Base sells ETH? Base founder refutes: holds more than 100,000 ETH strategic reserves

Base sells ETH fees earned by the sorter? This issue has sparked controversy recently.

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

Since the launch of the Base network, all of 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 been retained on the chain. 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 completely false - here are the facts: Base is committed to the Ethereum ecosystem and will continue to drive it forward. We have invested all of our revenue and resources into it, and have gone from zero to millions of new users on-chain in just a year and a half. Base and Coinbase have always held ETH and publicly disclosed long-term holdings (over 100,000 ETH, valued at over $300 million). As far as I know, this is the largest ETH holding of any public company, far larger than any other L2 DAO or Labs company currently. For security and auditing reasons, Base currently uses an off-chain custody solution (which is why the funds flow to Coinbase). We are ETH-based: we pay L1 costs in ETH, all external funding is denominated in ETH, and our goal is to continue to increase the proportion of ETH in Base's cost structure and work to bring more businesses on-chain. Although we still have off-chain expenses denominated in USD (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. We think about how to promote the mass application of blockchain day and night. If you agree with this mission, please join us to build 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 thoughts:

1. Purity tests such as " whether all ETH earnings are held " are not only meaningless, but also harmful to the development of the Ethereum ecosystem. Excessive attention to this kind of formalistic moral labeling will only lead us away from our core mission - to create products that users really need and 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 process. We firmly believe that the key to achieving this vision lies in building 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 multiple sources of income and continue to invest the proceeds in ecosystem 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. Building 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, as Base gradually evolves into a decentralized global on-chain economy, we are working hard to promote more business links to the chain (including suppliers, contractors and other partners) to achieve real-time and transparent operational disclosure, and completely break through the limitations of the traditional off-chain world on a quarterly basis.