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The Next Step of Onchain Finance: The Emergence of a New Protocol Hub Built on Base, B18, and B4626

As the crypto industry enters its sixteenth year, a clear inflection point is taking shape. The early phase driven primarily by application-level innovation is gradually receding, while a new phase—centered on financial infrastructure, protocol standards, and capital-grade usability—is becoming the dominant narrative. Within this context, a vertical technological and capital pathway formed around Coinbase, Base, B18, and B4626 has begun to attract growing attention from institutional investors and industry researchers. This is not the emergence of yet another DeFi project, but rather a systematic attempt to restructure onchain financial architecture itself. The “Ceiling” of DeFi Is Not Technology, but Financial Structure Over the past few years, DeFi has rapidly expanded its functional surface—from AMMs and lending to derivatives and yield aggregation. Yet the real deployable scale of onchain finance has consistently failed to match its technical sophistication. The problem is not insufficient yield or a lack of innovation, but a long-overlooked structural reality: the complexity of DeFi finance is borne primarily by users, not by protocols. In traditional financial systems, complex risk assessment, strategy composition, and compliance constraints are abstracted into institutional back-office systems. Onchain, however, this complexity is exposed directly to end users. This structural mismatch has kept large-scale, risk-sensitive capital largely offchain. Coinbase’s Strategic Shift: From Trading Platform to Infrastructure Gateway As one of the few crypto companies to successfully navigate multiple market cycles, Coinbase’s role has long extended beyond that of a centralized exchange. Through regulatory licensing, institutional custody, developer tooling, and wallet products, its strategic trajectory has become increasingly clear: to serve as an infrastructure-level gateway between traditional finance and onchain finance. Within this framework, the key question for Coinbase is not whether to engage with DeFi, but how. Building applications directly implies high maintenance costs and limited scalability; building infrastructure, by contrast, amplifies financial activity across the entire ecosystem. The launch of Base is a direct manifestation of this strategy. Base: An Ethereum Layer 2 Designed for Scalable Finance Unlike many Layer 2 solutions that emphasize raw performance metrics, Base is not positioned as “faster,” but as more usable. It inherits Ethereum’s security while offering extremely low transaction costs, making high-frequency and complex onchain financial operations economically viable. More importantly, Base possesses a characteristic that is difficult for other L2s to replicate: direct connectivity to a compliant, mature, globally distributed user and capital gateway. As a result, Base functions less like an application deployment environment and more like a financial execution backend—a role that naturally demands not fragmented applications, but a unified financial coordination layer capable of abstracting risk and return. B18: Shifting from Application Logic to a Protocol Hub It is within this ecosystem that B18 is defined as a structured financial coordination layer on Base. Unlike traditional DeFi products, B18 does not center on user interaction or single strategies. Instead, it approaches the problem from a capital perspective, addressing deeper structural questions: How can complex yield sources and risk parameters be protocolized? How can strategy execution be decoupled from human discretion? How can diverse capital demands be composed and orchestrated onchain? Functionally, B18 more closely resembles an onchain asset-management middleware than a retail-facing financial product. Its objective is not short-term user acquisition, but to support long-term, scalable capital allocation behavior onchain. B4626: Upgrading Interface Standards into a Financial Language If B18 is the financial hub, then B4626 is the language system that enables it to operate. ERC-4626 marked an important step toward standardization by unifying Vault interfaces and normalizing asset deposits and withdrawals. However, in real financial contexts, basic I/O interfaces are insufficient. Strategy interpretability, risk readability, and yield redistribution remain largely unstandardized. B4626 addresses this gap—not by merely implementing ERC-4626, but by extending it at the protocol level, enabling: Machine-readable strategy descriptions Risk parameters that can be directly interpreted by protocols, wallets, and institutional systems Yield distribution and routing without manual configuration Within this framework, Vaults cease to be simple “storage tools” and instead become financial modules that can be programmatically consumed by other protocols and capital systems. How Standards Actually Spread: Capital Pathways, Not Market Education History repeatedly shows that true industry standards are not adopted through persuasion, but through convergence along capital and efficiency pathways. B18 and B4626 are designed with this principle in mind. All native strategies and external distribution interfaces within B18 default to B4626 as their output format. Any participant wishing to integrate with B18’s capital and strategy network must therefore understand and support B4626. Under this structure, B4626 is not optional—it evolves naturally into a de facto standard. Why Now: The Convergence of Three Trends The strategic relevance of this system emerges from the simultaneous convergence of three trends: Compliant and semi-compliant capital is actively exploring onchain deployment paths Ethereum Layer 2 networks are becoming the default financial execution environment Foundational interface standards exist, but lack higher-order financial semantics B18 and B4626 sit precisely at the intersection of these forces. A Long-Term View: The Early Shape of an Onchain Financial Operating System From a longer-term perspective, a clear division of labor is forming: Coinbase serves as the gateway layer, Base provides the execution layer, and the absorption and expression of financial complexity gradually settle into the protocol system formed by B18 and B4626. This is not a narrative for a single bull cycle, but a structural evolution that closely mirrors the historical development of traditional finance. As onchain finance matures, the scarcest resource is not short-term yield, but infrastructure and standards that capital can trust and reuse over time. What B18 and B4626 represent is not a new hype category, but a deeper transition: the systematic migration of financial complexity from users to protocols.