Base will leave the Optimism ecosystem and move towards an independent, unified technology stack.

TechFlow to a report by The Block on February 19th, Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2 network, Base, announced its departure from Optimism's Superchain ecosystem, moving towards a unified technology stack operated by Base and abandoning external dependencies on the OP Stack, Flashbots, and Paradigm. This change aims to reduce the coordination overhead of maintaining code across multiple teams, simplify the system through optimizations based on open-source components like Reth, maintain a "Stage 1" rollup status, and plan for short-term compatibility with the OP Stack, but future hard forks will require migration to the new Base client. The upcoming hard fork includes Base V1 (supporting Fusaka and switching to TEE/ZK proofs), and subsequent versions will be synchronized with Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrades; the blog emphasizes the protocol's openness and welcomes alternative implementations.