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.

ABAB News · Cognitive Law

Exposure from a dinner meeting is equivalent to a round of seed financing
Only strategies that can be standardized can be distributed at scale
Blockchain turns intermediaries into a piece of code