Base has activated Cobalt, its third major network upgrade, on mainnet, bringing tighter control over transaction execution and new growth opportunities for the B20 token standard in onchain asset issuance. The upgrade focuses on two areas: advanced trading functionality delivered through validity transactions, and enhanced support for Foundation's tokenized finance assets. The changes were detailed in an announcement on the Base blog, as reported by Crypto Ninjas. With the mainnet activation, the new capabilities are now live for users and developers building on the network — and they speak to two distinct audiences at once: traders who run conditional strategies, and issuers of tokenized assets who need finer-grained control over how their tokens move.

Conditional Transactions Advanced Traders

At the center of Cobalt are Validity Transactions, a new primitive that allows users to sign and submit a transaction before its execution conditions have been satisfied. Instead of repeatedly monitoring the market and resubmitting orders, a trader can specify requirements such as an asset price threshold and a block-number deadline. Base then evaluates those requirements as new blocks arrive, and the transaction becomes eligible for inclusion once every condition is met. In practice, that shifts the work of watching the market from the trader to the network itself, with Base carrying the trigger logic block by block.

As an illustration, a trader could place a swap that executes only if a token reaches a price of 4,000 USDC before a specified block height. Such an order remains pending until the threshold is hit or the deadline arrives, without the trader needing to resubmit it. If the price condition is not satisfied before the deadline, the transaction is never included onchain. Users must still construct the transaction and define both its conditions and its contents — Base does not trade on users' behalf.

Orders Can Stay Private Until Inclusion

Validity Transactions can also be kept private until they are included onchain. This gives sophisticated traders more control over when their orders become visible and reduces the need to continuously poll blockchain state. Visibility is a meaningful lever in active markets: an order that stays private until inclusion does not broadcast the trader's intentions while it waits. The functionality is provided through Base's new Transaction API and is suited to strategies that depend on specific timings or onchain conditions.

B20 Gains New Controls for Tokenized Assets

Cobalt also advances B20, the network's native token standard designed for stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and other fungible assets issued onchain. The new features focus on compliance, a core requirement for issuers of regulated instruments such as tokenized funds. One new feature, Composite Policies, enables issuers to build AND and OR combinations from various compliance rules, so that multiple requirements must all hold, or that satisfying any one of them is sufficient. A tokenized fund, for instance, could require a recipient to complete KYC and accreditation requirements while using separate providers to perform sanctions screening. Because the policy is part of the token standard itself, the compliance rules attach to the asset as it moves onchain.

Also new on Cobalt are scheduled multiplier changes. Issuers can program multiplier adjustments in advance for corporate actions such as stock splits, without minting or burning tokens or altering the underlying raw balance. Because the adjustment is expressed as a multiplier, the raw ledger record stays intact while holders' effective amounts shift with the corporate action.

An additional feature, seizeWithMemo, allows balances to be transferred with seizure functionality once it is enabled for a token. The transfer can carry an onchain note explaining the action being taken as part of the move. Whether the function is enabled, and who may use it, is determined by the issuer. The memo gives each such transfer an onchain record of its stated rationale.

Base Targets 200ms Blocks in Future Upgrades

Cobalt sits within a longer technical roadmap covering trading, financing, and payments onchain. Base plans to target even shorter block times — as low as 200 milliseconds — while maintaining its existing network guarantees. The network also intends to support protocol-level smart accounts, along with gas sponsorship and transaction batching, among other EVM enhancements. Those roadmap items are the markers to watch as Base builds out the programmable-finance capabilities Cobalt introduces.

For asset issuers, traders, and developers, Cobalt moves Base closer to an infrastructure designed for programmable financial products rather than simple token transfers, laying groundwork for trading, financing, and payments use cases built directly onchain.