Coinbase announced today that it will work with Echo to launch an investment model that community members can participate in, providing further impetus for projects in the Base ecosystem. At the same time, it revealed 40 Base projects that have been invested and supported by Coinbase Venture in the past year and a half. This article will briefly introduce Echo and sort out the Alpha opportunities in more than 40 projects.
What is Echo
Echo was founded in March 2024 by crypto KOL Cobie @echodotxyz. Cobie was the head of growth at Lido and hosted the popular Web3 podcast UpOnly. The core of Echo is the lead investor recommendation mechanism, where users can create investment communities as lead investors, share projects with members and earn commissions from them.
Since its launch, more than 30 crypto projects have raised funds through Echo, including Ethena, Morph, Usual, Hyperlane, Dawn, Monad, Initia, MegaETH and many other well-known crypto projects. A total of $100 million was raised within a year. In December 2024, MegaETH completed two rounds of financing of $10 million through the Echo platform, the first of which was $4.2 million in 56 seconds and the second was $5.8 million in 75 seconds.
Echo is similar to an elite alliance of crypto investors, and tends to choose high-potential projects recognized by a small circle. For example, The Blocks CEO Larry Cermak and Aave founder Marc Zeller have created their own Echo communities. If users want to join, they first need to answer some questions and undergo KYC authentication. In addition, some communities must meet certain conditions to obtain specific investment opportunities. Currently, a total of 58 community leaders have created communities on Echo.
This community-driven investment model manages funds through smart contracts, ensuring that lead investors cannot directly access user funds, while giving users the right to decide when to sell tokens. Lead investors can obtain a certain percentage of follower investors profits after successful investment, and this mechanism effectively encourages the sharing of high-quality projects. Although its elite-oriented nature makes the user group relatively small, this screening mechanism ensures the quality of the project and attracts investors who focus on trust factors to participate.
This type of investment model is destined to have a small investor base, but this may change after the cooperation with Coinbase. Last month, founder Jordan Fish Cobie revealed that he would develop an ICO platform and said, There is currently no good way to conduct an initial sale. Your best option may be CoinList, but it has great limitations for several reasons.
Shan Aggarwal, vice president of corporate development at Coinbase, and Jesse Pollak, founder of Base, said in a statement that on-chain investing allows qualified investors to participate in ways that were not previously possible, while giving founders access to a broader, more dynamic capital base. We are excited to expand the capital channels for Base builders so that more people can participate in the next wave of innovation. The two peoples ideas coincide with each other, and Coinbase Venture has become the group leader of Echo at this point in time. It can be foreseen that Echos product target users will become more open than before, and more Base-Build projects will be born.
Some industry experts point out that the relatively relaxed regulatory environment in the United States may promote the recovery of public token sales. Matt OConnor, co-founder of Legion, another hot ICO platform, said that once ICOs regain vitality, they may shift their focus away from the memecoin craze. In the current market environment, there are fewer and fewer projects that are truly focused on product building, while a lot of wealth is accumulating behind the scenes. If the cooperation between Echo and Base is successful, it will open up a wider range of funding channels for industry builders and enable more qualified investors to have the opportunity to participate in venture capital opportunities that were previously difficult to reach.
Base Alpha
We cannot predict the excellent projects that Base may share on Echo in the future, but among the 40+ investment projects mentioned this time, in addition to the already well-known projects such as Aerodrome, Morpho, Mirror, there are still many Alphas worth exploring. The editor has compiled some projects that retail investors can participate in and briefly introduced them.
AI and Technology
Sapien
Sapien is a decentralized data factory that allows enterprises, AI models and agents to obtain data sets from experts in various fields, including question and answer annotation, data collection, model fine-tuning, testing and evaluation, text classification, sentiment analysis, semantic segmentation, and image classification. According to the official website, 110,000 AI trainers from more than 90 countries have participated in the points program. Sapien plans to launch an open, permissionless protocol on Base in the future, combining economic incentives, reputation systems and game mechanisms to promote the scale of AI training.
The project is led by Base co-founder Rowan Stone and Polymath founder Trevor Koverko, and has a deep cooperative relationship with Coinbase. As a decentralized solution for AI data labeling, it is said to have provided services to excellent companies such as Baidu, Midjourney, Alibaba, and Good Future, but the specific service model and depth are unknown. Even so, I believe that if the project is good, users can still obtain tokens that may be issued in the future by participating in the 0 cost point plan.
HeyElsa
Elsa is an AI Agent designed for blockchain-related tasks. I have been following this project for a long time. It is rare for this project to insist on building products instead of issuing coins, when many ChatBots with the DeFAI concept are competing to issue coins. Elsa can now stably meet almost all the token interaction needs on multiple chains, including staking and lending, sending and receiving cryptocurrencies, exchanging and bridging cryptocurrencies, checking cryptocurrency prices, checking popular tokens, checking and setting investment portfolios, and getting the latest news. Currently, users can get points by completing various tasks, which may be related to the subsequent token plan.
Infrastructure
Conduit
Conduit is a crypto infrastructure platform that focuses on helping teams quickly deploy production-level OP Chains to meet the needs of DeFi protocols, game companies, and NFT platforms. The project recently completed a $37 million Series A round led by Paradigm and Haun Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures. The funds will be used to develop customizable blockchain products. At a time when Base is promoting L3s App Chain, Conduit simplifies the blockchain development process under Bases Layer 2 expansion needs, and the market demand is strong. Although no tokens have been issued yet, recent financing shows market confidence, and tokens may be launched in the future to incentivize ecosystem participants.
Supermigrate
Supermigrate is a blockchain project migration service that helps projects transfer between different networks. It currently supports Base, Op, Mode, Ink and other chains. In a multi-chain ecosystem, with the development of L2, the demand for EVM migration services will increase, and the demand for such basic tools may increase.
Social and Prediction Market
Limitless
Limitless is a decentralized social prediction protocol similar to Polymarket, which allows creators to configure prediction markets and share them with the community. Users can trade the results of real-world events and earn fees, similar to binary options or 0 DTE options, providing a low-cost trading experience, and the total bets in the market have now reached $170 million. Users may obtain tokens that may be issued in the future by actively participating in the prediction market, providing liquidity, or recommending new users.
Neynar
Neynar provides developer tools to help build decentralized social networks, mainly serving social protocols such as Farcaster. The project recently completed an $11 million Series A round of financing with the participation of Coinbase Ventures. As the infrastructure of social protocols, although it currently only uses a business model of fiat currency and Crypto subscriptions, as a tool for deep participation in Farcaster products, it does not rule out the possibility of issuing tokens to stimulate its own ecosystem in the future.
The above projects are not commercial investment advice, but only for sharing. Please pay attention to protecting your assets in the current bear market. The rapid development of the Base chain will give full play to the strong Dev in its ecosystem to accelerate product release, and Base is also working hard to increase the communitys contact or investment methods with valuable products in various aspects to release a wider pool of funds, which will bring more opportunities on Base. BlockBeats will continue to track valuable information.
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