Developers of the L2 solution Base for Ethereum have announced that the network has reached the first stage (Stage 1) of decentralization as a step towards building an open on-chain economy.
Base has reached Stage 1 Decentralization
We’re building the foundation for a truly open, global onchain economy pic.twitter.com/3P63m7IqwT
— Base (@base) April 29, 2025
“We achieved this by launching permissionless fault proofs and increasing the decentralization of our contract upgrade process with the Security Council,” the team explained.
According to the statement, the achievement creates a more resilient foundation for applications, assets, and the on-chain economy on Base, ensuring:
- infrastructural certainty for projects—the platform cannot unexpectedly change the rules;
- enhanced network fault tolerance—there is no single point of failure;
- the opportunity for everyone to participate in securing and verifying the network’s state.
Vitalik Buterin’s framework provides a clear path for the gradual and safe decentralization of second-layer rollups on Ethereum, such as Base, the developers noted.
They highlighted two key aspects of the transition to Stage 1. In October 2024, the team launched Fault Proofs based on the OP Stack’s fault proof system. The solution entails:
- permissionless proposals: anyone can make claims about the state of Base, eliminating the need for a central party;
- unauthorized challenges: if an erroneous or fraudulent claim is made, anyone can contest it within 3.5 days by running open-source challenge software, with economic incentives for successful challenges.
The second main requirement for achieving Stage 1 was the decentralization of contract upgrade control. To this end, a Security Council was established, consisting of 10 independent entities from various jurisdictions.
To reach consensus, the structure, together with Base and Optimism, must pass a 75% threshold for approving an upgrade. This mechanism ensures that no single party has the authority to make changes unilaterally.
Back in January, developers of leading L2s on Ethereum, including Base, agreed to work on implementing so-called “base rollups” to enhance security and reduce network fragmentation.