Crypto Twitter went wild speculating about Coinbase’s blue dot. Here’s what that meant
On Wednesday, Coinbase’s main Twitter account posted a six-second video of a blue dot fading into a black background. Thursday date – Feb. 23, 2023 – was all that was revealed. Speculation on Crypto Twitter was rife.
The publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange announced later Thursday that it is launching Base, an ecosystem built on top of the Ethereum blockchain that allows developers to build decentralized applications, or dapps.
“To bring billions of users into the crypto-economy, dapps must be easier, cheaper and safer to interact with,” the company wrote in a blog post. “For this to happen, we need to make it even easier for developers to build these dapps.”
Coinbase’s latest offering continues a push toward a long-stated goal of making cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, which can seem impenetrable to lay consumers and some developers, accessible to a wider audience. And for a cryptocurrency exchange that relies heavily on trading fees, the launch of the new developer ecosystem is another attempt to diversify the company’s products amid the extended cold of Crypto Winter.
Base, which Coinbase describes as “secure, affordable, [and] developer friendly”, is built on top of Ethereum, one of the largest and most widely used blockchains. This makes it a layer-2 network, or a system built on top of another blockchain. Fees paid to operate on Base will be paid with Ether, Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency, not with a new token, the company said.
To launch Base, the cryptocurrency exchange is partnering with Optimism, another layer-2 network that makes using Ethereum more affordable for users and developers. (Each time Ethereum users post a transaction on the blockchain, they must pay “gas,” or a fee, with Ether. Optimism allows developers to process these transactions in batches, reducing gas.)
To commemorate the announcement, Coinbase released a new non-fungible token collection of, unsurprisingly, blue dots. The NFTs are free to create, or download to a crypto wallet, and will be available through Sunday.
Despite the blue dot glow, Coinbase’s business took a hard hit in 2022, when several prominent crypto companies declared bankruptcy, including rival exchange FTX.
On Wednesday, Coinbase released fourth-quarter earnings that, while beating analysts’ expectations, were markedly lower than a year earlier. The company’s full-year 2022 revenue was down 57%, and it lost $557 million in the fourth quarter, compared with a profit of $840 million in the same quarter in 2021.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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