Base sells ETH? Base founder refuted: There are more than 100,000 ETH reserves

Written by: Golden Finance xiaozou

ETH fees earned by Base sell-sorter? This issue has sparked controversy recently.

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

Since its launch, 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 feed back to Base ecological construction nor have they been retained on-chain. In the case of severe lack of transparency, we have good reason to speculate that these funds have been cashed out. This behavior is obviously contrary to Ethereum's decentralization philosophy.

Base member Kabir responded to this remark the next day:

This allegation is purely nonsense - the facts are as follows: Base has always been committed to building the Ethereum ecosystem and will continue to promote its development. We invested all our income and resources into it, and in just one and a half years we achieved a leap forward development from zero to millions of new users on the chain. Base and Coinbase have always insisted on holding ETH and have publicly disclosed their long-term holdings (more than 100,000 ETH, worth more than US$300 million). As far as I know, this is the largest ETH holding scale of all listed companies, far exceeding any other L2 DAO or Labs company at present. For security and audit considerations, Base currently uses an off-chain custody solution (this is also the reason why funds flow to Coinbase). We adhere to the ETH standard: pay L1 costs with ETH, and all external funding is denominated in ETH. Our goal is to continuously expand ETH's share in the Base cost structure and strive to promote more businesses to be chained. Although we still have off-chain expenses denominated in USD (such as compensation), the amount of ETH used to pay for these expenses is almost negligible compared to the ETH held and the overall ETH market size.

I want to emphasize that Coinbase has accumulated ETH worth over US$300 million, which is more than twice the total ETH return of Base. We always focus on long-term value creation, not short-term price fluctuations. What we are thinking 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 together. Spreading FUDs (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) over the weekend is by no means the right way to drive the industry.

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

1. Pure tests such as " whether to hold all ETH returns " are not only meaningless, but will also harm the development of the Ethereum ecosystem. Over-focusing on this formalistic moral proposition will only make us deviate from our core mission - to create products that users really need, build a sustainable economic system, thereby lowering the threshold for participation and allowing more people to benefit from blockchain technology.

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

3. Our development strategy is to explore diversified sources of income and continue to invest the income 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 revenue is invested through Optimism. Public products fund, in addition to sponsoring solady audits and other special investments. We will spare no effort to create top products and thrive economies. Investment growth is a wise choice and worthy of praise!

4. At the same time, we also attach importance to ETH's strategic reserves (holdings exceed 100,000), which not only consolidates its value store status, but also allows us to share the dividends of Ethereum ecological construction

• but this source of honor for our ability to continuously create value. The store of value functionality of ETH should not be over-cured into a " solution " but should be regarded as the result of the natural evolution of practical assets.

5. We fully recognize that the current transparency has not yet reached its ideal state - the existing quarterly reporting system mainly follows the disclosure requirements of US listed companies. However, as Base gradually evolves into a decentralized global on-chain economy, we are fully committed to pushing more business links to the chain (covering suppliers, contractors and other partners) to achieve real-time and transparent operational disclosures and thoroughly Break through the limitations of the traditional off-chain world's quarterly disclosure.