I still remember when I first held an iPhone back in 2007. It was only for a few minutes but that was enough to blow my mind. The device was light years ahead of the flip phones we all used—it was a camera and a music player and had a sleek, intuitive design that felt so cool. You knew right away this thing was the future.
I thought of that moment when I went to try out Base, Coinbase's blockchain that launched for the public on Wednesday, and which is being hyped to the sky by the company for its low fees and hundred-plus decentralized apps. After years of hearing that crypto is "in the first inning" when it comes to consumer adoption, I wondered if Base represented a breakthrough—had crypto's iPhone moment come at last?
No, it had not. It's unfair, of course, to expect Coinbase to replicate the most profound consumer achievement of this century. But still. I had hoped the company could capture even a wee bit of the magic from Apple's Steve Jobs era, but, alas, the entire Base experience felt mundane—a reminder of why crypto is still far from catching on with the general public.
The premise of Base, if you're unfamiliar, is to use Ethereum layer-2 technology—a process that makes blockchain transactions much faster and cheaper—to create an ecosystem, similar to iOs or Android, that offers a wealth of applications. The difference is that the ecosystem Coinbase is creating is built on Web3, which is decentralized and lets you escape the Big Tech monopolists, but at the expense of convenience.
I opened Coinbase on both my phone and laptop and clicked on "OnChain Summer," which is the name of the campaign the company is using to promote the Base blockchain. That prompted me to connect to a self-hosted wallet such as MetaMask or Coinbase Wallet. Once that is completed, you are then encouraged to send ETH tokens from the main Ethereum network to the Base network and start buying things.
If that explanation sounds straightforward, I assume you are fairly steeped into the blockchain world—it's a safe bet most of your friends and family wouldn't get all this business about wallets, networks, and bridging currencies. And that's a problem. Consumers are used to elegantly designed apps that are free to use, and are highly useful and entertaining. It will be very hard to tempt them into the world of Base, where there are relatively few apps—most of which are asking you to buy OnChain Summer NFTs.
But even if the Base user experience falls short, Coinbase deserves credit for doing some things right. This includes rejecting the temptation to get greedy and create yet another token, which has for years been the curse of layer-2 blockchain development. Likewise, Coinbase was wise to launch Base as an open-source project, which will attract developers and build trust in the project. And finally, Coinbase deserves props for getting back to its roots and building things—even if those things, for now, need a lot more polish.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
