Blockchain
Ethereum
Also known as: Ethereum L1, Ethereum mainnet
The public, permissionless, smart-contract-capable blockchain that serves as LearnCoin's ultimate settlement substrate via Base L2.
Ethereum is the public blockchain launched in 2015, designed around general-purpose smart contracts rather than just payment transactions. It transitioned to Proof-of-Stake consensus in 2022 (The Merge) and has been the dominant smart-contract platform ever since.
For LearnCoin, Ethereum is the ultimate trust substrate, but not the direct one. Credentials anchor on Base — an Ethereum L2 built on the OP Stack — and Base settles periodically to Ethereum L1 via the OP Stack's withdrawal bridge. That architecture lets us pay L2 prices (cents per transaction) while inheriting L1 security (tens of billions of dollars of validator stake defending the chain).
If Ethereum L1 ever became unsuitable — a catastrophic consensus failure, a forced regulatory exit, a chain split we couldn't reconcile — LearnCoin's anchoring would need to migrate. In practice, Ethereum L1 is more credible than most sovereign legal systems for the purpose of "a transaction ordering that nobody can unilaterally reverse."
Related terms