Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network developed by Coinbase, announced on Tuesday evening that its first independently built network upgrade, Azul, has officially launched, with plans to activate mainnet on May 13.
According to the upgrade announcement published by the Base engineering blog, this upgrade marks an "important step" toward Base's journey to Phase 2 decentralization—the highest standard of trust minimization for Ethereum L2s.
At the core of Azul is a multi-proof system that integrates two independent proof mechanisms—Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) provers and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) provers—into a single security layer. Both can process transactions independently, but when they agree, withdrawals from Base to Ethereum can be settled in as little as one day. This architecture meets the core requirement of Phase Two: the ability to fully detect and handle proof system failures on-chain.
Base is currently the second-largest secondary guarantor by total collateral, with $12.12 billion in total collateral. According to L2Beat, Arbitrum One leads with assets exceeding $16 billion.
As this statement is released, L2 security providers are facing increasing pressure to refine their security models. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has been working to accelerate L2 withdrawal speeds to reduce reliance on third-party bridges, while questioning whether the original L2 vision still holds—as noted in Azul’s announcement, Base’s multi-signature design is explicitly modeled after Buterin’s L2 finality roadmap.
In addition to security, Azul simplifies Base’s underlying client stack and aligns the network with Ethereum’s latest execution layer specifications. Base is also doubling down on stablecoins, global markets, and AI agents as its core growth bets, with faster, cheaper finality serving as the foundation for all three.
Azul is now live on the testnet and has launched a bug bounty competition with a prize pool of $250,000, ending on May 4.
This article was assisted by an AI workflow. All our articles are manually curated, edited, and fact-checked.