Building The Onchain Economy with Base and Discussing the Denim Upgrade

GM, GM, or good afternoon, where wherever you may be. Uh we're uh in for another great episode of DevNTell today. So if you're not familiar, uh DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Eric Brown, who's the head of DevRel at Base. So if you're not aware, Base, created by Coinbase, uh is a blockchain built for global finance that's trusted by leading institutions and open to all. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Eric, get an introduction to Base, learn all about their latest Denim upgrade, and learn how you can start building with them today. All right, let's get into it.

Uh GA, GA, good afternoon. Uh hi Eric, uh pleasure to have you on the show today, man.

Hey Narb, great to be here.

Yeah, likewise, likewise. I'm really ecstatic for our audience to uh learn all the latest and greatest around Base, uh including the hot off the presses uh new uh Denim upgrade that dropped yesterday. I know you guys have a lot of jam-packed features in there that uh will make a difference to a lot of developers uh building on Base. So really keen on them uh uh learning about it.

Yeah, excited to be here. Uh lots to go through, so uh we can jump right in.

For sure, for sure. Uh I guess before we get into all the good stuff, uh did you just want to give a uh introduction about yourself?

Yeah, that'd be great. I lead developer relations for Base and have been building in the onchain space since about 2017. Uh I'm a former founder. Uh I founded the company Franklin, which is a a payroll company that was on and off chain, and had the chance to uh be on the the in the trenches on the founding side, see all the uh existing pain points that existed at the time, uh and then got to come to Base to lead developer relations to help uh founders like like myself, my co-founders that uh were going through all those pain points to create a better building experience for them.

Amazing. Yeah, I'd like to double-click a little bit into uh Franklin uh and just curious how um what like what inspired you to kind of start that and how did that um company and and founding experience kind of lead you to Coinbase?

It started really because the need There was a clear gap for running traditional financial operations, back-office financial operations onchain. Uh so quick context uh is that we were spun out of Serotonin, which is a marketing firm in the space that many people might be aware of. Uh and and my co-founder Megan Knab, who's uh incredible, she uh had a very tight relationship with Serotonin, and they saw that all the companies they were working with, they wanted to be able to do their back-office operations onchain, but there wasn't a way to seamlessly do that. Uh and it was definitely during that area where a lot of people were saying Web 2.5, but still believe in that kind of like bridging between doing uh, you know, traditional banking rails so you could do all of your financial operations through banks in addition to uh onchain as well. And and we would handle everything from uh paying taxes, calculating your taxes, remitting them to uh the government. It was the only platform in the US that was uh onchain and also compliant for W-2 workers, not just contractors, uh which was a really big differentiator for us. Uh and so it was an incredible experience going through. And at the time, you know, this was back in uh 2022 when we got started, and uh the landscape was still quite a bit different back then. Uh, you know, L2s were just getting up and going, uh and there is a lot less clarity around stablecoin regulation, things like that. Uh there are a lot more pain points that existed around performance of blockchains and and the nature of privacy and things like that, which uh, you know, we had to work around. And then the whole experience of integrating different chains and layers and how all of that came together for the user experience uh was very illuminating and uh illustrated a lot of pain points that we still had had to solve as an industry. And so I think over the last 4 years, the industry has made leaps and bounds in that. Uh but there's still a lot lot to do, and part of the upgrades that Base is pushing out, I look backwards, I'm like, man, if we had had these things back then, how much easier our lives would have been on a day-to-day basis, how much quicker we would have been able to move and get to market and get that really valuable product-market feedback.

Absolutely, absolutely. Uh just curious, do do you think um if we had the same AI tools that we have today like a couple of years or 3 years back, like that that would have made a difference? Or uh do you think it's just, yeah.

Yeah, certainly it would have made a difference. You know, the the speed at which you can build now. You know, I think probably the the alphas and betas we built in the very early days, you know, I look back, you could probably do that in a weekend or or even a day at this point, right? Like getting that initial scaffolding up and running, doing your proof of concepts. Uh of course there's uh the playing field is then different, so everybody has that technology and the competition is different, so uh it's hard to say whether or not it would necessarily would have been easier to compete in the market. But I think the entire market would have been moving way faster, like you see today.

Absolutely, absolutely, I agree. Um awesome. Yeah, so uh shifting gears to Base itself, um for our audience uh who might uh some might be new uh to Web3, uh blockchain, uh and learning learning the ropes, uh could you just give us a overview of what Base is and uh why it exists?

I'd love to. So Base is the blockchain for global finance. It's a Layer 2 built on Ethereum, built with Coinbase. And um, you know, we have reached a point now where uh, you know, we have 200-millisecond block times, which we'll talk about today, you know, are one of the most performant Layer 2s in in the Ethereum ecosystem. Uh the total value locked onchain is continuing to to creep up and and knock a little bit on Ethereum's door. So a lot of really exciting things happening in our ecosystem uh and all that is focusing right now on building an amazing trading ecosystem with deep liquidity and high performance, a great payment ecosystem that has local stablecoins around the world, and financing, having great financing markets onchain with the best yield across all the available onchain markets.

Excellent. Well said, well said. Um and uh like we mentioned at the start, uh you guys dropped a big upgrade yesterday, uh the Denim upgrade. I saw uh a tweet uh where uh Ryan Armstrong and and Jesse Pollak were in the uh uh the denim the the Canadian tuxedo so to speak. [laughter] Um uh yeah, just uh yeah, uh uh what's new, uh what's changed, uh what can developers look forward to?

Yeah, definitely. I I have to give a shout-out to the the whole marketing team and and the I love the sequence of names that we have going with these upgrades. Uh Denim's been a fun one for sure. But as far as the actual nitty-gritty of of what we launched, so of course, one of the headlining things is 200-millisecond native block times. So uh a quick pause there is just that, yeah, we previously had Flashblocks, which were 200-millisecond pre-confirmations, but the full blocks were still 2 seconds. And so uh now we're at 200-millisecond block times, so uh much faster on the native blocks coming through the chain. And as part of that, there's upgrades like actually getting millisecond granularity timestamps within the blocks, which which we can dig into a little bit more, but is also important for being able to bring that speed onchain into smart contracts that need to leverage that speed. Uh and then we also had upgrades to our B20 token standard, which is the Base native token standard, that allow token issuers to have uh more granularity and control over the policies that they set, you know, for different real-world assets that you're bringing onchain. You have different regulatory needs you need to be able to handle, or you have different real-world events that happen that you need to be able to account for in the way that it's expressed onchain. And so we've added additional policies that allow issuers to control the onchain asset to appropriately reflect what's needed offchain.

Beauty. And uh just double-clicking into the um 200-millisecond block block time upgrade, uh I believe you had a a chart or or dashboard uh you wanted to bring up as well to kind of uh show that show that in action. Um

Yeah, that would be great. Let me pull that up. And and this is just to help visualize the impact that 200-millisecond block times have. So I think we can see this now. Uh of course, you can see just the the raw this change in the speed. Uh a couple of things to call out is that the In the past, the block.timestamp that contracts are using to bring offchain real-world time onchain only reports full seconds. And that's still true even with the 200-millisecond block time upgrade because we wanted to make sure that we were backwards compatible. Uh so you'll see that here what this little square is representing is that even as the 200-millisecond blocks, which are these smaller blue squares ticking across the page, are updating, the time that you're seeing in the block.timestamp is going to be the full second time. We've introduced something called BaseTime, which is an ability to bring the millisecond time onchain. So when you query BaseTime, uh which which I'd be happy to get into, uh you get the millisecond appended time. So you actually see in blue here the 2, 4, 6, 800-millisecond uh chunks of time that are coming onchain that can be read by smart contracts.

The other areas where I'll I'll pause on this page, but as it provides a visual, but for a quick explanation, is the real world of finance that we're bringing onchain today, it requires that the infrastructure be highly performant. And performant is a combination of two things here. It's not only the speed, right? So you have the 200 milliseconds, but it's also the precision of that. It's happening exactly every 200 milliseconds. And so when we look at the progression on Base, where we had Flashblocks, which was a really important step towards more speed and throughput where you have 200-millisecond pre-confirmations, the Flashblock implementation had some shortcomings where uh it wasn't necessarily that there was always going to be 10 Flashblocks in every single 2-second block. Sometimes there would be 8 or 9 uh given on some variance, and those pre-confirmations wouldn't arrive at exactly 200-millisecond intervals. Now that 200 milliseconds are native blocks, you know that every single 200-millisecond interval, you're getting another block. Uh it's consistent every single time, and you're not needing to interact with a different set of pre-confirmations, which required another layer that you had to build into your dev stack in order to handle that compared to just interacting with the blocks. And of course, because now it's native blocks, it's all natively handled and it's much more stable to build against.

Where that becomes really important when we think about our power users, when you look at onchain markets—and and this is querying in real time right now the Uniswap v3 pool, uh and and we could take a look at some of the other markets—but as price moves, if you're providing liquidity, you want to be able to very rapidly respond to the changes in prices. And before, let's just say in a 2-second block world, there's could be up to, you know, almost a full 2 seconds of time between a price change offchain and when you can actually implement a change in your liquidity provision onchain. Now every single 200-millisecond period of time, you're able to update your liquidity in order to reflect the most recent state of the market. Um I think another interesting scenario here, and and then I'll I'll let you jump back in, uh is talking about the health of our financial markets. Uh, you know, all of DeFi is uh basically managed by arbitrage, right? And how quickly we're able to react to uh information that's happening in the real world in offchain markets onchain.

And so here, this is just simulated, but we know that we have very volatile markets, uh and as part of that, that means that there's liquidations that keep our borrow-lend markets onchain uh financially stable. And so this is a little simulation here that tries to give you a sense of the difference between being able to land uh transactions within 200 milliseconds versed full 2-second blocks. So this white line here is intended to represent the offchain price of ETH as it goes down. Uh and then this lighter blue line is how quickly onchain price can reflect the offchain price uh versus this deep blue line would be if it was every 2 seconds. And then that shows you a little bit of the impact of how long If I replay this, you can see down here like what is the total value of loans that are waiting to be liquidated by uh the the bots onchain that are maintaining these markets. You can see that the uh total value of loans waiting to be liquidated is is much lower when you're able to get into the market faster. Uh the how far price is able to fall below a loan's trigger uh is of course a lot less uh deep because you're able to respond more quickly. So these are some of the very real-world financial use cases uh that are dependent on having highly performant and precise onchain infrastructure.

Yeah, that's that's pretty neat and and indeed quite an upgrade. I guess just uh staying on this topic of um different applications that can benefit from this upgrade, um like what about for example like RWAs? Um at like yesterday we we saw so quite the uh the bloodbath in the uh the market. Um so in the event like um we have like onchain um stocks trading, for example, um I would imagine um these very speedy um block updates would um would cater to uh such events, whether it the market goes up or down.

Yeah, exactly. And at least in today's world, so I actually have uh this is the Apple C, like Apple onchain tokenized stock that Coinbase has issued on Base. The today, because it's still very new, the liquidity is thinner, and what you would call the like price-setting liquidity—so what is the price on the markets that have the deepest liquidities—generally what you would trust as the source of truth for the current price of an asset is almost entirely offchain, and the onchain markets are reacting to that much more so than potentially in some other markets that are maybe a little bit more crypto-native. And so whether it be something like commodities like gold or uh tokenized stocks that are onchain, you need to make sure that you can close the loop very, very quickly. And so of course 2 seconds is is much too long in order to close that loop to arbitrage the gap between what is the price on the primary offchain markets and what is the price for the asset that's representing that onchain.

Awesome. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um and I guess for um people who are currently building on Base uh and have applications um that uh haven't upgraded yet, like what's that process? What what do they have to do? Is there anything for them to do?

For most folks, it should be nothing. Like, for example, like on my my personal website, I just have like a footer that dynamically updates based off of every block, which is just a little bit for fun, and it was able to handle I didn't do anything to it. It just now it just moves really fast. Um but there are a couple important things on the smart contract side. So uh if This is a little bit of an anti-pattern, but just in case anybody was using the block number to denote some passage of time, block numbers are now passing 10 times faster than they were before. So uh that's something that you would definitely want to take a look at. Um and then if you're somebody who uh in your smart contracts or or offchain need to have the responsiveness of 200 milliseconds, where not only is the transaction throughput happening at that cadence, but you want to be able to react to a precise point in time—let's say that like in 5 seconds and 200 milliseconds, I want this transaction to be processed—then you want to be able to leverage BaseTime. Uh you can go to our blog or our docs in order to understand how to integrate with that. It's really simple. Uh that way, your smart contracts benefit from the fact that the millisecond precision is now onchain on Base as well.

Awesome, awesome.

The last thing, I'll I'll quickly update We We haven't talked much about the the B20 upgrades that are are for issuance and and real-world assets. Uh but if you are looking at issuing a real-world asset onchain uh and you have different um policies that you need to put in place, like, for example, one thing that we've recently added is uh the ability to do the the inverse of a set that you need to uh either allow or disallow. So, for example, let's say that um you're maintaining a list of sanctioned individuals that you aren't allowed to have your asset move to based off of regulation. Uh you can have maintain a list of only the sanctioned individuals, and then in the policy you set on your B20, say something like "not this list," right? Instead of needing to do the opposite. Um and that that helps ensure that there isn't drift between maintaining different lists of like, you know, that you're trying to create a very specific set of people that you can send funds to or disallow sending funds to. Uh so if you're looking into issuance as well, we're continually upgrading our our B20 standard to ensure that it's the easiest standard for bringing real-world assets onchain.

Amazing. And uh I guess on that on that topic, um for builders who want to get started building on Base today, um what are some SDKs, APIs, tooling that's uh available off the top of your head, or the best place you'd recommend for them to start?

Definitely start on our docs. You know, the docs are are in a great place uh and now with AI today, you can easily grab it. It's all AI-enabled, so you can either navigate through the docs if if you want to read it uh for yourself. We make sure that it's uh well-drafted for humans as well as agents. But you can also just point your agents at it. We have a a docs MCP. The docs have our llms.txt files. Every single URL is a Markdown file as well. If you if you just add .md to it. So point yourself at uh docs, your agents at docs, and you should be able to do everything that we've talked about today uh with with very few tokens and and just a few iterations.

Amazing. And uh for folks watching and listening today, um those resources will be in the description of the podcast. Uh so if that's something that interests you, definitely uh check that out. And uh I guess on on the topic of AI, I know Coinbase is uh very, very high on AI in uh a lot of a lot of the day-to-day uh as well. Um just curious, like off the top of your head, like what do you think um this Denim Denim upgrade in particular um will help in with uh use cases revolving around AI agents and agentic commerce as well?

I'm glad you brought that up because, of course, we've spent a ton of time in agentic space. Uh some of the the highest X402 volumes, uh you know, which of course was authored by Coinbase, highest X402 volumes are are on Base as well. And the speed of the agents, I mean, if you want to talk about speed, right? The the agents will be able to do things at a a pace that far outstrips what humans can do, especially when you think about at scale. Uh and so that's one of the power use cases of onchain finance for agents is scenarios in which they are automating things that are happening at a a much higher frequency. Uh you know, Base already has very strong throughput, so even if, you know, we're decreasing any concerns about congestion as we get more and more agents that are acting on behalf of users onchain. Uh and now they can do more and more precise things as a result of us having 200-millisecond block times. So, uh you know, we've seen some interesting use cases of agents getting involved in trading, uh and a lot of that has actually been in being able to convert a a idea of a trading strategy into an actual trading strategy onchain. Uh but we have also seen people that have bots that are out there and and executing strategies for them as well, uh and understanding with a little bit more nuance when they look onchain and want to create a strategy, uh which markets have the deepest liquidity, which markets are actually reacting well to 200-millisecond block times. So these are some something that's interesting for folks to look into now. Uh and when you have agents that can scrape all this data and dive in for you, it makes it a lot easier uh to actually implement a strategy that's cohesive around the recent upgrades that have been happening.

Absolutely, absolutely. And even just like thinking now, like um these faster block times probably would um would be great for like a use case around like a like a live auction, right? Just as like every time like you have an agent that that's like bidding on something like you want you want that like speed and precision of your price kind of getting in ahead of like another person's or another agent's or or or whatnot.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, obviously, we've seen a lot with auctions in the onchain space. You know, in in a sense, every single block is its own auction, right? As as transactions try and land. Uh and so I think that's really interesting. And, you know, we also This is in a a previous upgrade, but we also have validity transactions now, which uh I'll I'll do a plug for, which allows you to submit a transaction that has a set of criteria that define whether or not the transaction will be submitted. So it makes it a lot easier to define criteria and submit it without needing to do that offchain. You can actually just do that natively within the transaction that you're submitting. Uh so agents could leverage that as well. Uh so you could even say, you know, in that validity tracked transaction, you know, so long as this transaction is valid to be submitted up until this 200-millisecond point in time, which combines both validity transactions and now the fact that 200-millisecond blocks are onchain, which gives you even that much more precision. So if you're uh, you know, bidding on a Beanie Baby, but you need to make sure that it's happening at the exact right moment and you believe that submitting 200 milliseconds before the end of uh the the auction is the best time to do that, you could implement that strategy today.

Beauty. Uh very cool. Uh and kind of uh one more question around like agentic commerce, cuz I know like you guys are are at the forefront, you Coinbase is the one who's made the X402 protocol. Um so you guys would would have the best kind of purview of the like what's going on in the trenches, so to speak. Um just curious to get kind of your perspective on when we can expect like agentic commerce to actually um like reach uh reach the average person. Cuz right now like I think

um from what I've uh seen and and uh experienced building, like the first part of all this is kind of already in place, like uh being able to set up an agent um with some sort of allowance or balance to go spend. And then the X402 protocol and and other protocols are in place for those agents to be able to spend. But then now, um that that last piece, the merchant side, um that's kind of where we're seeing a lot of the friction, um especially with like a lot of these um personal agents, personal bots that are coming out from Meta and and uh SpaceX and and and whomever. Um they kind of get stuck, stuck on the actual purchase part. Uh so like from from what you've seen and and and what you've kind of uh experienced, like what's your take on uh when we can expect that kind of full end-to-end to kind of be uh open? Floodgates opening.

With the the pace of AI innovation today, it's I'm hesitant to say anything too far from now. Uh and and the time-based predictions is often times easy to overestimate. What I would say is based so, you know, I was really in the the trenches on this, especially in the first two quarters of this year, and we always talked about it like obviously it's a two-sided market. Uh and back in February, when we had the the open claw moment, we saw that uh there was a massive explosion of the demand side, right? All these agents that are now available onchain that want to do things, but they didn't have the main street to go down, right? They didn't have the vendors. And so we've put a ton of work into partnering with the solutions that both humans and agents would want to be integrating with and getting them on X402, building out a marketplace for that. Uh and now integrating with the agentic frameworks that everyday users are actually engaging with. So uh we were excited to get out uh with Hermes. Just, you know, announced that Coinbase for Agents is available and and there is integrated natively with them as well. Uh and so I think that's like, you know, Hermes has been on the early edge, I think, of what we've seen happen now with some of these big consumer companies like Facebook, X coming into the game and and creating their own agents. And these these companies are experts at building consumer experiences. They're also the most risk-averse, and so they're going to take the lessons of these these other leading institutions to see where they need to put in guardrails, where they feel comfortable doing so. But I think we're very close. The technology exists, the user experiences are getting really, really solid, and so uh it's really just a matter of time. It's definitely if not when, and uh, you know, I have conversations with a lot of folks who uh it's it's really like glimpsing into the future. You see the things that they're doing with X402 and and the products they they're able to create with leveraging these expert uh solutions that you can pay for via is really incredible.

Yeah, I agree. And I think like a lot of the the more exciting stuff is is yet to come. Um like this year like was really like full pedal to the metal. Uh and I'm I'm sure next year is going to be the same. Um but uh yeah, we'll see. Very very exciting times indeed. Um and uh just before we kind of get to time, uh just want to give you a a chance if you wanted to share uh some of the other things kind of on Base's road map and anything uh our our developer audience should get excited for.

Appreciate that. We're we're doing a ton and we're increasing the rate at which we're releasing upgrades. So definitely pay close attention. Uh since May when we started uh releasing our own upgrades and and ended up on our own standard, uh you know, we're going to get to our uh fifth upgrade relatively soon here. Uh and so keep a a close eye on everything that's happening on on Base. Uh you can go to our docs and and see what's coming in our future upgrades. Uh and I would say just um get engaged with us. Like that it's it's moving so quickly that the best way to stay on top of it is to be building with us in parallel. We're here to support you. Uh and, you know, looking for any feedback that you have, how we can make the experience better. Uh if you're looking to build uh, you know, real-world assets onchain, you know, definitely reach out to myself. Uh you know, I'm helping teams go through integrations today with uh, you know, tokenized equities, real-world assets, financing, borrow, earn, payments, all these things. Uh the future of finance and modern finance is here today. We're looking to bring as many teams along as possible. So please reach out.

Amazing, amazing. And uh Eric's contact info, uh X X handle will be in the description of the podcast below. So definitely um if you're eager to to build on Base and get involved, uh uh that'll be there. Uh and definitely reach out to Eric and crew. Um and yeah, with that, uh just want to thank you so much, Eric, for taking the time out of your busy day to come chat with us. Uh really um appreciate you going through all the uh details of Denim. And yeah, uh for builders out there, if you want to get started with Base today, um all the details are in the description of the podcast below. So definitely have at it. Nice weekend project.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, get building. Thanks for having me, Narb. Great to be here. Hope to be back not too soon.

Absolutely, we'd love to have you back. Very soon, yes. We'd love we'd love to have you back. Uh and uh yeah, with that, uh just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be, and we will catch you here next week for another great episode of DevNTell. Till then, have a good one folks. Cheers.