Thread by @MoonwellDeFi

Today, the news of the @BuildOnBase launch reverberates through the industry and marks a dramatic acceleration of the on-chain vision that @Coinbase has been quietly building over the last half decade.
Let's dive deep into #Base, and what it means for the Moonwell community. 🧵

In the aftermath of 2022, it became apparent that some of the most trusted players in crypto were "swimming naked". When liquidity left markets due to the Fed raising rates, we found out who when big names such as Celcius, BlockFi, Terra, 3AC, Genesis, and FTX became insolvent.

Coinbase has been quietly building a different, more trustworthy exchange for the last decade. It has been painful for our industry to acknowledge that this values-based approach to securely storing cryptocurrency, and not loaning out customer deposits without permission, is key.

You would be mistaken if you thought Coinbase was just another centralized exchange. Their "secret master plan" reveals much broader ambitions: to reach a billion or more people through dapps and protocols and to turn "don't be evil" into "can't be evil."
coinbase.com/blog/the-coinb…

Indeed, Coinbase has already spent the last half decade building decentralized protocols. Perhaps you're familiar with a dollar backed stablecoin known as $USDC? Coinbase and @Circle created it during the depths of the 2018 crypto bear market.
cnbc.com/2018/10/23/cry…

It was during this time period, in 2018-2019, that two of Moonwell's contributors joined Coinbase. @LukeYoungblood joined to help build Staking Rewards, which is another example of Coinbase beginning to build directly on L1 protocols:

https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1192154927813943296

Luke's 3 year career at Coinbase led to the creation of a brand new line of business that provides passive income to people holding crypto and generates over $250m revenue annually, culminating in the launch of Ethereum staking rewards.

https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1361733385782259719

Octavius is another Moonwell contributor that worked at Coinbase during this same time. With a strong applied cryptography & security background, Octavius helped build the cold storage systems that enable Coinbase to protect billions of dollars in crypto.
wired.com/story/coinbase…

We were both drawn to Coinbase because of our shared values of trust & security-mindedness, as well as our desire to help construct the cryptoeconomy.

These values remain unchanged, and Coinbase continues to champion them as they build protocols to reach the next billion people.

Coinbase has made significant contributions to Ethereum, particularly in the development of EIP-4844, which will dramatically lower fees and gas on Ethereum L2s, with the goal of bringing transaction costs below the magical "1 cent per transaction" threshold.

https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1623029278601519106

Coinbase's decision to build on top of @optimismFND's Bedrock is ideal. Ethereum equivalence, the lowest fees, and a strong commitment to open governance and open source principals sets Optimism apart from other L2s. Optimism is by far the most forked L2; that says a lot!

https://twitter.com/optimismFND/status/1621573723877687297

The "OP Stack" as it is more widely known is a set of MIT-licensed open source software that anyone can use or fork, but more importantly, it represents a vision for Ethereum equivalence and modularity, and a credible plan to support billions of users. optimism.mirror.xyz/fLk5UGjZDiXFuv…

Base will also contribute to Optimism's #RetroPGF model, incentivizing the development of the open-source public goods that our digital world relies upon.

We also envision a future where "impact = profit" and people are rewarded accordingly for writing and maintaining OSS.

https://twitter.com/optimismFND/status/1600187625649803265

Since the Moonwell community first activated Apollo just over a year ago, we have pursued the goal of connecting the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems to the world of decentralized finance, or DeFi. We've also shared a vision of connected smart contracts with EVM as the base layer.

https://twitter.com/MoonwellDeFi/status/1611004171389378561

This connected smart contracts vision is supported by the cross chain integrations and features available on @MoonbeamNetwork, which will allow the Moonwell community to integrate with and expand to @BuildonBase, reaching even more people.
moonwell.medium.com/moonwell-on-ba…

https://twitter.com/MoonbeamNetwork/status/1624079104227282945

The vision remains the same, but the launch of @BuildOnBase brings an opportunity to connect the entire Dotsama ecosystem with Ethereum in a way that wasn't possible before. The Moonwell vision of connecting the best parachains and dapps on Polkadot to DeFi is compelling!

The future is bright for both the #Moonwell and #Base communities, and we could not be more excited about supporting @BuildOnBase to bring the power of DeFi to the next billion users!

Follow @MoonwellDeFi for the latest updates, and like/retweet the first tweet below if you can:

https://twitter.com/MoonwellDeFi/status/1628758944285065217