The Coinbase chain, Base has gained traction in the last year, emerging as one of the top L2 on Ethereum. I’m not even sure should it be called L2, as from my perception it’s more of an L3 than L2. Coinbase wants to give its users more toys to play and onboard the users of the exchange to the Base chain. Instead of users using Coinbase to buy crypto and then transfer it to another chain where they do all the defi, nft and other stuff, keep them in the ecosystem by offering them this company chain.
The chain itself is opensource, built with the Optimism technology. However, from my understanding Coinbase is running the chain by themselves, meaning one validator/block producer. I’m not totally sure how exactly this works and if there more validators, or options for other to support the chain, but in both cases it’s a single entity show. What this means is that basically if they want, they can censor transactions, freeze funds etc. without any consent from other parties. They can be subject to regulation and government control as a US based company.
However, for now the show continues and the chain has gained traction. It is global and international, and everyone can use it. A while back they even introduced zero fees for USDC transactions on Base, making payments with USDC on Base attractive.
Let’s take a look at the data on the Base network and see what has been happening in the last period.
The data presented here is mainly from base scan, DeFi Lama and Dune Analytics.
We will be looking at:
- Total Value Locked TVL
- Number of Addresses
- Active Addresses
- Daily Transactions
- Fees
- Contracts
Total Value Locked
This represents how much of value has been bridged to the Base chain where it seats and is being used in DeFi and other use cases. Here is the chart:
As we can see for the first time funds started being bridged on Base back In August 2023, when the TVL reached 400M USD. Then a period of stagnation up to February 2024, when the TVL started growing aggressively and it reached 1.5B in a short period.
In the last weeks the TVL increased drastically again due to the increase in prices and is now at 3B!
Number of Addresses
One of the key metrics for crypto projects is the number of wallets.
First the overall number of wallets.
A massive growth back in August 2023, basically from zero to more than 50M in a period of one month. I believe at this time the Friendtech application was gaining traction on the Base chain. A steadier growth since then up to the summer 2024.
In the last month a more aggressive growth again and we are now at 180M wallets on Base.
For comparison Ethereum has almost 300M wallets.
If we take a look at the new daily wallets we get this.
Here as well we can see the growth back in August and September 2023 when there was close to 1M wallets created daily. This lasted up to October 2023 and then dropped to less than 100k new wallets daily.
A growth again in the summer of 2024 and increasing in the last months up 1M and above, reaching 2M on occasions.
Active Addresses
How many of the wallets created are active? Here is the chart.
At first the number of active wallets increased to around 100k DAUs, where it stayed for a while, and then a continuous growth in 2024, starting back from March 2024 reaching an amazing 2M DAUs in October 2024. A drop in the last period, but still above the 1M mark.
For reference the number of active wallets on ETH is around 500k.
Daily Transactions
The activity on the network is mostly represented by the number of daily transactions.
On the transactions side we can see a constant growth in 2024, that started back in March. At the moment there is more than 7M transactions per day.
On Ethereum the number of transactions per day is around the 1.2M mark.
Fees
Base is basically promoting itself as a low cost option to Ethereum, but also an easy gateway from the Coinbase exchange. Recently they have even made USDC transactions feeless.
Here is the chart.
The above are the fees per transactions in $.
As we can see, at first there was a lot of volatility with the fees going up and down but staying relatively low. In the recent period the fees are basically below one cent or in the range of 0.001 to 0.005 USD. This is no doubt a very small fees.
But even with this small fees the Base chain generate daily revenues somewhere between 100k to 700k USD.
Contracts
Base as Ethereum is a smart contract platform so here is the chart for verified contracts per day.
A spike at first up to 2k daily contracts, then a drop to few per days, and an increase again in March 2024 to 2k. A small pull back to around 1.5k daily contracts where it is now.
From the overall data we can see that there was an initial spike in the use of the Base chain in 2023 and then a drop. But since March this year the chain relay took off and now has 7M daily transactions, a million active daily accounts and close to 3B in TVL. At the same time providing very small fees competing with the fees on the Solana chain.
All the best
@dalz
The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the people( @acidyo ) sharing the post on Reddit as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com. Otherwise, rewards go to the author of the blog post.
Base is doing well considering the spike in factors like number of (active) addresses, transactions, locked Base etc. It's pretty certain Base will be adopted even more widely in the near future, as it has a lot of things that attract investors like it's no fees usdc transactions and others.
Seems like everything crypto-related is growing right now..
Could you do one foe ADA? Might do well sharing it on their subreddit!
I did one, years ago, but I remember they didnt had good stats to work with. Might take another look again soon :)
Crypto related growth actually