In a block post, published on 29th June 2023, the team behind Base, an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) blockchain incubated by Coinbase, outlined their robust security measures in preparation for their upcoming mainnet launch. The platform aims to onboard the next million developers and billion users onchain, and security is a crucial part of this vision.
Base is built on the OP Stack, in collaboration with Optimism. This foundation means that Base benefits from the extensive security work done by the OP Labs team and the broader Optimism community. To further enhance the OP Stack’s security, Coinbase’s Protocol Security team conducted an internal audit.
Over the past six months, the Protocol Security team has worked closely with OP Labs to improve the security of Base and Optimism. This included auditing all Optimism pre-deploys and contracts on both L1 and L2 to identify vulnerabilities and risks in the technology stack.
In preparation for the mainnet launch, Base engaged the wider community through a public smart contract audit contest via Code4rena. This contest invited security researchers to find and report bugs in any part of the OP Stack. Over 100 security researchers participated in this contest, and no significant vulnerabilities were discovered.
In addition to securing the core OP Stack codebase, Base is developing an open-source monitoring tool, Pessimism, to provide prompt notification of anomalies in the protocol and network. This tool will complement existing OP Labs monitoring tools, Coinbase in-house blockchain monitoring capabilities, and third-party tools.
Furthermore, Base is building a smart contract security scanning tool to help developers reduce the chances of writing a security vulnerability in their contracts. Developers can use this tool to quickly and easily scan their contracts and get results from multiple open source vulnerability detection tools, including Coinbase’s own proprietary secure trait analyzer.
