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@basedevo
The Origin of Based https://paragraph.com/@basedevo/the-origin-of-based
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@basedevo
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.
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@basedevo
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?
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@basedevo
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.
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