Coinbase’s Base Acquires Iron Fish Team to Enhance Privacy on Layer 2 Network

Coinbase-incubated Layer 2 community Base has introduced buying the event crew behind Iron Fish, a privacy-focused blockchain mission. The newest transfer goals to spice up privateness options inside Base.

The acquisition focuses on integrating the experience of Iron Fish’s crew and doesn’t contain the Iron Fish blockchain or its native token, each of which is able to proceed to function independently underneath the Iron Fish Basis.

Privateness-Centered Growth

Key members of the Iron Fish crew, together with CEO Elena Nadolinski and Jason Spafford, will be a part of Coinbase’s efforts to develop “privacy-preserving primitives” for Base. Their experience is predicted to handle the challenges of transaction transparency inherent in blockchain networks, as per the official announcement.

In the meantime, Nadolinski will proceed her function on the Iron Fish Basis’s board in a bid to make sure that the mission’s governance construction stays intact.

Iron Fish, which is thought for leveraging zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) to make sure transaction confidentiality, launched its mainnet in 2023 after over two years of growth. It had secured $28 million in a 2021 funding spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz.

By integrating Iron Fish’s crew, Coinbase goals to equip builders with instruments to construct safer and compliant decentralized purposes on Base. This initiative is according to Coinbase’s aim of advancing privateness options inside its ecosystem.

Iron Fish revealed that connectivity has witnessed important development which is at the moment bridged to 27 clear chains with the assistance of ChainPort. To discourage dangerous actors, Iron Fish has applied sanction screening on each transaction. It has additionally enabled non-public wrapped USDC from Base and is getting ready to launch a cell app to offer customers with a non-public, Venmo-like expertise in cryptocurrency transactions.

“We imagine Base is uniquely positioned to onboard the world to crypto, and we’re extremely excited to construct out a privateness resolution that may obtain actual mass adoption, making non-public transactions the usual reasonably than the exception.”

Base Struggles Amid Market Uncertainty

The newest acquisition comes as Base faces difficulties amid excessive volatility within the broader market regardless of a powerful market entry over a yr in the past.

The community beforehand reached a excessive of $4 billion in TVL in December 2024 however has since dropped to $2.8 billion, because it continued to wrestle to take care of its earlier momentum.