At Base, our goal is to build the secure, trusted infrastructure for global finance: an economy that runs 24/7 with deep liquidity to power any transaction at scale. But infrastructure is only as powerful as the applications built on top of it. It is the entrepreneurs and founders, the builders creating real-world use cases, who ultimately make the difference.

The Base Ecosystem Fund exists to find and enable these exceptional builders. We provide pre-seed and seed-stage capital, combined with dedicated, hands-on support from the Base team, to give the best founders the resources they need to succeed.

The Base Ecosystem Fund believes that global finance is the defining, killer use case for blockchains. This spans the full spectrum of financial activity, including payments, stablecoins, credit, trading, tokenization, derivatives, prediction markets, agents, and more.

Rather than keep our theses behind closed doors, we are sharing the active areas we are most excited about right now. These represent the specific ideas we want to see emerge, scale, and fundamentally grow within the Base economy.

Alternative Yield-Bearing Assets

As tokenization proliferates and asset coverage expands, we are particularly excited about bringing productive, yield-bearing assets onchain. This includes short-duration working capital instruments such as stablecoin pre-funding, invoice financing, trade finance, and revenue-based financing, as well as longer-duration assets such as REITs, royalties, licensing income, and private credit funds. Delivery models can span from wrapped off-chain funds and native onchain issuance to stablecoin vaults that deploy into targeted opportunities. What matters most is partnering with deep domain experts who possess the vertical-specific underwriting capabilities to originate and manage these assets responsibly. These alternative assets introduce genuinely uncorrelated, productive yield for holders while unlocking the full structural benefits of composability, liquidity, and distribution.

Tokenized Portfolios as Collateral

Most brokerages offer margin lending, but far fewer offer Securities-Backed Lines of Credit (SBLOCs). This is because many brokerages aren't banks, and funding loans at scale is expensive, making SBLOCs historically a high-net-worth product. This leaves tens of millions of everyday brokerage users with no access to non-margin credit against assets they already own. Tokenizing these portfolios and moving them onchain bypasses those traditional hurdles. With programmatic credit drawn against customer holdings via DeFi lending protocols, we can remove the balance sheet constraints that have historically made SBLOCs uneconomical at scale. The ideal model is B2B2C: an end-to-end solution handling everything from asset tokenization to credit deployment, giving brokerages a way to embed credit they couldn't otherwise fund, and giving their customers liquidity they've never had access to before.

Stablecoin Distribution in Cash-Centric Emerging Markets

In under-financialized emerging markets with de jure or de facto dollarization – such as Argentina, Cambodia, Ecuador, Lebanon, and Venezuela – the US dollar serves as the primary unit of account for capital. Yet, this wealth remains structurally trapped in physical cash with little to no access to yield or credit. A large opportunity exists to make this capital productive by connecting local physical cash networks to stablecoins. By meeting end users where they are and building directly on existing cash-centric behaviors, these distribution networks can serve as a highly defensible wedge to leapfrog subpar legacy banking solutions with direct flows between paper currency and stablecoins, setting the stage for frictionless access to noncustodial yield and financial services.

Local Stablecoins

Despite the dominance of USD stablecoins today, there remains a large opportunity to drive adoption of local stablecoins as first-class assets. Many local fiat rails remain slow, costly, and, in some jurisdictions, subject to burdensome taxes. Savers who prefer to hold local currency are typically locked out of competitive rates unless they hold large balances at traditional banks. Enterprises and merchants operating in corridors where sender and recipient share the same currency face unnecessary FX intermediation steps, and merchants remain dependent on third-party payment solutions. Moreover, tokenizing local assets remains highly constrained until the corresponding local currency liquidity exists onchain. Local stablecoins address this by enabling faster, cheaper onchain payments that can pass yield directly to end users while allowing merchants to settle natively. They also eliminate FX friction by enabling direct currency pairs and serving as the essential quote pair for tokenized local assets.

Unsecured Consumer Credit

Punitively high costs of capital and rigid legacy underwriting metrics continue to lock millions out of the global credit market. Unlocking broader access and lowering the cost to borrow requires a shift from basic credit scoring to a comprehensive, verifiable, multi-signal underwriting framework. Utilizing zkTLS enables secure verification of offchain data – such as salary, bank accounts, and assets – to be paired alongside onchain collateralized credit histories. To scale safely, this stack can integrate localized collections partnerships and legal or credit-reporting recourse. Capitalizing on this market means building the underlying underwriting engine and capital aggregation infrastructure to sell into existing wallets, fintechs, and neobanks, meeting users where they already transact to structurally drive down capital costs across the board.

Multi-Party Credit

Merging multiple credit histories into a single, unified profile unlocks massive, historically untapped lending opportunities like intra-family lending and remittance-backed credit. By leveraging smart contract vaults, stablecoins, and zkTLS, lenders can make multi-party underwriting automated, secure, and frictionless. This enables them to safely service lower-credit borrowers by enforcing joint recourse through a high-credit guarantor, such as a parent backing an entrepreneur or an international remittance sender backing a local recipient. To make this a reality, we are looking for teams building the infrastructure and consumer applications for merged-profile credit rails, multi-party debt, and programmable shared recourse.

Conditional Asset Markets

Conditional asset markets have the potential to achieve significant scale by enabling the trading of state-contingent outcomes, where participants trade positions across potential future states, with only one market realized upon settlement. By isolating how specific events impact particular assets, this mechanism enables precise hedging across liquid assets of all kinds, rather than forcing investors to speculate on raw event probabilities. Crucially, this structure produces highly valuable information, revealing exactly how the market values the future of those assets across different circumstances.

Verticalized Prediction Markets

Verticalized prediction markets represent the move beyond generic platforms toward domain-specific information and execution hubs. While this shift to date has largely been concentrated in sports, other sectors remain underdeveloped. We see strong potential in dedicated platforms for politics, where real-time data and social mechanics can improve forecasting accuracy; culture & media, where embedded tools can turn passive audiences into financially engaged participants; institutional risk & insurance, where programmatic hedging can help underwriters manage tail risks through market-driven pricing; and clinical trials, where specialists use market mechanisms to surface the most effective therapies and techniques. By attracting domain-specific market participants, these venues can achieve a quality of price discovery that generalist platforms cannot replicate.

Foreign Exchange Markets

Traditional FX markets heavily favor large institutional players, leaving cross-border enterprises and SMEs to face high costs, opaque pricing, and restrictive capital requirements when trading major, minor, or exotic currency pairs. Using programmable rails, stablecoins, and derivatives, the status quo can be disrupted by rebuilding the entire suite of global currency markets. These can span spot, forwards, NDFs, futures, and options – all natively onchain. Creating 24/7 liquid FX markets can enable advanced, composable use cases built directly on top, such as seamless and accessible hedging and structured cross-currency products.

Onchain Bilateral Agreements

Traditional bilateral OTC agreements, including repos, total return swaps (TRS), and credit default swaps (CDS), are vital for institutional funding and risk transfer, but private execution breeds opacity, friction, and counterparty risk. Onchain bilateral agreements transform this model by recording contract terms, collateral, and lifecycle events on a shared ledger to enable real-time transparency and programmability. To ensure these digital contracts are structured for integration into existing legal frameworks and eventual regulatory standardization, an orchestration protocol can facilitate agreements via smart contracts on a permissionless rail, bypassing public DeFi's shared liquidity risks while keeping structures easy to underwrite, audit, and legally validate. Ultimately, this offers a transparent alternative to legacy infrastructure, creating a compliant pathway to migrate institutional-grade instruments onchain without sacrificing established risk frameworks or legal certainty.

Agents for Everyday Commerce

As agent infrastructure outpaces real consumer use cases, the open problem is shifting from building agents to making them compelling enough for everyday consumers to actually rely on. There is a large opportunity in agents that take user intent and see it through to a completed transaction, rather than bolting AI on to existing commerce flows. Areas with potential for disruption include agentic shopping and checkout, booking and reservation assistants, event ticket purchasing, and coupon and discount agents. We are looking for founders building in these segments that can translate consumer demand into stablecoin and ERC-7496 / onchain checkout volumes.

SKU Tokenization

Today, merchant catalogues live in fragmented, proprietary Web2 databases, siloed and inaccessible to AI agents, fundamentally constraining agentic commerce. SKU Tokenization solves this by migrating catalogue inventory onchain as composable, programmable assets, making products universally discoverable across any wallet, aggregator, or distribution channel. This gives any agent the lowest friction path to find, evaluate, and purchase in a single atomic flow. Beyond discoverability, liquid onchain markets for tokenized SKUs unlock a new commercial primitive: the separation of selling from delivery. Merchants can sell inventory before demand materializes. Market makers (i.e., resellers) can intermediate supply. And end users can redeem purchased assets for physical delivery on their own timeline. Static product inventory becomes a tradeable, liquid asset class.

While these are some of our current areas of interest, we know the strongest signal ultimately comes from high-quality founders and where they see the most significant opportunities.

If you are building in these categories or in an adjacent space you are excited about, please reach out and apply here.