City Protocol Connects with Base Ecosystem Builders in Singapore
City Protocol team member 0xjerome disclosed that last week in Singapore, they had face-to-face discussions with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and several Base ecosystem builders.
According to information released by the official Base account, this meeting took place at Coinbase's Singapore office: founders of several Base ecosystem projects demonstrated their products to Brian Armstrong and received direct feedback, followed by a deep roundtable discussion on trading, financing, and payment topics.
0xjerome took this opportunity to publicly unveil a new product the team is developing, OTP (Onchain Token Portfolio), positioning it as a new standard for packaging investment strategies on-chain.
As described, OTP can accommodate various asset forms including ETPs (Exchange-Traded Products), thematic portfolios, guru trackers, and fund strategies—essentially any investment portfolio that can be expressed can theoretically be packaged into an OTP.
Mechanically, this meeting did not involve direct financial transactions; it was more about ecosystem alignment and product exposure: City Protocol gained public exposure and "official endorsement" through interaction with Coinbase/Base's official account, while the Base ecosystem aimed to attract more native asset management projects, extending its product scope from "trading, financing, payment" to "on-chain asset portfolio management." If the OTP standard is adopted by more protocols in the future, potential beneficiaries include on-chain users seeking passive income through standardized portfolios, as well as funds and strategy providers that can package strategy products according to this standard; however, public information has not disclosed City Protocol's financing situation, the specific launch time of OTP, or the locked asset scale, making it difficult to assess actual capital flow and adoption scale in the short term.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Base is an Ethereum Layer 2 network launched by Coinbase in 2023, with a strategic core of "attracting on-chain application ecosystems to support Coinbase's exchange business." It has previously bound new project parties through closed-door meetings with founders and ecosystem marketing activities; this meeting in Singapore continues Base's consistent approach of "CEO personally endorsing + ecosystem exposure."
From a resource mobilization perspective, such meetings do not directly involve capital injection, but the public endorsement from Brian Armstrong and Coinbase's official account serves as a low-cost way for early projects to gain "trust capital"—this type of exposure often helps early protocols improve their bargaining power in subsequent financing negotiations or user growth more than a round of financing would.
The idea of "standardizing and packaging investment strategies on-chain" corresponds to the productization process of ETFs/ETPs in traditional finance—packaging complex strategies into a standardized certificate that can be directly purchased; what OTP aims to do is essentially to transfer this logic on-chain, similar to previous on-chain indexing products launched by Index Coop. City Protocol is currently in the early stage of publicly disclosing product concepts and seeking ecosystem endorsement, and has not yet entered a phase of large-scale adoption.
Structurally, this represents a reconstruction of the industry chain: in the traditional asset management industry, strategy packaging (funds/ETPs), custody, and distribution are three separate processes completed by different institutions; on-chain standards like OTP attempt to compress the packaging and custody processes into the same layer of infrastructure, directly connecting the distribution process to wallets and on-chain users. The mechanism lies in the composability of blockchain, allowing a productization process that originally required collaboration among multiple institutions to theoretically be compressed into a standardized on-chain protocol, which would diminish the necessity of intermediary institutions in the traditional asset management chain.
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