Coinbase’s Base plans $100B on-chain economy with scalability boost

Coinbase Layer-2 network Base wants to onboard $100 billion in on-chain assets as part of its goals for 2025. The network disclosed this in a January 17 blog post, noting that it aligns with its mission to build a global onchain economy.

According to the post, Base, which has already achieved significant success in less than two years, wants to increase its global footprint in 2025.

The network plans to do this by achieving goals such as onboarding 25 million people, bringing 25,000 developers, and increasing the total amount of transactions to one billion by October.  The L2 network also intends to improve its  scalability by increasing blockspace capacity to 250 million gas units per second (Mgas/s)

With ambitious goals ahead, the Base team has already devised a strategy to achieve its targets. The strategy focuses on five key areas: builders, apps, ownership, markets, and decentralization. As part of its strategy to become the preferred platform for builders, Base will now deploy more developer-friendly tools, including OnchainKit improvements, AI agents, and mini-app development tools.

In addition, it plans to improve the overall on-chain experience for builders and developers by providing tools that help them earn more, go viral, and generally expand distribution.

The blog post reads:

“We will nurture a vibrant ecosystem of connected, open onchain apps that grow the number of people using Base. More apps translate to more concrete reasons for every single person to get onchain.”

Meanwhile, The Base team also focuses on decentralizing the network and improving its scalability. Thus, it is working on driving transaction costs below 1 cent and speed below 1 second while reaching  Stage 1 decentralization by the end of this year.

Coinbase targets on-chain with new products

Meanwhile, Base’s goals align with Coinbase’s broader target of providing more on-chain products. The publicly traded exchange has been bullish about bringing more people on-chain and recently launched Bitcoin-backed loan products, enabling users to borrow USDC through the Coinbase app and use BTC as collateral.

Products like Base, Smart Wallet, and other DeFi-related products from Coinbase highlight how the exchange has built a broad on-chain ecosystem to attract more mainstream investments. Perhaps the best explanation for this comes from the Smart Wallet team lead, Max Branzburg, who noted how the exchange has been iterating over the years and how products are being developed to address people’s ability to come on-chain.

He said:

“First, it was too hard to get onchain, so we built the @coinbase app. Then, networks were too slow and expensive – so we built @base. Then, wallets were still too complex, so we built the Smart Wallet.”

He added that the Bitcoin loan is only the first step in bringing finance fully on-chain, and more Coinbase will make it accessible to millions of people who hold billions of dollars in assets.

Coinbase gets criticism for arbitrarily blocking users’ accounts

Despite its on-chain ambitions, the exchange has come under fire from some users for arbitrarily blocking their accounts. Ex Coinbase employee Griffin McShane recently called out the exchange on X after his account was temporarily blocked for two months because he was trying to withdraw a deposit.

In Coinbase’s email to Griffin, they claimed this was a measure to keep his account safe, as monitoring shows that he is sending crypto to a fraudulent platform or person. However, McShane noted that he has used the same account for years, including when he worked at Coinbase.

Although the exchange has now resolved the issue, several users claimed that they had faced the same problem with Coinbase, which resulted in them being locked out of their accounts for months. Meanwhile, blockchain sleuth ZachXBT noted that Coinbase has a major fraud problem that it has failed to address while blocking legitimate users.

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