Coinbase’s Base Applies Security First Mindset Ahead of Mainnet Launch

Coinbase’s developed Layer 2 network – Base – is gearing up for a mainnet launch. Since its deployment on testnet earlier this year, Base has already met 4 out of 5 of the criteria for the upcoming event while giving security the top-most priority in its goal to attract the next million developers and a billion users on-chain.

As such, the team tasked with protocol security has doubled down efforts to improve the security of Base and Optimism over the last six months. The experts haven’t detected any major flaws so far.

Base’s Security First Mindset

According to the blog post, the devs have audited all Optimism pre-deploys and contracts on both L1 and L2 to detect bugs and risks in the technology stack.

‘Fuzzing’ methods were leveraged for critical components such as the L2 bridge and the sequencer in addition to developing operational runbooks for different kinds of risk scenarios as well as distress events.

The team also reviewed and audited the key management setup and contracts for Base.

Following the completion of these audits, no critical severity bugs were discovered by over 100 external security researchers that were employed for the purpose. This boosted Base’s confidence to proceed toward the mainnet launch, the platform said in a statement.

The team is currently working on ensuring appropriate action for any informative or minor issues that were reported during the process.

“Our goal with all our security work is to see around corners and blunt the effectiveness of these attacks. We’re proud of the work we’ve done to secure Base and while even the best controls will sometimes fail, we will always learn and do better.”

Going Foward

Coinbase unveiled its own Ethereum layer-2 network in February, which is being developed in collaboration with Optimism. Its mainnet launch is slated for sometime in 2023. As part of the agreement, the crypto exchange joined Optimism as a core dev on the open-source OP Stack.

Moving forward, Base revealed the addition of an open-source monitoring tool, dubbed Pessimism, which is designed to notify builders of any anomalies such as account balance irregularities, contract events, or disparities between L1 and L2 states.

Furthermore, the new tool will be put alongside existing OP Labs monitoring tools, Coinbase’s native blockchain monitoring capabilities, as well as third-party tools for detecting malicious and out-of-pattern events.