Base sells ETH? Base founder refutes: there are more than 100,000 ETH reserves

Written by: Jinse Finance xiaozou

Did Base sell off the ETH fees earned by the sorter? This question has sparked debate recently.

On February 10, 2025, Santisa, the chief information officer of Lucidity, a crypto market investment and consulting company, posted on the X platform:

Since the launch of the Base network, all its sorter fees have flowed to Coinbase. Although it is impossible to confirm whether these funds have been sold, it can be confirmed that these funds have neither fed back to the construction of the Base ecosystem nor achieved on-chain retention. In the absence of transparency, we have every reason to speculate that these funds have been cashed out. This behavior is obviously contrary to the decentralized concept of Ethereum.

Base member Kabir responded to this statement the next day:

This accusation is pure nonsense - the facts are as follows: Base has always been committed to the construction of the Ethereum ecosystem and will continue to promote its development. We invested all our revenue and resources into it, and in just one and a half years, we achieved a leap from zero to millions of new users on-chain. Base and Coinbase have always held ETH and publicly disclosed long-term holdings (over 100,000 ETH, worth over $300 million). As far as I know, this is the largest ETH holding of any public company, far exceeding any other current L2 DAO or Labs company. For security and auditing reasons, Base currently uses an off-chain custody solution (which is why the funds flow to Coinbase). We adhere to ETH standard: ETH is used to pay L1 costs, all external funding is denominated in ETH, and our goal is to continuously increase the proportion of ETH in Base's cost structure and work to promote more businesses on-chain. Although we still have off-chain expenses denominated in US dollars (such as salaries), the amount of ETH exchanged to pay for these expenses is almost negligible compared to the ETH we hold and the size of the entire ETH market.

I want to emphasize that Coinbase has accumulated more than $300 million worth of ETH, which is more than twice the total ETH revenue of Base. We always focus on long-term value creation rather than short-term price fluctuations. What we think about day and night is how to promote the large-scale application of blockchain. If you agree with this mission, please join us to build it together. Spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) on weekends is not the right way to promote the development of the industry.

On February 11, 2025, Jesse, the founder of Base, also expressed some of his ideas:

1. "Whether to hold allETHincome"This kind of purity test is not only meaningless, but also harmful to the development of Ethereum ecology. Paying too much attention to this kind of formalistic moral label will only make us deviate from our core mission - to create products that users really need, to build a sustainable economic system, so as to lower the threshold for participation and allow more people to benefit from blockchain technology.

2. Base has always been committed to promoting the global chain process. We firmly believe that the key to achieving this vision is to build a self-consistent economic engine to provide continuous power for global expansion. At the same time, we also call on more companies to join the chain ecosystem construction and jointly promote this historic process.

3. Our development strategy is to develop diversified sources of income and continue to invest the proceeds in ecological construction - covering core areas such as team building, project funding, strategic mergers and acquisitions, and infrastructure upgrades. At the same time, about 15% of the income will be invested in the public product fund through Optimism, in addition to special investments such as sponsoring solady audits. Creating top products and prospering the economy is our primary mission, and we will spare no effort to achieve this. Investing in growth is a wise choice and is worthy of praise!

4. At the same time, we also attach great importance to the strategic reserve of ETH (holding more than 100,000), which not only consolidates its value storage status, but also allows us to share the dividends of Ethereum ecosystem construction - but this honor comes from our ability to continuously create value. ETH's value storage function should not be overly solidified as a"solution", but should be regarded as the result of the natural evolution of practical assets.

5. We fully recognize that the current transparency is not yet ideal - the existing quarterly reporting system mainly follows the disclosure requirements of US listed companies. However, asBase gradually evolves into a decentralized global on-chain economy, we are making every effort to promote more business links to the chain (covering partners such as suppliers and contractors) to achieve real-time and transparent operational disclosure, and completely break through the limitations of quarterly disclosure in the traditional off-chain world.