March 28, 2025
Appchains on Base: Enhanced
As blockchain applications grow in popularity, they face challenges around scaling effectively without sacrificing performance, costs, or decentralization. Recognizing this problem, Base, Coinbase’s Layer 2 solution, launched Base Appchains: powerful Layer 3 rollups designed for dedicated blockspace, instant withdrawals, and seamless performance. However, Base Appchains currently rely on AWS S3 for data availability. While convenient, this centralized dependency introduces risks around liveliness, censorship resistance, and transparency.
In this article, we highlight these limitations and explore how HyveDA, a decentralized, high-throughput data availability layer, can help solve them. By integrating HyveDA, Base Appchains can achieve high performance, improved security, and stay completely aligned to the Base ecosystem, ensuring reliability for users and developers alike.
Understanding Base Appchains and the Current Limitations
With Base Appchains, developers can now build Layer 3s on the already existing and very popular Base Layer 2. Base L2 is built on OP-Stack, so to make this happen the Base team forked OP-Stack and added OP-Enclave. The main issue that is solved by OP-Enclave is withdrawals, which are slow in Optimistic Rollups and not performant for high-throughput in ZK Rollups. OP-Enclave approaches this problem with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), which offer a high level of security while maintaining performance. By doing so, Base Appchains enable instant withdrawals, which are a foundational piece for composability within the Base Appchain ecosystem. Although this article won’t deep dive into the inner workings of TEEs and fast-withdrawals, they are the foundation of what makes Base Appchains so exciting, read more about it here.
On the other hand, Amazon S3 is used by Base Appchains for data availability. S3, unlike TEEs, is inherently centralized and subject to risks such as censorship, deletion, or alteration by AWS and/or the resource owner. OP-Enclave can verify the integrity of data retrieved from S3 by comparing it against cryptographic hashes, but it cannot prevent data from being censored or becoming unavailable. The usage of S3 for data availability exposes Base Appchain users to risks, such as data withholding and liveliness attacks.
The reliance on S3 for data availability should be viewed as a temporary solution, with Base alluding to support “altDA” in the future. However, even most altDAs, including Ethereum, will not be able to cater to the high (micro-)transaction volume that a truly successful application will eventually reach. Data Availability, like slow withdrawals, can quickly become a bottleneck, thus hindering on-chain scaling.
The Importance of Data Availability in Base Appchains
Data availability (DA) in the context of chains ensures that all block data is accessible for everyone to download and verify. This in turn provides a liveliness guarantee for network participants given, as long as the data is available, you can derive the state and withdraw your assets. For Rollups, which Base Appchains essentially are, the withdrawal feature becomes ineffective if data is withheld and nobody can derive the state and thus nobody can withdraw. Decentralized Data Availability mitigates the risks of Amazon S3 by having a network of validators ensuring that data remains available even if some of the actors are withholding data.
The issue of data availability in Base Appchains is not only that of security. Base Appchains are designed for successful applications, which will handle millions of users. After the Pectra hardfork, the throughput target for Ethereum blobs will be only 0.064 MB/s and the fastest fully decentralized alternative is 1.33 MB/s, but this would require Appchain developers to step outside of the Ethereum ecosystem. To ensure all appchains can reach their full potential, there needs to be plenty of blob space to serve them all without requiring developers to rely on another ecosystem.
In conclusion, to unlock the full potential of Base Appchains, the DA solution chosen must be decentralized, Ethereum-aligned, and capable of scaling dramatically beyond current limitations.
Introducing HyveDA for Base Appchains
HyveDA is a decentralized, Ethereum-integrated data availability solution addressing these critical concerns. With a throughput of around 1000 MB/s, HyveDA supports the scalability needs of Base Appchains without compromising decentralization, security, or integration into Ethereum’s ecosystem.
HyveDA integrates directly into Ethereum by requiring DA operators to restake slashable (more on HyveDA’s slashing mechanism coming soon) ETH through Symbiotic, posting DA attestations and utilizing Ethereum smart contracts for verification, ordering, and slashing. Under the hood, this is all enabled by a Byzantine Fault Tolerant DAG structure, providing robust data availability guarantees without any centralized operator or consensus bottleneck. (Read more about HyveDA’s DAG architecture here).
Besides throughput, HyveDA offers configurable longer-term data retention, which is something shared with Amazon S3 but not available in other decentralized DA solutions. Data availability is fundamentally transient storage, because after a period of time the blobs get pruned from the network. In other DAs, there is no strict built-in guarantee that your data remains available after the block becomes finalized. In HyveDA, however, the protocol allows developers to configure an explicit time-to-live (TTL) value for their data. During this retention period, the nodes can be cryptographically challenged to prove availability. If nodes fail to respond accurately, they will be penalized via the Symbiotic slashing mechanism. This functionality is vital for appchains that manage data requiring prolonged, but not indefinite, availability.
For example, DePIN, gaming platforms, payment processors, and decentralized orderbooks benefit immensely from TTL. These appchains won't have to mandate node operators to store all historical data locally to deal with the pruning cycle on the DA. Instead, they can confidently retrieve data on-demand from HyveDA, significantly reducing resource overhead, boosting scalability, and preserving the composability that makes Base Appchains attractive in the first place.
Putting it all together
As demonstrated above, HyveDA provides a suitable data availability layer that is decentralized, Ethereum-aligned, and capable of scaling dramatically beyond current limitations. However, the question remains: what would integration within OP-Enclave look like?
To illustrate this, we will take a look at a practical integration.
Step 1: Transactions and Batching
The first important step in appchains is usage. Users continuously make transactions to the Appchain, which land in the sequencer of the Appchain. These transactions get batched together by the OP-Enclave batcher and instead of uploading this to Amazon S3, it gets published as a blob to HyveDA. HyveDA returns an identifier to the blob, which the Appchain Sequencer will be watching for in the latest committed DA checkpoint on the Ethereum smart contract. After that, the Appchain will post the blob identifier in an on-chain inbox address.
Step 2: Enclave Execution
The proposer in OP-Enclave submits the required information to the enclave to allow it to execute the transactions statelessly, recomputing the Appchain state.
Step 3: Proposer Submission
The proposer receives the output root and attestation from the enclave(s). When a withdrawal occurs, or a specified timeframe has passed, the proposer submits it to the OutputOracle contract on Base.
Step 4: Signature Check
The OutputOracle contract checks if the signer is registered on the SystemConfigGlobal contract. If it is, the output root is accepted as this means it came from an attested AWS Nitro enclave running the correct code.
Step 5: Hyper-Secure Fast Withdrawals
Because the output root is accepted based on the TEE attestation (and the trusted signer check) and the data is published on the decentralized DA, withdrawals can be processed almost instantly without the risk of data being withheld. Remember, even with the execution proven, if data is withheld you can not independently derive state and state proofs to process the withdrawal.
Direct comparison: HyveDA vs S3
In short, HyveDA with Base Appchains solves the critical limitations of Amazon S3 whilst staying completely Ethereum-aligned and scalable. Although Amazon S3 is arguably more scalable, it suffers from high vulnerabilities in data withholding attacks, censorship, and limited composability. Additionally, HyveDA’s initial throughput will be 1000 MB/s, but it will scale up quickly to higher throughputs.
If integrating with HyveDA, Base Appchains maintain their unique strengths, instant withdrawals and composability, while achieving scalability, decentralization, and trust-minimized data availability crucial for truly high-performance, Ethereum-aligned applications.
Want to build your Base Appchain on HyveDA?
HyveDA is currently in active development, rapidly moving towards a public testnet launch. We're working closely with pioneering projects interested in becoming early adopters, collaborators, or integration partners. If you're considering building a scalable, decentralized Base Appchain and want to explore how HyveDA can help your application scale securely and seamlessly: reach out and let's talk.
Stay ahead by joining our early access community, participating in our upcoming testnets, or simply staying informed as we progress. Reach out to our team directly on X, join our Discord for technical updates, or follow our developments here.
Data flows at the speed of the builders who dare to outscale. No bottlenecks. No limits. Just unstoppable throughput .
Discord: https://discord.gg/hyveda
Website: https://hyve.xyz
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Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, financial, legal, business, or technical advice. References to digital assets, technologies, or investment opportunities in this article do not constitute a recommendation, endorsement, or solicitation to purchase or engage with such assets or services. Readers should not rely solely on this content when deciding to utilize, integrate, or invest in any technology or digital asset discussed herein. All investments, especially in digital assets and blockchain technologies, involve significant risks, including an uncertain and volatile future. You should consult professional advisors regarding any investment, technical integration, regulatory compliance, or legal matters related to your specific situation. The accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the content is not guaranteed, and HyveDA disclaims any liability arising from its use.