Odaily interview with Base: With the explosive growth of social networking, which track will you focus on in the future?
Original - Odaily
Author - Loopy
In July this year, Base, the Layer 2 expansion solution built by Coinbase, was opened to developers and officially launched on the mainnet on August 10.
The Base network is built on OP Stack, connected to the Ethereum network and shares security and resources. At the beginning of its launch, Base quickly gained market attention by relying on the myth that the BALD token doubled overnight; the SocialFi application friend.tech further pushed Base into everyones field of vision - friend tech not only made the social track popular, It also quickly pushed up Bases TVL.
Recently, CoinGecko released aReport, analyzed the TVL and market share changes of multiple Layer 2 this year. Base, which has only been launched for a few months, has already become the fifth largest Layer 2 network.
It is not difficult to see from the changes in market share that Base has become the fastest growing Layer 2 in one fell swoop. DeFiLlama data shows that Base TVL has currently exceeded $300 million.
There are already a lot of Layer 2 in the encryption market. How can Base achieve a breakthrough in this highly competitive track? It requires both an increasingly prosperous ecosystem and the successful creation of hot products. Of course, the brand effect brought by Coinbase is also very important.
According to incomplete statistics, currently, the number of Base ecological projects has exceeded 100, and the scale is relatively complete, of which infrastructure accounts for half, including but not limited to bridges, On-Ramp, wallets, oracles, node providers, etc.
In addition to native projects, there are also quite a few well-known brands that have expanded their business to the BASE chain through multi-chain deployment, including well-known projects such as Uniswap and OpenSea.
Last week, Bangkok held a week-long Blockchain Genesis and 2023 Thailand Blockchain Week event. Odaily interviewed GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS, the head of Base Asia Pacific, on site and discussed the current situation and development of Base.
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS has worked for well-known companies such as Facebook and BlackBerry. Interestingly, before joining Base, he served as President of Southeast Asia for the well-known social application Tinder. Base is a big hit in the social field. I wonder if GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS’s experience in Tinder can help? Is this another coincidence of fate?
The following is a transcript of the conversation
Odaily: The Layer 2 market is highly competitive. How does Base remain competitive in this market?
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS ：The purpose of Layer 2 is mainly to expand the Ethereum network, and I think each Layer 2 has its specific use case. Therefore, how to leverage Layer 2 technology is most important if you want to remain competitive in this highly competitive market environment.
For Base, we’re working hard to attract the next billion users. Therefore, our goal is to be the most user-friendly Layer 2 platform to bring more innovation and compelling use cases.
Odaily: What specific measures has Base taken to attract more developers?
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS ：What we are talking about is not just narrative and technology. The Base chain will help developers build on our platform. We are working hard to make OP Stack more scalable by optimizing it, also for Base to gain wider adoption.
Base also has a unique advantage - it is incubated within Coinbase, a well-known brand and large public company in the encryption industry. So I think Base has a very high level of trust and credibility and thats a unique advantage of Base.
Odaily: What areas will Base focus on supporting?
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS ：This is a very important issue for Base, which was just launched at the end of August and our mission is to attract the next billion users into the on-chain world.
We are still exploring the best path to achieve this goal. Weve seen the success of SocialFi - friend tech, for example - but weve also seen more use cases based on DeFi and gaming, and theres a lot of infrastructure being built on Base.
Base doesn’t clearly position itself in the vertical circuit anyway – which I think is pretty unique. Because, in order to achieve the goal of attracting the next billion users, efforts from all aspects, fields, and tracks are needed.
Odaily: There is a view that there are too many Layer 2s now, and maybe one day there will be more chains than applications. What do you think about this issue?
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS ：There are certainly a lot of Layer 2s out there, but I don’t think “too many Layer 2s” are going to happen.
I understand that everyone is currently working hard to expand the Ethereum network through Layer 2. Nowadays we have all kinds of Layer 2 technologies. And over time, only a few Layer 2 technologies with very clear use cases and importance will remain until the end. So right now were still in the early stages.
As part of a Layer 2 ecosystem or Layer 2 protocol, we only need to work together in one direction - to make Onchain use cases more frequent for people in a simple and easy-to-use way.
Odaily: Are there any big events happening at Base in the coming period?
GIULIANO OCTAVIANOS ：There are some big things coming up in the next few weeks.
First up is the Optimism bounty. Because Base is built on OP Stack, any developer building on Base can apply for Optimism RetroPGF to receive the bounty.
Second, we just launched the Base Builder grant, which is open to developers who are already building on Base and trying to innovate even more.
Also, there are some other things coming. Overall, we are trying to attract a lot of blue chip dApps to Base. This way everyone can use their commonly used dApps on Base very conveniently.
