Decentral Block Post

Base, a new layer 2 application-focused protocol by Coinbase has just one criteria left to fulfil  before being ready for mainnet launch.

On June 29, the team said the Optimism-powered, Ethereum-secured network has been subject to six months of rigorous security audits — both internally and externally — its second-last criteria required for launch.

“With the completion of these audits, we’ve now fulfilled ⅘ of our criteria for mainnet launch,” Base said, adding that they feel confident after not finding any critical code bugs:

“Completing these in-depth security workstreams without discovering critical severity bugs gave the Base team confidence to proceed towards mainnet launch.”

The other three criteria passed included a “Regolith” hard fork in testnet, a successful infrastructure review with OP labs — the team behind Optimism — and Optimism’s “Bedrock” upgrade.

While many investors in the West may look to crypto to speculate the next biggest trend, blockchain technology is actually solving “real-world problems” in Africa such as hyperinflation and "corruption," executives told Cointelegraph.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Chris Maurice, founder and CEO of Yellow Card — Africa’s largest cryptocurrency exchange — said crypto in Africa “is growing at the speed of light” because it allows many Africans to escape from the traditional financial system’s failures and transact more freely.

“Crypto solves real-world problems with banking and currencies on the continent, and it isn't the casino that it can feel like sometimes in the West.”

Maurice said the most common use cases in Africa are to make international payments, to send money to friends and family and to “save money against inflation.”

“Crypto in Africa lives closer than any other part of the world to the original mission of the technology,” he added.

Bitcoin (BTC) aborted a fresh attempt to reach $31,000 on June 29, while traders waited for bulls to succeed.

BTC price “primed to launch”

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC price action refusing to leave its short-timeframe trading range.

Now caught between $30,000 and $31,000, BTC/USD lacked impetus to continue the prior week’s uptrend or reverse downward.

For market participants, however, there was increasingly reason to believe that flipping higher resistance levels to support would come next.

“Bitcoin’s 2020 Fractal is still in play,” popular trader Jelle wrote in a Twitter update, arguing that Bitcoin was repeating its late 2020 breakout.