The team at Base, Coinbase’s well-known layer-2, has hinted to its community that no “token network” will be issued to pay network fees and manage governance processes, effectively ruling out the airdrop that was rumored months ago.
Recently, however, after a Decrypto interview with Paul Grewal, chief legal officer of Coinbase, it emerged that this possibility is not so remote and that in the future the exchange’s rollup could release a token as a gift to early users of the infrastructure.
If there were ever to be an airdrop for Base, this could turn out to be of enormous magnitude, given the potential that Coinbase holds and given the strong growth in blockchain that we have been witnessing recently.
Let’s take a look together at how to get ready by maximizing your chances of being rewarded by the popular crypto exchange.
Summary
Base: Coinbase’s layer-2 has no plans to issue a crypto but could still change its mind and perform an airdrop in the future
Base, the Ethereum layer-2 operated by the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, landed on the mainnet in August this year with the promise that it would NOT launch a reference token for the crypto network.
This can be easily read in Coinbase’s help desk and in Base’s X profile bio, where it is clearly stated that the project team has not yet planned to issue a coin to be used as a token gas or to manage internal governance.
However, speculation has intensified in recent days about a change of course for the exchange, which may consider creating its own cryptocurrency.
In fact, in an interview a few days ago with Decrypto, Paul Grewal, chief legal officer of Coinbase, said that the company “does not rule out” this possibility in the future.
At the moment, the exchange has placed more emphasis on other factors rather than focusing on tokenization of the protocol. These are Grewal’s words:
“The economic aspects and tokenization of the protocol are frankly something we are less focused on at the moment. More attention has been paid instead to outreach programs like Stand with Crypto.”Â
Moreover, until now the pressure that U.S. market regulators have put on Coinbase has been so great that it has discouraged the exchange from launching a new crypto resource, at the risk of being labeled as security.
In fact, a lawsuit was filed a few months ago by the SEC for violation of federal securities laws.
When the dust settles at the SEC and a clearer framework on crypto regulation is issued, Coinbase may decide to finally release a BASE token, and who knows, perhaps distribute it in parallel to its community with an airdrop.
How to get ready for a possible BASE airdrop
Coinbase has a multitude of resources at its disposal and is a leading figure within the blockchain industry. The creation of a token network and a distribution of it via airdrop could lead to unprecedented success, with a billion-dollar valuation in the market.
When in doubt, better be prepared for one of the potentially largest airdrops in cryptocurrency history. To succeed in being eligible with your crypto address you need to perform 3 simple steps.
First, it is critical to bridging an ETH countervalue of at least $50 from the Ethereum network to the Base network as soon as possible and if possible repeat the operation several times in the coming months.
Obviously, the more funds that are deposited on the layer-2, the higher the probability of receiving an airdrop.
The second point concerns activity on the chain and volume creation through interaction with the various decentralized applications in the ecosystem. Among the best known dapps orbiting Base are Aerodrome, Friend.Tech, Stargate, Uniswap, Pancakeswap, Curve, BaseSwap, Compund, and Sushiswap.
The most appropriate thing to do to maximize the potential airdrop reward is to go out and create a total volume of more than $10,000 spread over at least 2 different months and 4 weeks.
Finally, it is very important to interact with as many protocols as possible, going for the most varied activities such as buying and selling NFTs, providing LP liquidity, using social-fi platforms, and participating in Base’s advertised campaigns.
To get a boost in profits you can decide to perform all these actions on different addresses so as to get multiple airdrops: be careful, however, not to be identified as sybil by following the appropriate precautions.
The strong growth of layer-2 in recent months
Layer-2 Base has enjoyed great success in the Ethereum rollup market in recent months, going on to position itself as one of the top decentralized infrastructures in terms of both TVL and community development.
Just a week after launching on the mainnet, Coinbase’s blockchain surpassed $100 million in funds bridged within it, while today it has reached the $550 million mark, behind only Arbitrum and Optimism in terms of L2beat rankings.
Broadly speaking, Base could grow further in the coming months by reaching the billion-dollar threshold of funds locked within it and coming to compete with the top two optimistic rollups in the industry.
Should there then be an airdrop Base users in the future, this could be really important in terms of size for users.
The growth of the chain has been so exponential that it has even taken it past the famous ZkSync Era network, which is operated by Matter Labs and on which rumors of an aidrop are far greater than those circulating to date for Base.
On the exchange volume front, after the first two weeks of fomo where hundreds of millions of dollars were transacted every single day, we have arrived at a stable situation where that metric more or less always reaches the $20 million per day threshold.
Much of the activity on Base involves two individual protocols, namely Aerodrome and Friend.Tech, which together total about â…“ of the TVL of the chain.
This is because on both protocols users expect major airdrops, which have been publicly announced by the respective project teams.
