At the end of February of this year (2023), the crypto industry has been shaken by the announcement of two major players: Optimism and Coinbase.
On February 23rd the main Layer 2 Optimistic Rollup published a Mirror article announcing its new Superchain. This platform aims to integrate otherwise siloed L2s into a single interoperable and composable system, which is a strong response to the challenges posed by the future multichain world. We've previously mentioned this in our blog post on multi-wallets.
The big news is that Coinbase, the second largest crypto exchange in the world, has joined the Optimism Superchain as both a core developer of the OP Stack codebase and a new L2 blockchain built on it, called Base. This means that potentially 108 million Coinbase users can be funneled into a new Layer 2. For comparison, even Ethereum and Bitcoin have rarely reached 1 million active users, only during the peaks of the 2017 and 2021 bull runs or during black swan events like the Terra and FTX collapses.
Why should we care?
This means that in the coming months and years, this is likely to be a catalyst for exponential growth of on-chain data. If captured properly, this will provide a completely new set of customer insights that will boost not just web3 projects, but also web3 enabled e-commerce brands and merchants that leverage crypto and NFTs as part of their offering. The companies that will excel will be the ones who understand the power of wallet data and are able to offer personalized experiences to users, helping to increase engagement and sales.
Furthermore, the recent news that Amazon is launching an NFT marketplace next month (April 2023) is another example of opening up web3 to a huge new audience. When we put all these pieces together, there is potential for an exponential increase in web3 adoption which will lead to richer web3 data analytics, on-chain insights, and new customer journeys.
We are very excited to live through this epochal shift and even more excited to build in it.