The Chief Executive Officer of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, has dropped hints that the company’s upcoming layer-2 blockchain network, known as Base, would be subject to transaction surveillance and anti-money laundering procedures when it first launches.
Although acknowledging that Base currently has certain centralized components, Armstrong said that “it will be more and more decentralized over time” during an interview that took place on March 6 and was conducted by Joe Weisenthal on Bloomberg Radio.
On the other hand, he went on to imply that there would be transaction monitoring and AML regulations imposed on users of the new layer-2 network.
In the early days of cryptocurrency, he speculated that Coinbase would be responsible for monitoring transactions. He went on to say that “I think that the centralized actors are the ones that are probably going to have the most responsibility to avoid money laundering issues and having transaction monitoring programs and things like that.”
Chris Blec, an advocate for decentralization, drew attention to Armstrong’s remarks in a tweet he published on March 7.
According to Coinbase, Base is an Ethereum layer-2 network that provides customers with a risk-free, inexpensive, and user-friendly solution to construct decentralized applications. Base also caters to developers.
Optimism’s “OP Stack,” a technology that enables high-speed transactions on blockchains like Ethereum, is being employed in the development of this technology. On February 23, Base was presented to the public, and it is now in the testnet phase. Coinbase has not yet provided a mainnet launch date, although it is anticipated that it will occur in the second quarter of 2023.
