Written by: Kaori, BlockBeats

Editor: Jack, BlockBeats

After Bitcoin rebounded and stabilized, the market conditions heated up rapidly. To say that the ecosystem with the most outstanding performance in recent times is none other than Base. The most intuitive data is that it took Base’s TVL 203 days to reach US$1 billion, 23 days to reach US$2 billion, and 5 days to reach US$3 billion.

However, in the existing impression, from Friend.Tech to Farcaster, the popularity of the Base ecosystem always comes and goes like a tornado. But this time seems different. Base's fundamentals seem to be changing.

What has changed in Base?

Someone once took a screenshot of the bar chart of active users on the Base chain, indicating that the Base chain has always been active, but the answer given by Jesse, the head of the Base protocol, was "nine Months and Octobers don’t count, the ecosystem wasn’t ready at that time.” It can be seen that Jesse believed that the timing of Friend Tech’s emergence was not the most appropriate, and the traffic it brought to Base was too much for the entire ecosystem at that time. Ahead of time.

But upgraded in Cancun Once officially complete, Base is ready. The most obvious change is that there are more people, projects, and money on Base.

Data does not lie

According to Dune data, standards based on contract complexity and interaction volume , the number of high-quality developers on Base has increased 6x since the beginning of this year. According to Artemis data, the number of unique contracts deployed on Base and the number of unique wallets deploying contracts on its network greatly exceed Arbitrum and Optimism.

In addition, the number of projects in the Base ecosystem is also increasing. The following figure is a chart of the number of new tokens appearing on DEX produced by Variant Fund data analyst J.Hackworth. It can be found that Base has become the most dynamic L2 in the Ethereum ecosystem and is comparable to the growth rate of Solana. According to DeFillama data, Base’s protocol revenue now exceeds $2 million a day, a significant increase from early March.

This past weekend, Due to the hype of DINO, MFER and Degen Chain, DEX trading volume increased by 100% in 24 hours. At the same time, Solana's DEX trading volume dropped by nearly 50%. It can be seen that the current market attention has been attracted by Base.

"The base leader" is here Expansion

“Give me $1 billion and 60 employees, and I can turn Coinbase into a DAO.”

Jesse, the founder of Base, is a rare leader among the founders who is keen to participate in the early stage of alpha, participates in pre-sales and even gets rug, and also combines his enthusiasm and thinking about the cause. They are all publicly posted on social media, creating a very people-friendly image. This is undoubtedly a good image management for entrepreneurial projects sprouted from large enterprises.

Recruiting people means that a company is on the rise; looking at a company's recruitment can also give a glimpse of its current business needs. For Base, the most important tasks at present are to expand the chain to meet demand; and to expand the team and system to support developers on a large scale.

On Coinbase’s official recruitment website, Base is currently recruiting positions for DeFi Ecosystem Director, Consumer Ecosystem Director, Developer Ecosystem Director and Marketing Manager.

These hires reflect Base Corresponding to the current demand for ecological construction on the chain, Base’s recruitment needs 7 months ago were product leaders and creative directors. The different development stages of the ecology determine that Base did not have a strong on-chain financial ecology at the beginning. Instead, the creator economy, social networking, games, etc. were tilted towards the consumer side, which has gradually become part of Base's DNA. Now, starting DeFi construction and enhancing developer ecological maintenance will bring another cryptographic force to Base.

Expectation management of "Coinbase rich second generation"

The inflow of money is Base's hard power, understand it clearly Where Base's money comes from may better control the pace of Base's development.

Coinbase’s support for Base is Base’s greatest confidence. Jeese, head of Base, once said, “Base’s structure as a startup within Coinbase gave me tremendous trust and leeway to execute. We have a small, highly capable team and also benefit from leveraging the larger scale of the parent company. infrastructure and talent, which can help us develop rapidly."

This year, this help has become more obvious.

The first is the smart wallet launched by Coinbase. Its core function Magic Spend allows users to transfer funds on the chain "in a timely manner". Users have the option to withdraw funds from their Coinbase account when a transaction is signed/paid, and funds are only withdrawn when a transaction is signed/paid. Users don’t need to do anything other than have funds in their Coinbase account, there’s no wallet extension to download, and there’s no need to bridge.

This is critical to converting Coinbase users into Base. If you are a user of OKX Web3 wallet, you should be able to feel the importance of the wallet entrance to the chain. Coupled with the Cancun upgrade reducing Layer 2 handling fees, Base may be able to successfully handle this wave of traffic.

In addition to bringing more people, Coinbase also brings more money to Base. A few days ago, Coinbase Vice President Max Branzburg posted on social media, "In the future, Coinbase will store more corporate and customer USDC balances on Base. This enables Coinbase to manage and protect with lower fees and faster settlement times. customer funds without affecting the Coinbase user experience."

Institutional USDC inflow is the highlight of the capital inflow indicator for Base. There is a strong correlation between the inflow of USDC and the TVL explosion of a chain. Take Solana as an example. On March 11, Circle minted 250 million USDC on the Solana chain, which injected stronger vitality into the Solana ecosystem and generated Very positive impact.

"What if" is the reaction of some people when Base has no plan to issue coins, and this is also Base's way to attract users and funds.

The aforementioned support of Coinbase to Base belongs to Base’s inherent halo, and the market’s expectations for this have been partially verified. Although the official Base account clearly states in the introduction that it will not issue coins, for an Ethereum Layer 2, issuing coins is the biggest expectation of users. If the protocol does not issue coins, it must rely on on-chain activity to maintain income. From Friend Tech to Warpcast, Base will always attract groups of airdrop hunters, and this is the charm of Base.

Related reading: "Not issuing coins is Base’s weapon》

Is Base really ready?

Although Base’s TVL, DEX trading volume and other indicators have increased significantly, whether it is facing new or old “strong rivals” within the Ethereum ecosystem , outside the ecosystem, Solana continues to gain momentum. Is Base really ready?

Liquidity injection has begun

The absolute standard for measuring whether a chain is a temporary success is fluidity.

In the early morning of March 30, Sartoshi, the founder of the well-known NFT project Mfers, announced on mfers holders issue airdrops. 100x in 6 hours. The wealth-creating effect of MFER has made many people who had previously dismissed Base begin to change their attitudes.

At the same time, Sartoshi This approach has also brought many well-known NFTs from the previous cycle to attention at this time "for a long time". The community even compiled a list, including the official posts of NFT projects such as Penguin, RTFKT, coolcat, and the social accounts of their founders. . Just yesterday, doodles co-founder poopie (Jordan Castro) announced the launch of the experimental Meme project poopcoin on Base and airdropped it to NFT holders. It is foreseeable that if a few more meme disks such as BOME and SLERF on Solana are born on Base, more liquidity will be injected into Base.

In addition to meme, don't forget that there is Friend Tech, a once-famous project on Base. Although its momentum is much smaller than last year, due to its large user base, if it is airdropped, it will become the second wave of liquidity for Base. On the points trading platform Whales Market, Friend Tech's points once rose to $5, which also shows that market expectations are increasing. Perhaps capital such as Paradigm will learn the "airdrop liquidity" strategy of the capital behind Solana and continue to increase the liquidity injection of Base.

"Gas pressure is given to Base"

After the Cancun upgrade was completed, the transaction fees of Layer2 of the Ethereum ecosystem did decrease, but the cost-saving data packet Blob technology introduced by the upgrade was originally intended to provide more storage space to expand Ethereum, thereby reducing the transaction fees of Layer2, but now it is widely used to create "blobscriptions", which runs counter to the original goal. This also squeezed the available share of Layer2, making Base's fees even higher than before the upgrade during peak trading periods.

As mentioned above, Base's current daily revenue has exceeded 2 million US dollars. The figure below shows the gas fees of Ethereum's major Layer2s in the past month. Base's gas fees at the end of March were far ahead.

During Solana's peak period, its transaction fees have been controlled at a level that users don't notice, so Base still has a lot of room for improvement in this regard.

However, the Base team attaches great importance to this issue. Last week, Jesse said that the Gas Limit has been increased by 50% to 3.75mgas/s, which has reduced the median Gas fee from more than $11 to around $0.02. Although the average fee is currently $0.06, the Base team plans to increase it to 5 mgas/s in the coming weeks.

Ecosystem cannot be beaten?

There is no doubt that DEGEN has broken through the circle, but the original "Index nature" standard has now become L3. It has separated from the first-line ecology and in turn grabbed Base traffic and liquidity. This has made the Base ecological fomo mood that does not have many strong targets even more serious. . In addition, some projects on Base still experience trading volume. At the time of writing, Base’s trading volume has returned to normal levels, but in the past few days, Base’s trading volume once exceeded $15.3 billion.

An ecology depends only on one Two short-lived out-of-circle projects are not enough to maintain long-term prosperity. One of the problems Base currently faces may be that there are not enough ecological mainstream projects accumulated. Aerodrome occupies half of Base TVL. Although this shows that VELO's DEX is very successful, it also reflects that there are no more viable projects in the Base ecosystem for users to choose from. Even due to excessive FOMO, the market value of Aerodrome exceeded its native protocol Velodrome several times.

In addition, most of Base’s DeFi facilities are currently derivative IPs of other ecological protocols. Aerodrome is the Velodrome migration of the OP ecosystem, and the lending protocol Moonwell is the wave There are many teams in the card ecosystem and other ecosystems that are chasing hot spots and migrating to Base. The most noteworthy of these migration projects is ResearchHub, the encryption research platform founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. Its foundation said over the weekend that it will migrate to Base in the near future.

Although more and more Projects began to patronize Base, but only when the native projects within the ecosystem become stronger can a group of loyal ecological users be gathered. Once the users and traffic brought to Base by protocols such as Friend Tech and Farcaster settle down and continue to cultivate this ecosystem, Base will take root deeper and have stronger strength to compete with other ecosystems.

In fact, Base has received great attention since its birth. The title of Layer2 launched by Coinbase, the only listed encryption trading platform, is enough to make its hot money flow. However, Base did not pursue high goals from the beginning. Instead, it chose social networking as a way to break the situation. It gradually cultivated culture and created this track, which created the soil that allowed the seed of DEGEN to be born and grow.

Jesse believes that anyone who tries to express that "going to market is the most important" has missed the point. The best GTM (go to market) is to focus on technology or product strategy. Think deeply and make it possible. But it is also because of the market’s expectations for Base that the seed of DEGEN will continue to grow, which is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, give Base some time, and Stay Based.

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