Base activated its Cobalt upgrade on mainnet on September 30, giving issuers of B20 tokens new tools to schedule balance multipliers, seize balances with a recorded memo, and combine transfer rules through two new composite policies. The upgrade does not make a tokenized asset a share in the company it tracks — it makes the issuer's control over that asset more explicit and more consequential.
Base activated Cobalt at 18:00 UTC on September 30, seven days after the same fork went live on its Sepolia testnet. The update adds functions to B20, the token standard Base introduced with its earlier Beryl upgrade, including transactions conditional on chain state and a registry for scheduling future upgrades.
Seizure and multipliers give issuers new administrative power
Cobalt introduces seizeWithMemo, which lets an authorized issuer move tokens out of a holder's wallet in one step, replacing an earlier burnBlocked function. The memo can record a reason on-chain, but it cannot prove the reason was legally sufficient — a smart contract can verify that the calling account has authority, not whether a court order was valid or an issuer targeted the correct account.
A separate scheduled-multiplier function lets an issuer change a token's displayed balance at a future time without each holder signing a transaction, similar to a stock split. The issuer must still carry out the matching real-world corporate action and notify brokers, custodians and price feeds; a token could double its unit count on-chain while a trading system keeps an old per-unit price and misstates exposure.
Two new policies combine existing transfer rules
Union and Intersect are the fork's two new composite policy types. Union permits a transfer if any one of several underlying conditions passes; Intersect requires multiple conditions to pass together. Which conditions apply, and in which direction, depends on each token's own configuration — the fork supplies the primitives, and issuers supply the governance.
Not every proposed feature shipped. Payment of network fees in B20 tokens was dropped from the fork's scope on September 29, and faster 200-millisecond blocks remain part of a later, unscheduled Denim upgrade. Base's documentation sets the mainnet node minimum at v1.4.2; an earlier v1.4.1 node can follow the fork's consensus rules while still failing to forward the new validity-transaction type correctly.
Seizure rights are not universal across tokens
The ability to seize a balance does not apply automatically to every token on Base. A B20 issuer must configure the relevant policy slot before seizeWithMemo becomes available on that asset, so two tokens built on the same standard can carry sharply different holder rights.
Base's broader tokenized-stock lineup, including its earlier B20 activation, makes that per-token distinction the detail holders now need to check. A tokenized share is not automatically equivalent to direct stock ownership.
Source: crypto.news
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
