Morning Minute: Base Breaks Up With Optimism

GM!

Today’s top news:

Coinbase’s Base is going independent.

Much to the chagrin of the Superchain.

OP fell as much as 20% on the news.

Previously, Base relied on code from Optimism, Flashbots, and Paradigm spread across multiple teams and repos. The new stack replaces Optimism’s optimistic proofs with Base-specific TEE/ZK proofs (Base V1 hard fork, coming soon), and removes Optimism from the Base Security Council, replacing it with an independent signer.

There will be no disruption for end users, but node operators will need to migrate to base/base releases.

“The mission Base launched with is the same mission we have today: make it the best place to build and onboard the next billion people into the onchain economy. We knew that this required creating a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly home for anyone, anywhere, to build on top of. To get there quickly, Base launched as an OP Stack chain.”

“To accelerate innovation, scaling and security, Base is evolving its foundational software by moving to a unified, Base-operated stack.” - from the Base announcement

Rumor mill saying Base token is coming later this year and this drove a lot of the decision making for leaving Optimism.

Hearing they will use their new stack to drive value to the token, which wasn't previously possible.

Here’s the number that tells the whole story: Base has historically generated over 90% of the Superchain’s total revenue. That’s the revenue that flows to the Optimism Collective—not to Coinbase, not to Base.

For years, Base has been the engine powering someone else’s token.

Now that’s about to change.

Base is $3.85B in TVL and the dominant L2 by activity, and now it will have more control over its economic future.

This pretty much had to be done to maximize revenues, and certainly a prerequisite for any BASE token launch plans.

And interestingly enough, the rumor mill has been heating up about BASE token launch plans for 2026.

So overall, it’s a win for Base, a loss for Optimism and neutral for end users - unless it accelerates that BASE token launch…