
Coinbase's Layer-2 network, Base, is moving away from Optimism's OP Stack to deploy its own unified infrastructure. The move is intended to provide more control over the protocol's direction and enable faster upgrades. The announcement triggered a 4% drop in the price of Optimism's OP token, highlighting competitive tensions among Ethereum L2s.
- The original 2023 partnership involved a revenue-sharing agreement where Base would give the Optimism Collective the greater of 2.5% of its sequencer revenue or 15% of its net profit. In exchange, Base was eligible to earn up to 118 million OP tokens over six years to participate in governance. - Base's new unified stack aims to double the network's upgrade cadence from about three to six hard forks per year, allowing it to ship changes more quickly than the broader OP Stack ecosystem. - Jing Wang, CEO of OP Labs, stated that the new "Unified Base Stack" still shares 99% of its code with the OP Stack and related infrastructure, framing the move as a validation of the underlying technology. - Despite the architectural shift, Base will continue to work with Optimism as a client of its "OP Enterprise: Mission-Critical Support" service during the transition period. - As the largest chain in Optimism's "Superchain" ecosystem, Base holds approximately $3.85 billion in total value locked and has accounted for over 80% of Superchain revenue at times. - The upcoming Base V1 hard fork plans to introduce Fusaka support and will replace Optimism's fraud proofs with Base-specific TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) and zero-knowledge proofs. - Node operators on the Base network will be required to migrate to a new Base client and follow releases from the `base/base` code repository to remain compatible with future network upgrades.
