The second Base began, and the joke buried in it

Base started at 00:35:47 in the morning, UTC. Not a launch-event hour, not a round number, just a slightly awkward time when most of the people who would eventually use the chain were asleep.

You can pull the receipt yourself. Block zero of Base mainnet carries the Unix timestamp 1686789347, which converts to 15 June 2023 at 00:35:47 UTC. Take that number modulo 86,400 and you get 2,147. The chain this collection lives on began on the 2,147th second of a day, out of the same 86,400 the site sells.

The block itself is nearly empty. Zero transactions. A gas limit of 30,000,000 and nothing spending it. Genesis blocks tend to be like that: a starting state written down rather than a moment anything happened. But this one has something in it.

Thirty-two bytes of text

Every Ethereum-style block header has an extraData field, a small free-form slot where whoever produced the block can put whatever they want. On Base's genesis block it holds exactly 32 bytes, and those bytes are readable ASCII:

extraData:
0x616c6c20796f75722062617365206172652062656c6f6e6720746f20796f752e

decoded:
"all your base are belong to you."

Thirty-two characters including the full stop. It fills the word exactly, which I doubt was an accident.

The line it is quoting is one of the most-repeated mistranslations in the history of video games. Toaplan released the shooter Zero Wing in Japanese arcades in 1989, and the European Mega Drive conversion arrived in July 1991 carrying an in-house English script that turned a villain's boast into "All your base are belong to us." The English was done by someone on the export side of the company rather than a professional translator. The phrase escaped the game entirely around 1999 and 2000, moved through forums and a remix track, and became one of the first things the internet ever made into a running joke about itself.

Base changed the last word. Us becomes you. A line about a corporation announcing it has taken everything from you, rewritten so it says the opposite, and then welded into the first block of a chain run by a very large corporation. It is a good joke and a slightly nervous one, and it is the kind of thing that only works if you leave it somewhere permanent and say nothing about it.

They made people go and find it

They did say something about it, though not by explaining it. When Base opened mainnet to builders, the announcement offered a commemorative mint with a small treasure hunt attached. Step one of the instructions read: go read the Base mainnet genesis block message, hint, extraData. Step two was to sign that message with your own key under EIP-191. Step three was to hand the signature to a contract, which would only mint if the thing you signed was the sentence sitting in block zero.

The proof of having read a block is a signature over its contents. That is a nice piece of design, and a fairly rare one: a token whose eligibility condition is literally that you went and looked at the chain's own first record. The open mint ran until 13 August according to the same post.

Where genesis lands on a clock

Genesis timestamps are a strange little genre. Bitcoin's first block is stamped 3 January 2009 at 18:15:05 UTC, second 65,705 of that day, late afternoon in London. Ethereum's genesis block, oddly, carries a timestamp of 0. Not a time at all. The chain's own first header claims it began at midnight on 1 January 1970, which is the polite way of saying the field was never filled in because there was nothing yet to measure against.

Base picked a real second. And per the arithmetic in an earlier note, that second had to be odd, since every Base timestamp after it is genesis plus a multiple of two. 1686789347 is odd, so 2,147 is odd, so the entire chain inherited its parity from a single decision made once at 00:35:47 and never revisited.

Second 2,147

I checked, because I could not not check. Second 2,147 in this collection is unminted. I called getSecondData(2147) against the contract while writing this and it came back with the minted flag at zero, no token id, no owner.

That is a fact and not a suggestion. There is nothing in the contract that knows or cares what happened on Base at 00:35:47, no trait, no marker, no tier. Second 2,147 mints under the same rules as second 2,146, and owning it would confer exactly one thing: the number. The meaning would live entirely in whoever bought it and would not travel with the token if it were ever sold. That is true of every second here, which is a thing I have written about before and keep finding more ways to say.

What I actually like about 00:35:47 is smaller than any of that. Someone, at some point, sat down and decided the first thing a new chain would ever say should be a twenty-year-old mistranslation with one word flipped. Then they buried it in a header field almost nobody reads, in a block containing no transactions, timestamped in the middle of the night. Three years later it is still there, unchanged, unchangeable, one second of one day holding a joke nobody has to get.

Usual cautions, since this touches a live chain. Minting is a transaction on Base with a network fee, and it cannot be reversed once confirmed. Lost keys mean a lost token. Phishing sites copy real ones, so check the contract address against the About page before connecting a wallet. Reading anything described here is free and needs no wallet at all. None of this is financial advice, and a second is not an investment.

→ Base only ever ticks on odd seconds · Whose midnight is second zero? · Read your second off Base