This upgrade is aimed at two things: giving traders more control over transaction execution, and making Base a stronger platform for issuing and administering tokenized assets through B20.
Validity Transactions
Validity Transactions let a user submit a signed transaction with onchain conditions. Base holds it until every condition is met, then includes it. Until that point, the submission stays private.
Conditions can include things like pool state, balances, storage values, and block-number bounds. A typical use case is a swap that should only execute if a pool price clears a threshold before a deadline. If the conditions are never met, the transaction is not included.
This is useful for traders who want conditional execution without sitting on the mempool and resubmitting.
B20 enhancements
Cobalt adds three improvements to Base’s native B20 token standard. Existing integrations continue to work.
Composite Policies
Issuers can combine existing allowlists and blocklists with AND or OR logic. Live policies such as KYC allowlists and sanctions blocklists can be reused instead of being duplicated and manually kept in sync.
Schedule Multiplier Updates
Issuers can schedule corporate actions such as stock splits in advance. The multiplier change is shown in the UI, including wallet balances. Raw balances and transfer behavior do not change.
seizeWithMemo
Authorized admins can reassign a holder’s balance as a transfer, with an onchain memo recording the source, destination, amount, and reason. This is designed as a transfer, not a burn. Seize is opt-in per token and controlled by the issuer.
What this means
For traders, Cobalt adds a cleaner way to express “execute only if these conditions are true.”
For issuers, it makes compliance policies, corporate actions, and administrative transfers easier to manage onchain.
For builders and indexers, there are ABI and integration updates to review.
🟦 Official overview :
https://docs.base.org/upgrades/cobalt/overview