The largest crypto exchange by volume in the USA has launched the BASE network, which is now garnering more interest. In 2023, Ethereum layer2 solutions were very popular, and many alternatives emerged. Despite the competition from Shibarium, BASE, and others heating up, the BASE network surpassed a significant milestone yesterday. So, which altcoins benefit from this?
Current Status of the BASE Network
Coinbase has launched an Ethereum layer2 network called Base, which aims to diversify its revenue streams and has announced upfront that it will not issue tokens. This network caused great excitement in its early days, even witnessing many useless tokens achieve massive gains.
Now Base is back in the spotlight. The volume of decentralized crypto exchanges operating on this network has reached a new record high. The DEX volume, which increased by 25% compared to the previous day, surpassed the $1 billion threshold for the first time.
According to data compiled by Dune, on March 30th, Base exceeded the previous day’s volume of $959.63 million, with 64.3% coming from the UniSwap protocol. Aerodrome Finance with 9.7% and SharkSwap with 7.8% represented smaller portions of the volume. The number of daily active users (DAU) also rose from 153,000 to 172,000. The weekly average number of users reached 667,765.
Pay Attention to These Altcoins
The increase in active users and volume certainly has a reason. We have been talking about meme coins that have been gaining popularity on the BASE network for a while. Despite frequent scam incidents, a meme coin frenzy similar to the one on the Solana network has started here, and crypto analyst Wizard of SoHo is confident that more is to come.
Wizard of SoHo mentioned that Base reminds him of the early days of Solana and wrote that we could see meme coins reaching a market value of several billion dollars on the BASE network as well. According to CoinGecko, Degen (DEGEN) and Brett (BRETT) are currently the two largest meme coins by market value, with $709 million and $654 million respectively.
On March 25th, DEGEN had a market value of only $143.4 million. We saw the price increase roughly fivefold within about 7 days. Jesse Pollak argues that we could see days when BASE will compete with Ethereum in terms of activity.
