Dear Bankless Nation,

Back in February, crypto exchange giant Coinbase announced Base.

It’s a layer-two (L2) Ethereum scaling solution built on Optimism’s OP Stack tech and part of Coinbase’s mission to help create an open financial system for the world.

As of today, the L2’s now officially open for bridging ahead of a full network launch + an “Onchain Summer” fest planned for next week, August 9th.

For this post, let’s talk the basics and key resources so you can prepare for the coming Base NFT boom!

-WMP

Getting Started with Base NFTs 🔵

The Base basics 📚

Base operates as a permissionless L2, open to all developers and users, settling on Ethereum, and with Coinbase initially being the sole sequencer at genesis but with plans to decentralize over time.

Despite the recent $BALD memecoin frenzy, Base's real appeal lies in its potential to onboard Coinbase's established user base into web3, providing a frictionless transition from centralized to decentralized apps.

Learn more: Read Unpacking the Coinbase L2 Opportunity and The Base Case in Bankless

Base Bridge opens for business 🙌

Before now, only a one-way and unofficial bridge into Base was live for developers.

However, today, August 3rd, the Base team announced the opening of the two-way Base Bridge in preparation for the full public launch of Base on Wednesday, August 9th. The bridge currently supports ETH (which you use to pay for gas on Base), cbETH, DAI, and USDC.

Keep in mind, if you’re getting ready to bridge in and start exploring Base, you may need to add the L2 to your wallet. If you’ve downloaded the Coinbase Wallet app or extension, you’re already set as the wallet now natively supports Base. Otherwise you can use a service like Chainlist to add Base to your MetaMask, etc.

It’s an opportune time to get ready here, as lots of activity is set to take place across the L2 in the coming days.

“Over the next week, you’ll begin to see dapps across the onchain ecosystem turn on Base support and new ones launch,” the L2 team’s latest announcement noted.

The Onchain Summer festival 🌞

To celebrate the official launch of Base, the L2’s team is putting on an unprecedented, month-long Onchain Summer festival starting on August 9th.

The event will bring together “50 of the best builders, brands, products, artists, and creators” in the space and will feature “something fun to do onchain” every day the festivities are running.

Among Base’s Onchain Summer partners are mainstream brands like Coca-Cola and Atari, and many crypto and NFT projects are on the slate too including Bonfire, Fini, Highlight, Parallel, Manifold, OpenSea, Optimism, Rainbow, and Zora.

Additionally, to kick off the event the Base team is launching over 100 ETH worth of grants through Prop House, which was created by Nouns DAO as a public community funding system where people can bid on ETH with ideas. The grants will be spread across tracks: Onchain Summer, Build on Base, Based Accounts (ERC-4337), and Stand with Crypto.

First Base mints 🌿

If you haven’t minted anything on Base yet, you’re in luck. You’ve got options now, and they’re growing fast. But where to start?

For the next month, you can use the provided interface at onchainsummer.xyz to mint the free “Bridge ETH to Base” NFT (seen in the screenshot above) and simultaneously bridge however much ETH you want to Base. This is one straightforward place to begin.

Another similar opportunity, the Base Bridge Pass, is currently available via mint discovery platform mint.fun. Mintable until August 31st, this drop lets you mint an NFT that in turn automatically triggers a small amount of ETH being sent to your wallet’s address on Base.

Zooming out 🤔

Over the next month, we’ll undoubtedly see a considerable surge of Base NFT activity.

I presume the aforementioned festival partners like OpenSea and the mint suites of Highlight, Manifold, and Zora will be adding support for the L2 in short order, and such integrations will generally make it a lot easier for creators and collectors to dive into Base.

And, again, these integrations are just a few of the deployments we can expect in the coming days. There are already dozens of projects that are lined up for deployment here, so don’t sleep on the Base app scene in the weeks ahead! There will be many NFT intrigues ahead.