Coinbase’s Layer 2 Base Teases Native Token

Jesse Pollak, founder of the Ethereum Layer 2 network Base, which is backed by Coinbase, has hinted at a potential native token launch for the first time since the Base mainnet launched in August 2023.

Pollak dropped the news at Basecamp 2025, a conference for creators, builders, and Base community members held in Stowe, Vermont.

During his “State of Base” talk, Pollak spoke on the importance of user alignment and decentralization and said, “We’re going to be exploring a network token for Base.”

He clarified that it’s “very early” but added, “We think this could be a really, really powerful tool for building the global economy that all of us believe in.”

The Base token has been an elusive but highly speculated-on topic, with traders and investors thinking of it as a proxy for a “Coinbase token”, but there has been little to no information regarding a token launch until now.

Base is the largest Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain, and the sixth-largest chain by total value locked (TVL) with $5 billion locked in DeFi. Ethereum is the leader by a landslide with $93 billion, while Solana is the second largest with $12.7 billion.

Leading Base ecosystem tokens are soaring following the announcement, with AERO up 9%, ZORA up 15%, and DEGEN, the Farcaster community token, up 10% on the day, while majors such as BTC and ETH are down between 0.5% and 2.5%.

While Ethereum Layer 2 tokens have garnered a bad reputation over the last two years due to poor post-TGE token performances from the likes of Arbitrum, Optimism, and Blast, Base has continued to gain market share while its competitors fizzle out.

“A token would unlock billions of dollars in stimulus for the chain, bring in billions in new activity from speculators, and allow it to become fully decentralized. As Jesse said, Base plans to [do] this the right way — I don’t expect it to look anything like typical L2 tokens — it will be something entirely new,” Alex Cutler, the co-founder of Aerodrome Finance, told The Defiant.