Coinbase's Chief Legal Officer, Paul Grewal, clarified that Base, the company's Ethereum Layer-2 network, is not an exchange and should not be regulated as such. Grewal emphasized that Base serves as blockchain infrastructure, with transaction matching occurring in applications built on top of it, rather than at the Layer-2 level. This statement comes amid regulatory discussions on whether centralized sequencers might fall under SEC jurisdiction. Ripple CTO David Schwartz and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin have supported Grewal's stance, likening Base to cloud service providers like AWS. In a strategic shift, Base is exploring the launch of a native network token, reversing Coinbase's previous position. Additionally, the project announced an open-source bridge with Solana to facilitate interoperability between ERC-20 and SPL tokens.