Base and Optimism Reveal a Common Revenue-Sharing Governance Framework
The developers behind the Base and Optimism network have announced a revenue sharing and governance agreement. Coinbase, Base’s parent company, has published “Principles of Neutrality” that it will adhere to to prevent Base from becoming too centralized. The announcement was made in three blog posts, each published on August 24th. One came from the jointly controlled Optimism Collective and one from Base.
According to a post by the Optimism Collective, Base’s smart contracts can only be updated via a multi-signature wallet with two signatures. The Optimism Team (dubbed the “Optimism Foundation”) controls one signature, while Base controls the other. The base cannot be updated without approval from the Optimism Network team. As more chains choose to leverage the OP stack to become part of the “superchain,” leadership will be handed over to a “safety committee” made up of representatives from each chain that is part of that ecosystem.
This month marked a momentous first for Ethereum: a publicly listed US company incubated and launched an OP Chain powered by Optimism.
But @BuildOnBase represents so much more than just technological validation of the OP Stack.https://t.co/E1Pow0LIlk
— Optimism (@Optimism) August 24, 2023
Base will pay the Optimism Collective either 2.5% of their sales or 15% of their profits, whichever is greater. In return, it will receive up to 118,000,000 OP tokens. This allows it to participate in Optimism’s log management. The announcement said that this amount would be capped at 9% of the total voting offer in order to keep record keeping balanced.
Jesse Pollak, the main creator of Base, was credited in the post. He promised that Base would become more and more decentralized over time, from what Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin called “Tier 0” to “Tier 2” in a Layer 2 decentralization. Base will improve the scalability and stability of the current Optimism client, op-geth and op-node. They will also create a new client, “op-reth”, to diversify clients.
The team will continue to develop Pessimism – a real-time network monitoring tool that attempts to detect cyber threats early.
Pollak also confirmed that Base would share its earnings with Optimism Collective and eventually give keys for upgrades to an Optimism Security Council.
Will Robinson, the technical lead at Coinbase, published the post. He focused on the idea of “neutrality”.
Robinson is committed to staying neutral on the base network. The exchange will not “custody nor control the crypto users they bring onto the Base network,” nor will it “alter the order of transactions in its favor or misuse non-public information collected by Base.”
Robinson stated that Coinbase’s marketing team, as well as other branches of the company, will only use publicly available block explorer data and tools to promote Coinbase’s products. You will not gain insider benefits by running Bases Sequencer. Robinson claims that Base’s withdrawals are processed without any form of censorship.
Some critics have suggested that the current centralized nature of the Base network could lead to regulatory scrutiny by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Gabriel Shapiro, an attorney, said Base could face “dangerous collateral damage” to the industry.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong also raised eyebrows on March 7 when he suggested that “centralized players” on Base must implement identity authentication. Despite these criticisms, many Ethereum investors expressed hope that Base and Optimism Superchain would help onboard new users to the Ethereum ecosystem.
