The Reserve Protocol is now live on Base, marking its first expansion beyond the Ethereum mainnet.
This update matters because it aims to empower accessible innovation. As noted in a blog post by the Reserve Protocol team, the “low-cost,” and developer-friendly Ethereum L2 environment launched by Coinbase “affords a streamlined and low-friction experience for experimentation with decentralized currency.” With the Reserve Protocol, participants in the Base ecosystem now have the tools “to sculpt their own decentralized and fully-backed currencies (RTokens).”
According to the announcement, this launch “brings self-healing currency to Base.”
DeFi should expand far beyond “a few thousand power users.” Base’s lower transaction fees will enable people who are “interested in using yield bearing stablecoins to actually use them without having all benefits wiped out by gas costs. We want to see millions of RToken users on Base.”
Ever had a great idea for a stablecoin? How about a flatcoin or an index? Reserve encourages the curious “to let their economic imagination run wild.”
RTokens (the product of using the Reserve Protocol) give deployers freedom “to realize these dreams by customizing a wide array of parameters such as revenue sharing, asset backing and emergency collateral.” With Base’s lightning-fast speeds and negligible fees, it’s possible countless experiments “will take place.”
RTokens deployed on Base are “equipped with the same resilient mechanisms shown by their counterparts on mainnet.” You may recall how the Electronic Dollar (eUSD) was able to autonomously “recover its $1 peg following the USDC depeg earlier in 2023. This launch brings self-healing currency to Base.”
Across both Ethereum and Base, countless collateral options exist “for deployers, including major stablecoins, ETH and wBTC; both on their own, and in yield-bearing forms from protocols such as Compound, MakerDAO, Aave, Convex, Curve, Morpho, Stargate and Flux Finance.”
As noted in the update, Reserve’s mission is “to increase adoption and access to sustainable, inflation proof, stable currency.”
The Reserve Protocol provides “a turnkey, permissionless platform for anyone to create yield-bearing, asset-backed currencies that share revenue, are censorship-resistant, and have auditable reserves on-chain, 24/7.”
The platform is designed to “provide an alternative to inflation-prone currencies, empowering people to maintain their purchasing power over time and across borders.”