[HIP-36] Launch Hop on Base Mainnet

Summary

Base is a secure, low-cost, builder-friendly Ethereum L2 built to bring the next billion users onchain. It is built on Optimism’s open-source OP Stack & the core dev team at Base is joining Optimism as the second Core Dev team working on the OP Stack to ensure it’s a public good available to everyone; and contributing a portion of sequencer revenue to funding public goods.

This post seeks to open a discussion around the onboarding of Base into the Hop ecosystem by initially supporting ETH, USDC, and HOP during the launch of Base and incentivizing the AMMs. After some discussion on this post, a Snapshot vote will be posted. The Base chain will be available to the all in “early August”.

Motivation

The Base ecosystem is already vibrant with activity and could become one of the top chains by volume for Hop and the broader crypto ecosystem. Many dapps have already started to build on Base, and one goal for the chain is to allow various protocols to “get in front of [the tens of millions of] users in the Coinbase ecosystem”. [1]

Hop’s relationship & integration with Coinbase products can already been used today in the Coinbase Wallet mobile app and browser extension. This integration with Base is a logical extension of this relationship that should help the Hop ecosystem solidify itself more firmly within the Coinbase ecosystem.

From a technical perspective, the integration is nearly identical to the already deployed Optimism bridges. Since Base is built on Optimism’s OP Stack, there are very few changes to the code, deployment process, trust assumptions, and tooling required for integration with Hop.

Base takes a security-first Approach . On top of inheriting the already-strong security standards of the OP stack, they have also deployed their own resources to independently audit the system, thus providing additional security to Optimism users and Hop users by extension.

Incentives

This proposal seeks to set up an incentive program for the ETH and USDC AMMs on Base. The proposed values below were calculated by taking 10% of the existing monthly HOP incentives for ETH and USDC (respectively) on Optimism. These values reflect the fact that it is likely that Base will reach up to, or exceed, 10% of Optimism’s TVL over time. The need for a more cohesive system for distributing Hop incentives has been an active area of discussion/research and these incentives will last only until such a system is in place.

• 34,680 HOP per month on the ETH AMM on Base
• 24,140 HOP per month on the USDC AMM on Base

Timeline/Next Steps

• This RFC will last a few days in order to gather any appropriate discussion or feedback.
• After discussion and feedback, a delegate will post this proposal to Snapshot.
• If the Snapshot vote passes, the Hop UI will support Base with ETH, USDC, and HOP on Day 1.