The Base network is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, launched by Coinbase on August 9, 2023. It’s designed to make transactions faster and cheaper while still leveraging Ethereum’s security. Imagine Ethereum as a busy highway—Base is like a side road that takes some of the traffic, processes it efficiently, and then merges it back into the main flow. It uses a technology called Optimistic Rollups, built on the OP Stack (the same framework as Optimism), which bundles transactions off-chain and submits them to Ethereum in batches. This cuts down on fees and speeds things up, making it a practical choice for decentralized applications (dApps) @base