Base Cohort & agent builds

Base is using its latest accelerator cycle to push deeper into onchain finance and artificial intelligence agents, with Batch 003 selecting 12 startups from 1,175 applicants. (blog.base.org) Base said the seven-week program began April 6 and ends with a live Demo Day in San Francisco on May 19. The company said the cohort is concentrated in decentralized finance, artificial intelligence, stablecoins and prediction markets, and that many teams may also be considered for direct investment from the Base Ecosystem Fund. (blog.base.org) (batches.base.org) The 12 teams named by Base are Blockrun.ai, Stealth, 4Mica, OPAL, Onsight, Credifi, Tomorrow, Agently, Nivo, JPEG App, Floe Labs and Liminal. Third-party summaries describe projects ranging from artificial-intelligence agent infrastructure and payment rails to unsecured lending, stablecoin credit and onchain foreign-exchange hedging. (blog.base.org) (chaincatcher.com) An onchain agent is software with its own wallet, like a bot that can hold money and sign transactions without a person clicking every step. Base’s developer docs say these agents can register an identity, pay for application programming interface access in stablecoins, and execute token swaps automatically on Base. (docs.base.org) That framing helps explain why the same news cycle also focused on agent-driven finance rather than only accelerator slots. Base’s documentation now pitches agents as “independent economic actors,” meaning software that can earn, spend and trade onchain through wallets and payment protocols. (docs.base.org) The stablecoin at the center of some of those experiments is USDS, which was initialized in Sky Protocol governance in September 2024 alongside sUSDS and SKY. Sky’s consumer site now markets USDS and sUSDS as savings products and says users can supply USDS to earn variable ecosystem rewards tied to independent “Sky Agents.” (vote.makerdao.com) (sky.money 1) (sky.money 2) Sky says those ecosystem rewards are “currently unavailable in the US,” and says rewards are issued by partner protocols rather than controlled by Sky.money. The site also says returns are variable, proportional to the size of the USDS pool, and subject to market conditions and smart-contract risk. (sky.money) Base is not presenting Batch 003 as a broad 20-project list in its official materials. The company’s April 8 announcement and current program pages describe a 12-team startup cohort, plus separate student and robotics tracks in the wider 2026 Base Batches program. (blog.base.org) (batches.base.org) The near-term test is whether these agent and finance projects turn demos into products by May 19. Base has moved from talking about cheaper transactions to backing software that can borrow, route payments and trade with its own wallet on Ethereum infrastructure. (blog.base.org) (docs.base.org)