The Origin of Based

https://paragraph.com/@basedevo/the-origin-of-based

BASED

Based is an experiment.

That’s the most honest way to describe it. It started as a playful, permissionless experiment and evolved into an ongoing onchain experiment in interoperability, culture and distribution.

In February 2023, Coinbase announced Base, their Ethereum L2 blockchain. To commemorate this, they released a free mint NFT called “Base Introduced” on Zora. While the NFT was technically free, users still had to pay Ethereum mainnet gas fees which were around $5–$10 at the time in order to mint it. Despite the fee, over 485,000 NFTs were minted by more than 370,000 unique wallets. That’s massive distribution for a NFT and one of the most widely distributed NFTs we've ever seen. More importantly, it signaled intent by the users since they paid to mint it as a commemorative NFT. Every holder opted in, paid, and participated.

The Zora website limited users to one mint per wallet but for the more technically savvy crypto users, it was possible to mint more NFTs directly from the contract. You may wonder why would someone do that, well it's crypto and some people speculated that this NFT may get future rewards via airdrops or some other onchain mechanic.

At the time, that seemed like the end of the story. A commemorative NFT. A memento of Base’s launch.

But what if someone wanted to make it more than that?

The idea that birthed Based was simple:

“What if this NFT could be redeemed for something actually on the Base network? What if it became the foundation for a new, community-driven token on Base itself?”

This question was inspired by the permissionless interoperability that blockchains enable. We wanted to explore how assets created on one network (Ethereum) could interact with assets on another network (Base) without asking the original asset issuer (Coinbase/Zora) for permission. The concept: let anyone who held the “Base Introduced” NFT redeem it for a new ERC-20 token, $BASED, on the Base network.

Ironically, the original Base NFT wasn't actually on Base. It was on Ethereum mainnet because it was a commemorative mint before the Base L2 network was live and active.

So we thought let's bring the original Base NFT to Base. No permission from Coinbase. No need for gatekeepers. Just pure, onchain experimentation.

In July 2024, we announced the Based experiment on Twitter/X and Farcaster which encouraged people to go to the based website to redeem their NFT. (Please excuse the now defunct original domain basedevo.fun but we have since moved to a more based domain - based.works)

We decided to allow people to redeem the NFT rather than burn it because burning the NFT would've incurred mainnet gas fees which would've hurt distribution and made it less likely that people would participate. Plus we didn't want to burn NFTs that Coinbase issued as a commemorative asset. We came up with a novel way to set a claim mapping between Ethereum and Base without having to materially change the NFT on the Ethereum. We thought that was a pretty cool and elegant solution.

Based was designed to be fair and transparent while prioritizing the original NFT holders first and foremost. Here’s how the token supply was allocated:

50% to Base Introduced NFT redeemers

35% to liquidity (50% went to a PartyDAO for ETH donations to pair with $BASED and the other 50% was permanently locked into a LP position on Uniswap with the ETH donations)

10% reserved for future airdrops

5% set aside for experimental onchain uses

There were no private allocations, no insiders, no stealth allocation. If you wanted to be Based, you had to show up and participate.

We strived very hard to be as thoughtful as possible since we had seen many token launches fall prey to bad actors, insider dealing, snipers, and many other issues that have plagued token launches over the years. We took our learnings and applied them to $BASED in what we felt was the clearest, fairest and most transparent way possible without any price setting. We purely let the market decide what this was worth, if anything. It was simply based in the people that held the NFT and participated in the based experiment.

Looking back, we may be most proud about this aspect of the $BASED project because we wouldn't change anything in regards to the tokenomics because it played out in a fair and transparent way that mitigated any issues that could've gotten in the way of this experiment playing out.

If you held a “Base Introduced” NFT, you could redeem it for an allocation of $BASED.

Redemption happened in three phases, with earlier redeemers receiving more:

Phase 1 (July 12-26): 500,000 $BASED per NFT

Phase 2 (July 27-August 7): 250,000 $BASED per NFT

Phase 3 (August 13-October 1): 25,000 $BASED per NFT

This structure rewarded early action and added a time-based layer of engagement to the experiment. A user redeemed their NFT and was instructed to come back on August 13th to claim their $BASED allocation which was instantly claimable on the site upon launch.

This felt like the fairest and most transparent way to launch $BASED in order to give it the best chance to leverage the wide distribution of the Base, Introduced NFT and to encourage as many people to redeem their NFTs as possible in order to build distribution.

By the time the $BASED token launched on August 13, over 85,000 NFTs had been redeemed across 45,000 wallets. The result? A widely distributed token with real onchain traction — over $15M in trading volume on day one. The people who redeemed a NFT were officially based.