The Big One: Base Leaves the OP Stack

Let’s get right to it. On February 18th — smack in the middle of ETHDenver — the Base team dropped a blog post titled “The Next Chapter for Base” that essentially said: thanks Optimism, it’s been real, but we’re building our own thing now.

Base is migrating off the OP Stack and onto a unified, self-managed codebase called base/base. The reasoning? Faster shipping cadence, less “cognitive overload” for developers, and more control over their own infrastructure and roadmap. In practice, this means Base is consolidating the sequencer, client releases, and core components into a single repo they own and operate.

The plan is six smaller, focused hard forks per year — double what they were doing before. The first batch includes three sequential forks culminating in Base V1, which should align with Ethereum’s upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade.

// Base's development philosophy, apparently
if (dependencyCount > 0) {
    rewriteEverything()
}

What This Actually Means

A few things worth unpacking:

For developers and node operators — you’ll need to migrate to the new Base client to stay compatible. The team says there should be no immediate disruptions, and existing specs remain compatible during the transition. But if you’re running infrastructure on Base, start paying attention now.

For Optimism — this is rough. Base has historically accounted for over 90% of Superchain-generated revenue flowing to the Optimism Collective. Under their 2023 agreement, Base shared sequencer revenue and could earn up to ~118 million OP tokens over six years. With Base pivoting to an “OP Enterprise” client role rather than a core OP Stack participant, those fee flows are very much in question.

The market noticed. OP dumped nearly 20% on the news. Turns out when your biggest revenue source says “we’re going independent,” people sell first and ask questions later.

For the broader L2 landscape — this feels like a trend. L2s are growing up and wanting more control. Base is sitting at $3.85 billion TVL and clearly feels constrained by external dependencies. Can’t really blame them.

The Spicy Context

This didn’t happen in a vacuum. Earlier in February, Base had a rough patch — temporary delays and dropped transactions caused by a misconfiguration in transaction propagation. They rolled it back, stabilized things, and outlined a month of infrastructure upgrades. Hard to say if that incident accelerated the decision to go independent, but the timing is… notable.

Oh, and Vitalik used his ETHDenver stage time to basically question whether the original L2 rollup-centric scaling roadmap still makes sense, arguing many L2s are struggling to progress toward full decentralization. So Base announced they’re leaving the biggest L2 framework while the co-founder of Ethereum is publicly questioning L2s. Great week for nuance.

The Solana Bridge Is Still Cooking

While all the OP Stack drama stole the headlines, it’s worth remembering that Base’s native bridge to Solana — which went live back in December — is quietly becoming a big deal. Secured by Chainlink CCIP with Coinbase handling relay and indexation, it uses a lock-and-mint mechanism with transfer times typically under a few minutes.

It’s already integrated into Zora, Aerodrome, Virtuals, Flaunch, and Relay. The Solana community predictably called it a “vampire attack on SOL liquidity” when it launched, and Jesse Pollak predictably said interoperability isn’t zero-sum. Both sides have a point, honestly.

Base’s stated goal is to be “the hub for the everything economy: every asset, across every network, at any time.” Solana is just the first chain linked, with more expected. Between this and the OP Stack departure, Base is clearly positioning itself as an independent, multi-chain hub rather than just another rollup in someone else’s ecosystem.

ETHDenver Vibes Check

A few quick notes on the event itself because the vibes are… interesting:

The event was reportedly about 1/10th the size of last year, more reminiscent of ETHDenver 2019. Builder energy is high but the hype crowds have thinned considerably. Beeple made art depicting ETHDenver as a post-apocalyptic wasteland, which is both hilarious and kind of accurate.

Meanwhile, the Trump family was hosting a competing crypto forum in Palm Beach and there was a White House stablecoin meeting happening at the same time. ETHDenver literally had to compete with the US government for crypto attention this year.

Vitalik talked about AI and “perfect markets.” Hester Peirce from the SEC showed up. The event tracks had names like ETHERSPACE and FUTURLAMA, which honestly sound like rejected Futurama episodes.

My Take

Base breaking from the OP Stack is the most significant L2 infrastructure move in a while. It signals that the Superchain thesis — where everyone builds on the same stack and shares revenue — might not survive contact with economic reality. When your biggest chain decides it can ship faster alone, the whole “collective” narrative gets shaky.

I’m still bullish on Base as an ecosystem. The independence play, the Solana bridge, the $3.85B TVL — they’re building something with real gravity. But if you’re holding OP bags, this week was a wake-up call.

More ETHDenver takes as the week wraps up. If anything else breaks, you’ll hear about it here. Probably within five years this time. 😄

Sources: CoinDesk, CryptoTimes, Unchained, Base Blog, Decrypt, CryptoSlate