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Activity on Base, the newly launched Ethereum layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase, has surged in recent days following its mainnet launch on August 9.
Daily active users on Base hit 136,000 yesterday, according to Dune Analytics, while the total value of funds bridged into the network has soared by over 80% to hit $170 million, per data from L2Beat. Base has leapt into the top five in total amount bridged across layer-2 networks, trailing behind Arbitrum One, Optimism Mainnet, zkSync Era, and dYdX.
On Thursday, Base surpassed the zero-knowledge proof-based Starknet rollup, which currently has $132 million locked in the network.
The surge in Base activity can be attributed to meme coin trading and a social finance application, Friend.tech.
Meme coins and "crypto-native degens" drive network activity
A meme coin mania had already taken off on Base even before its mainnet launch, with several users bridging tokens before an official user interface (UI) was made available to the public by the development team.
Users bypassed the need of a UI by using development tools launched on July 13 by the Base team to bridge ETH and trade meme coins on the Layer-2 rollup.
Meme coins are tokens without any utility inspired by an internet meme; Nansen’s latest report on Base shared with Decrypt suggests that “the early Base depositors are crypto-native degens.”
The report found that these users’ activity was concentrated on top decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap, as well as stablecoins and common DeFi applications, which highlighted the “sticky usage of trustworthy apps” extending to the Base ecosystem.
Meme coin trading hype was adversely affected after the leading meme coin on the network, BALD, experienced a rugpull.
Nevertheless, DeFi activity is starting to come back alive, with the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi applications on the network surging to $72.83 million, per DeFiLlama data.
Overnight trading volumes on Base since Thursday reached $186 million, according to DEXScreener data.
RocketSwap and BaseSwap accounted for the majority of the trading volumes populated by meme coin reading.
The top traded pairs on the exchange since yesterday were Unibase (UNIBASE), Punk (PUNK), and BaseShib (BASESHIB).
A new social network project called Friend.tech also saw a surge in activity, with over 66,000 transactions and 7,000 active users, per a Dune dashboard by Austin Adams.
Friend.tech operates as a Twitter-connected app, offering users the opportunity to trade "shares" of other users.
By owning a share of a particular user on the platform, individuals gain access to that user's content and the ability to send them messages.
The total transactions of BASE recorded on August 10 was nearly 580,000 over 136,000 daily active users, per a Dune dashboard by TK Research.