Editor’s Note

Welcome to Bedrock.

Bedrock is a publication about the future of the onchain economy. Each week, we'll explore the builders and ideas at the frontier, paving the way for a digital world that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom.

We believe that Base is establishing the cultural foundations—the bedrock—for an onchain renaissance: a new economy that fully leverages what the internet and Ethereum have to offer.

Our goal is to give you solid ground to stand on. To build a better world, you must believe in something, and you've got to keep a pulse on the world around you.

Let's see what the world is up to.

Robinhood, the everything app?

The battle for the future of finance just got a lot more interesting. Robinhood dropped three major announcements that continue to signal their intention of becoming the financial institution of choice for the next generation: stock tokens, crypto staking, and their very own L2 built on Arbitrum's stack.

The stock tokens launch immediately sparked controversy when Robinhood announced they would also tokenize private equity from OpenAI, a move that OpenAI quickly denounced. But controversy aside, the strategic bet is clear: Robinhood is positioning itself for the great wealth transfer coming as millennials and Gen Z inherit money from their parents. They're betting that money will live onchain, and while it won't happen all at once, they want to own the distribution.

Their crypto staking offering is perhaps more immediately disruptive, with rates consistently higher than established centralized players. When a platform known for democratizing stock trading starts offering better staking rates than the crypto incumbent, it forces the entire industry to reconsider their value propositions.

And the L2 announcement rounds out their strategy perfectly. By building on Arbitrum's stack, Robinhood gains access to battle-tested infrastructure while maintaining the flexibility to customize their chain for their specific use cases. The details of the chain and its usage are unclear, but it seems obvious that Robinhood believes that it will allow them to capture more revenue per transaction.

If you thought that onchain wasn't eating traditional finance, you're wrong. Robinhood is betting that the distinction between "stocks" and "crypto" will become increasingly meaningless to users who just want access to assets and yield. By building bridges between these worlds – literally tokenizing traditional assets – they're creating a unified financial experience that traditional banks can't match.

The question isn't whether Robinhood will succeed, but how quickly the incumbents will respond.

It's Still Summer. It's Still Onchain.

"Create and build with us all summer long."

Onchain Summer is back for year three, and this time it feels different. Gone are the daily drops and mints of previous years. Instead, it seems like we're focused on highlighting the best builders and sprinkling in some big announcements.

The campaign runs July 7th through August 11th, with Base rewarding builders with social distribution and rewards up to $500k. Every week, the top mini apps by usage get featured in tweet-thread roundups, with top teams invited to livestream and showcase their work. The builders of the top performing apps will be invited to Basecamp and honored at the Onchain Summer awards ceremony.

What's compelling about this year's approach is how it mirrors the maturation of the onchain ecosystem itself. Instead of artificially creating scarcity through limited drops, Onchain Summer 2025 is about abundance: giving builders the resources and attention they need to create sustainable value over time.

Previous summers were about introducing people to the possibilities of onchain culture. This summer is about giving them the tools to build it themselves.

The Sloptimistic Take

In a recent conversation with Katie Chiou, Mat Dryhurst offered a perspective on AI-generated content that cuts through the usual anxiety: "sloptimism."

"If AI is going to overwhelm our current valuation mechanisms and cultural incentives: bring it on. I love that idea. I think it's a forcing function for us to reconsider curation of media, to reconsider the valuation of people with interesting contributions."

Dryhurst's argument is that our current cultural incentives are already broken. Musicians and artists are reduced to taking pictures of themselves on Instagram, hoping to seduce someone into engaging with their actual work. "That is a debased understanding of culture," he argues.

His "sloptimistic" take suggests that the overwhelming nature of AI-generated content will force us into making interesting decisions about culture that we should have made a decade ago. When everything can be automated, we'll finally have to figure out what's actually valuable about human creativity and curation.

This perspective feels particularly relevant to the onchain economy where, as Mat mentions, many of these experiments are already happening. Instead of optimizing for engagement metrics that reward the lowest common denominator, onchain systems can be designed to reward taste, curation, and genuine cultural value.

The internet will be filled with slop. Hell, it already is. The question is whether we'll use that forcing function to build better systems for recognizing and rewarding the cultural contributions that matter. Onchain infrastructure gives us the tools to do exactly that.

Morsels

The new Coinbase Wallet (TBA) is getting new features every day. This week: full customization of the look and feel.

$400M of BTC-backed loans in 4 months, powered by Morpho.

fxhash, a new platform for creating and trading "art coins," is live.

We'll be publishing 2-3 times per week. Subscribe to stay up to date!

005: The Financial Institution of the Future