The Base put the Cobalt upgrade into production on mainnet on Wednesday (30), adding transactions that can only be included when specific conditions are met and expanding the controls available in the B20 standard for issuing and administering assets. The upgrade was completed at 20:00 UTC, according to the network's official status.
One of the main changes is the Validity Transactions. The feature allows sending a transaction signed in advance and defining conditions related to balance, contract storage, block number, or Flashblock index. Base verifies these rules before inclusion and considers the transaction eligible only when all criteria are met.
In practice, the framework allows creating operations such as swaps conditioned on a given network state without relying on a separate keeper to monitor the blockchain and send the transaction at the appropriate time. An order can, for example, remain pending until a price condition is reached or expire if that does not happen within the defined interval. Eligibility, however, does not reserve space in the block nor guarantee that the transaction will be included.
B20 expands controls for tokenized assets
Cobalt also expands the B20, Base's native standard for token creation. The new Composite Policies allow combining allowlists and blocklists using union or intersection rules. This makes it possible, for example, to require simultaneously that an address be on a list of verified users and on another list of authorized investors, without copying and synchronizing these databases externally.
The upgrade also adds mechanisms aimed at asset administration. B20 now allows scheduled changes to the multiplier used to represent balances, a feature applicable to events such as stock splits, and expands authorized seizure functions when that control is enabled on the asset. These tools bring Base's infrastructure closer to requirements found in tokenized assets subject to transfer rules and compliance controls.
Cobalt is Base's third independent upgrade and succeeds Beryl, which introduced B20 in June. The upgrade also includes changes to node infrastructure and the registration process for trusted execution environments, but the most direct impact for applications is in the new primitives for conditional execution and programmable asset management.
