Original author:Kaori，BlockBeats

Original 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 Bases 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. Bases fundamentals seem to be changing.

What happened to Base?

Someone once took a screenshot of the bar chart of active users on the Base chain, which shows that the Base chain has always been active, but the answer given by Jesse, the head of the Base protocol, was September and October dont count. The ecosystem was not ready at that time. Yes. It can be seen that Jesse believes that the time when Friend Tech appeared was not the most appropriate, and the traffic it brought to Base was too advanced for the entire ecosystem at that time.

But with the Cancun upgrade officially complete, Base is ready. The most obvious change is that there are more people, projects, and money on Base.

Data doesn’t lie

According to Dune data, based on standards of contract complexity and interaction volume, the number of high-quality developers on Base has increased sixfold 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, Bases protocol revenue now exceeds US$2 million a day, a significant increase compared to 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, Solanas 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 expanding his recruitment

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. He has participated in pre-sales and even been rug. He also publicly posts his enthusiasm and thoughts about the cause 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 companys recruitment can also give a glimpse of its current business needs. For Base, the most important missions currently are to expand the chain to meet demand; and to expand the team and system to support developers on a large scale.

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

These recruitments reflect Bases current on-chain ecological construction needs. Correspondingly, Bases recruitment needs 7 months ago were for 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 Bases genes. 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 Bases hard power. Understanding where Bases money comes from may be a better way to grasp the pace of Bases development.

Coinbases support for Base is Bases 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 grow 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 can choose to withdraw funds from their Coinbase account when a transaction is signed/paid, and funds are only withdrawn when a transaction is signed/paid. Aside from having funds in their Coinbase account, users don’t need to do anything else, download a wallet extension, or 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 impacting the Coinbase user experience.

Institutional-level USDC inflows are 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 Bases way to attract users and funds.

The aforementioned support from Coinbase to Base belongs to Bases inherent aura, and the markets 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 Bases various indicators such as TVL and DEX transaction volume have increased significantly, whether it is facing new or old strong rivals within the Ethereum ecosystem, or Solanas unabated momentum outside the ecosystem, is Base really ready? ?

Liquidity injection has begun

The absolute criterion for measuring whether a chain is a temporary success or not is liquidity.

In the early morning of March 30, Sartoshi, the founder of the well-known NFT project Mfers, announced on X that he would issue his own meme token mfercoin on the Base chain and issue airdrops to mfers holders. 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, Sartoshis approach has also attracted attention to many well-known NFTs from the previous cycle at this time. The community even compiled a list, including official promotions of NFT projects such as Penguin, RTFKT, coolcat, etc. Founder’s social account. 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 memes, don’t forget that there is also Friend Tech on Base. Although the momentum is much smaller than last year, due to the large user base, if it is airdropped, it will become the second wave of liquidity for Base. Orgasm. On the Whales Market, a points trading platform, Friend Tech’s points once rose to $5. This also shows that market expectations are increasing. Perhaps capital such as Paradigm will learn from the “empty bet to invest liquidity” strategy of the capital behind Solana and continue to provide support for Base. Liquidity injection increases.

Gas pressure is on Bases side

After the completion of the Cancun upgrade, the transaction fees of Layer 2 of the Ethereum ecosystem have indeed dropped. However, the cost-saving packet Blob technology introduced in the upgrade was originally intended to provide more storage space to expand Ethereum, thereby reducing the cost of Layer 2. Transaction fees, however, are now heavily used to create “blobscriptions”, which goes against the original goal. This also squeezes out the available share of Layer 2, making Bases fees even higher during peak transaction periods than before the upgrade.

As mentioned earlier, Base’s current daily revenue has exceeded 2 million US dollars. As can be seen in the figure below, the gas fees of major Layer 2 in Ethereum in the past month, Base’s gas fees at the end of March were unparalleled.

During Solanas peak period, its transaction fees have been controlled at a level that users cannot 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 it has increased the Gas Limit by 50% to 3.75 mgas/s, which has reduced the median gas fee from more than 11 US dollars to about 0.02 US dollars. Although the average charge is currently $0.06, the Base team plans to increase this to 5 mgas/s in the coming weeks.

Ecology cannot be defeated?

There is no doubt that DEGEN has broken through the circle, but the original Index nature target has now become L3. It breaks away from the first-line ecology and in turn grabs Base traffic and liquidity. This makes the Base ecologys fomo sentiment, which does not have many strong targets, even more serious. In addition, some projects on Base still experience trading washout behavior. At the time of writing, Bases trading volume has returned to normal levels, but in the past few days, Bases trading volume once exceeded US$15.3 billion.

An ecosystem relying only on one or two short-lived out-of-circle projects is 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 VELOs DEX is very successful, it also reflects that there are not 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 Bases DeFi facilities are currently derivative IPs of other ecological protocols. Aerodrome is the Velodrome migration of the OP ecosystem, the lending protocol Moonwell is the Polkadot ecosystem, and there are many other ecological teams 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 are beginning to patronize Base, 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 attracted great attention since its birth. The Layer 2 title launched by Coinbase, the only listed crypto trading platform, is enough to make 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 the culture and creation track and created the soil that allowed the seed of DEGEN to be born and grow.

Jesse believes that anyone who tries to express going to market is the most important thing misses the point. The best GTM (go to market) is to think deeply about technology or product strategy and make it possible. But it is also because of the markets expectations for Base that the seed of DEGEN will continue to grow. It is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, give Base some time, and Stay Based.