There are now more daily transactions on Ethereum layer-2 Base, which was incubated and launched by Coinbase, than on Ethereum—fueled in large part by the hype around social app Friend.tech.
The latest data from digital asset analytics platform Artemis Terminal shows that daily transactions on Base hit 1.37 million yesterday while on Ethereum, they stood at little over 1 million.
Base is American crypto exchange Coinbase's latest product: An Ethereum scaling solution which promises to make it quicker, easier and cheaper for developers to build apps. But Coinbase has been adamant that Base will be decentralized, meaning the company's role in its governance will diminish over time.
San Francisco-based Coinbase has said the chain will be open ecosystem for millions of new decentralized apps.
And it has taken off with lots of projects and their tokens but right now mainly because of Friend.tech, a new decentralized social media platform build on Base which has exploded with popularity.
The reason? Friend.tech is a Twitter-linked crypto app which lets users buy and sell shares of their friends’ social media profiles—and it's being lapped up by celebs. It's worth noting that Ethereum researcher Evan Van Ness and Flashbots product lead Robert Miller have pointed out on Twitter: There are signs that a large portion of the transactions on Base are coming from bots and spammers trying to get an edge on Friend.tech.
Still, the app's boom in popularity means that transactions are soaring on Base as more people sign up to use the app.
Since its launch, the total amount generated in protocol fees is fast closing in on $6 million, according to DeFi Llama data.
The mobile platform links to Twitter accounts and tokenizes them; users who buy "keys" to another account gain exclusive access to that user's private chat room—and ostensibly the value of that user's token, whether it rises or falls.
But Base is still lagging behind Ethereum, the second biggest blockchain, in other metrics: Volumes on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) is still the highest on Ethereum-based ones, at 836 million. On Base, which stands at a mere 8.25 million.
And the total value locked in Base protocols is at 180 million; on Ethereum it's over 22 billion.