At 6 a.m. on July 17, Base held its long-awaited press conference.
The content update of the Base chain itself is not complicated. The chain performance has been improved by 10 times, and the logo has changed from a circle to a square. What is really worth paying attention to is that Coinbase Wallet has been updated to The Base App, a new entry product that is highly anticipated.
This means that Base is no longer satisfied with being a useful chain, it has begun to build its own traffic entrance and actively participate in the construction of user paths. The bottom layer and the entrance are both in its own hands, which is something that very few L2 projects can do at this stage.
From Superchain to Super App
In the past, Base has always emphasized that it is part of Superchain, a reusable, scalable, and composable general-purpose L2. However, in terms of both technical route and ecological strategy, Base has obviously begun to move away from the role of pure infrastructure and turn to become a platform operator.
The Base App is the result of this transformation. It is no longer a traditional wallet tool, but attempts to integrate modules such as identity, transaction, social, payment and AI Agent on the chain to form a unified entrance. The design concept is closer to integrated products such as WeChat and Telegram, rather than asset management tools such as MetaMask or Rainbow.
In other words, Base not only wants to be a place where applications can be deployed, but also wants to be the interface that users see when they first enter Web3.
This strategic change represents the border between building infrastructure and building user products. BlockBeats previously obtained the qualification for the internal test experience of the App. For the review article, please refer to: One step faster than Twitter, the new Coinbase Wallet has evolved into WeChat
Why do you have to make the entrance yourself?
The reason why Base launched The Base App is not because the chain itself has a big bottleneck, but because the entire L2 market has entered a homogenization stage.
Performance is no longer the only indicator that determines competitiveness, as most projects have sufficient throughput capacity. Instead, who can handle the traffic and who can build a complete user path has become the key to differentiation.
Web3 has always lacked a default entry, and each component has been trying to complete onboarding independently, but the actual effect is not ideal.
In this context, Base chose to build its own entrance for practical considerations:
Coinbase itself has a C-end foundation, with compliance, payment, legal currency access and other capabilities, and is already one of the institutions closest to an application distribution platform;
Rather than waiting for developers to build things on their own, it is better to build a reference paradigm first to form a closed loop of product power.
Compared with using subsidies and airdrops to exchange for traffic, being a high-frequency entry point has greater long-term user value.
For any chain that wants to build an ecosystem, not controlling the entrance is equivalent to handing over the initiative. Bases choice to build its own entrance can be understood as a more long-term oriented decision made at the current stage.
A use case worth noting: Integration of AI Agent and social functions
Although the mainline update of The Base App did not particularly emphasize AI capabilities, when introducing the social module and mini app architecture, a functional integration worthy of attention was mentioned: calling on-chain assets through AI Agent in chat scenarios.
In the demonstration, users can directly enter natural language in the chat box, such as Lets split the money for last weeks trip. The AI Agent can identify the conversation partner, calculate the amount due, and automatically call the wallet to complete the payment. The entire process does not require jumping to the interface and does not rely on external dApps.
From the perspective of experience, this is a compression of the on-chain operation path; from the perspective of technical architecture, it is a deep integration of the self-hosted wallet and the natural language system. Its feasibility depends on the simultaneous establishment of three conditions:
User assets are self-custodied and can be authorized to be executed by Agents;
The chat and asset modules are connected, with a unified account system;
Agent can understand natural language semantics and map them to on-chain operations.
This type of function is not the first time. There have been projects that have tried to combine AI Agent with on-chain transactions, but most of them are focused on cryptocurrency trading, market analysis, investment research assistants, etc., and the scenarios are biased towards high-frequency operations of individual investors. In contrast, The Base App embeds it into the social module, which is closer to the accounting collaboration under real social relationships and closer to daily needs.
Although this path is still in its early stages, it does demonstrate a possibility: the way Web3 interacts is shifting from “click operations” to “natural language instructions.”
Technologies such as Account Abstraction and MPC wallet optimize execution efficiency; while design attempts like The Base App are closer to a reconstruction of the usage path itself, targeting the cognitive threshold itself.
Supporting the above AI or various on-chain functions can allow users to experience a smooth experience similar to Web2 in the Base App. This is due to the official launch of FlashBlock, the development module Flashblocks that Base officials had built in cooperation with Flashbots in February has been launched on the test network, and Jesse announced that the module was officially launched on the main network two hours before the press conference.
Developers can integrate through RPC interfaces or WebSockets that support Flashblocks. It is recommended to use the former for a more stable fallback mechanism. Flashblocks uses a time-ordered transaction mechanism to avoid the traditional high-priced transaction queue-jumping phenomenon, and sets a segmented packaging strategy for high-Gas limit transactions to ensure the fairness of block resource allocation. Flashblocks can theoretically reduce the effective block time from 2 seconds to 200 milliseconds, which makes todays Base 10 times faster than yesterdays Base and 2 times faster than Solana. For most Web2 applications, the standard of smooth experience is to complete interactive feedback within 100 to 300 milliseconds, and this standard has obviously been met.
The battle for Web3’s entry point is reopening
Obviously, Base is not the only one who wants to be an entrance. But from the current point of view, these entrances either lack traffic foundation, or the scene construction is incomplete, or lack execution capabilities. Base has a key variable: Coinbase.
On the one hand, Coinbase has a traffic base of nearly 100 million users, and on the other hand, it can connect the fiat currency entrance with the on-chain account to provide a complete closed loop for the Base App - technology, users, payments, transactions, deposits and withdrawals are all connected.
The essence of the entry competition is the competition for scene dominance. Whoever can define the way users open Web3 every day will be qualified to reconstruct the industry order.
At a time when Web3 lacks new narratives, the shift in product form may be the new narrative itself.
The launch of Base was not complicated, but it sent a clear signal: the competition between public chains is transitioning from “chain capabilities” to “entry capabilities”.
Base took the initiative to build a complete closed loop from App to chain, not for temporary traffic, but for longer-term user path dominance.
It may not immediately become the “WeChat of Web3”, and it may not even change user habits in the short term. But it at least shows us that there are still many blank areas between infrastructure and user products that can be filled.
When who owns the entrance becomes the new starting point of consensus, the competition between public chains will also enter a new stage.
