Discover What's Next on Base

Aerodrome Finance

Aerodrome is the central DEX and liquidity coordination layer of Base. It operates on the Solidly ve(3,3) model: users lock AERO tokens to receive veAERO, which grants voting power over weekly emission rewards directed to liquidity pools. Protocols compete for liquidity by bribing veAERO holders, creating a self-sustaining flywheel.

DeFi ecosystems rise and fall on the depth of their liquidity. Aerodrome solves Base's capital coordination problem by turning token emissions into a competitive market. Protocols that need deep markets must engage with Aerodrome's flywheel, giving it structural importance that compounds as the ecosystem grows.

Aerodrome is not merely a DEX — it is Base's liquidity layer. Every new DeFi primitive launched on Base depends on it. Its market position is reinforced by the very protocols it serves.

Moonwell

Moonwell is an open, permissionless money market protocol on Base and Moonbeam. Users supply supported assets to earn yield, or borrow against collateral at algorithmically-determined rates. All risk parameters — collateral factors, borrow caps, interest rate curves — are governed by WELL token holders.

Lending protocols are foundational infrastructure for DeFi. They enable capital efficiency, leverage for yield farmers, and liquidity for assets that would otherwise sit idle. Moonwell's early deployment on Base and its integration with Coinbase Wallet positioned it as the default money market for Base's DeFi ecosystem.

As one of Base's earliest and most audited lending protocols, Moonwell functions as trust infrastructure. Other protocols compose on top of it — yield strategies, leveraged positions, institutional integrations — making its security track record foundational to broader Base DeFi.

Zora

Zora is a protocol and marketplace for creating, collecting, and monetizing digital media on Base and other EVM chains. Its architecture decouples minting infrastructure (open protocol, permissionless, free to deploy) from the discovery marketplace, enabling any creator to publish on-chain with minimal friction and meaningful royalty protection.

The on-chain creator economy has historically been dominated by platforms extracting rent from creators. Zora's model flips this: minting is free, royalties are protocol-enforced, and the content is owned by the creator forever. Base's low fees make micro-transactions viable for the first time, enabling entirely new creative business models at scale.

Zora is building a new content layer, not competing for collectibles market share. As Base scales, Zora's position as the default on-chain publishing stack means it captures value from every creator who treats Base as their medium.

Virtuals Protocol

Virtuals Protocol is a launchpad and framework for creating, tokenizing, and co-owning AI agents on Base. Each agent launched through Virtuals has a bonding curve token, can autonomously hold and transact digital assets, and can be governed by its token community. The protocol provides the economic infrastructure for agent-native economies.

The convergence of AI and crypto creates a new category that did not exist two years ago: autonomous agents with genuine economic resources. Virtuals builds the infrastructure layer for this — enabling agents to generate revenue, manage on-chain treasuries, and be owned by communities rather than corporations.

Virtuals represents a genuine new paradigm: AI agents as economic entities, not tools. Base's low transaction fees make high-frequency agent activity economically viable. The protocol's position as the primary launch venue for AI agents on Base gives it a first-mover advantage in a category that is accelerating rapidly.

Talent Protocol

Talent Protocol is an on-chain professional reputation network built on Base. Its core product is the Builder Score — an algorithm that aggregates a user's verifiable credentials across GitHub activity, ENS ownership, POAP attendance, Farcaster engagement, on-chain transaction history, and more — producing a single portable, composable reputation score.

Verifiable reputation is the missing primitive in web3. Without it, communities resort to token-gating (wealth as a proxy for merit) or centralized identity (defeating the point). Talent Protocol builds the on-chain trust layer that makes credential-gated opportunities, merit-based airdrops, and professional discovery possible without centralized intermediaries.

The Builder Score is composable — any protocol can query it to gate access, weight votes, or personalize experiences. This positions Talent Protocol not just as a product but as reputation infrastructure for the entire Base ecosystem, with network effects that compound as more protocols integrate it.