Base, Optimism unveil shared governance and revenue-sharing framework

Developers behind the Base and Optimism networks have jointly announced a revenue-sharing and governance-sharing agreement. Coinbase, the parent company of Base, has also published a list of “principles of neutrality” it will follow to prevent Base from becoming centralized. This announcement was made through three separate blog posts on Aug. 24; one from the jointly-controlled Optimism Collective, one from Base, and one from Coinbase.

According to the jointly-controlled Optimism Collective’s post, Base’s smart contracts can only be upgraded via a 2/2 multi-signature wallet account. One signature is controlled by Base and the other by the Optimism network’s team (called the “Optimism Foundation”). This means that Base cannot be upgraded without the consent of the Optimism team. As more chains opt to use the OP Stack and become part of the “Superchain,” governance will be handed over to a “security council” with representatives from all of the chains that comprise this ecosystem.

This month marked a momentous first for Ethereum: a publicly listed US company incubated and launched an OP Chain powered by Optimism.

But @BuildOnBase represents so much more than just technological validation of the OP Stack.https://t.co/E1Pow0LIlk

— Optimism (✨_✨) (@optimismFND) August 24, 2023

Base will also pay either 2.5% of its revenue or 15% of its profits to the Optimism Collective, whichever is greater. In return, it will receive “up to approximately 118 million OP Tokens,” allowing it to have a voice within Optimism’s protocol governance. This amount will be capped at 9% of the total votable supply “in order to maintain balance,” the announcement stated.

The post from Base was issued under the name of its principal creator, Jesse Pollack. He pledged that Base will become more decentralized over time, moving from what Vitalik Buterin called “stage 0” to “stage 2” of a Layer 2’s decentralization. The Base team will work to improve the scalability of the two current Optimism clients, op-geth and op-node, and create an entirely new client called “op-reth” to diversify the types of clients used.

Related: Coinbase layer-2 network Base hits 136,000 daily active users

The team will also continue to develop Pessimism, a real-time network monitoring tool that attempts to detect cybersecurity threats early.

In addition, Pollak confirmed that Base will share revenue with the Optimism Collective and will eventually hand over upgrade keys…