jakiro
Written by: 0xjs@Bitchain Vision
Recently, FUD about Base appeared on x. The focus is that because Base’s centralized sorter earns huge income from Ethereum community users every year, it is essentially a centralized exchange without a license.
Regarding this FUD, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, Base founder and Vitalik all came forward to refute it.
Coinbase chief legal officer paulgrewal.eth said calling sorters on L2 like Base an exchange misrepresented its function as a market:
The SEC defines an “exchange” as a market that connects both buyers and sellers of securities.But L2 is a general blockchain running as an infrastructure that processes messages as code (call smart contracts) and batches all transactions (payments, calls, messages) while deferring any formal order interaction/match rules (AMM, CLOB, auction) to the application’s smart contracts and front-end.
Think of off-chain infrastructure like AWS.Just like Base, infrastructure like AWS runs code provided by developers.These codes can contain a variety of contents—payments, calls, messages, transactions—but the code runs deterministically.If an exchange is running on AWS, is AWS an exchange?
In summary: L2 sorters enable scalable and secure on-chain transactions, thus extending Ethereum’s computing power and enabling widespread applications in the new global economy.Labeling them wrong is actually spreading FUD (fear, uncertain and uncertain guesswork) and ignoring the key role they play in scalability.
Base founder Jesse explains how Base sorters work, view eliminates the FUD people play with the roles they play with:
First, what is an L2 sorter?For Base, the sorter collects user transactions, sorts them by first-in-first-out principle, calculates the result state changes, and packs them in batches to Ethereum L1 for final settlement, which is faster and cheaper than transactions on L1.
There are two key points to note about this design: First, the sorter is just a “fast lane” entering the Base network.At any time, users can also trade directly on the Base network through the Ethereum network.This mechanism gives the Base network Ethereum validator network complete decentralized features and censorship resistance.
Therefore, Base is not a stock exchange that has not obtained a license.It is a critical infrastructure to expand the scale of the global chain economy.Over the past two years, we have completed the first phase of Base decentralization and enabled permissionless block proposals.Today, we are actively promoting the second phase of work.
Ethereum founder Vitalik also posted a post to support Base:
Base is operating the right way: it is L2 on top of Ethereum, leveraging its centralized capabilities to provide a stronger user experience while still being tightly integrated with Ethereum’s decentralized foundation layer to ensure security.Base does not keep users’ funds, they cannot steal funds or prevent you from withdrawing funds (this is part of the first phase definition of L2beat)
This is what we mean by Layer 2 unmanaged, they are extensions of Ethereum, not beautified servers that happen to commit the hash value.
Stage 1 means that a Security Council that needs to be passed by 75% of the votes has the right to overturn the on-chain code.But at the same time, the first phase also clearly requires that the committee must have members who are sufficient to block the passage of the quorum (accounting for ≥26%), from outside the institutions responsible for managing the Layer 1 (the underlying public chain).
Therefore, the management agency cannot unilaterally conduct review or steal assets through the voting of the Security Council, so it is not the custodian of (the user’s assets).
And Stage 2, even if the Security Council voted 100% to the vote, it could not overturn the normally-functioning on-chain code.
Although Base founder and Vitalik have joined forces to refute that Base is not an unlicensed exchange, L2’s centralized sorter has indeed been criticized by the crypto community for a long time.
There is no doubt thatEthereum L2 is a huge money printing machine that continuously captures wealth between end users and Ethereum L1, especially Base is far ahead.
According to Token Terminal data, Base has earned as much as $81 million through the sorter in the past year, with Arbitrum second, with revenue of $21 million, which is nearly four times that of Base.
