The total value deposited into various DeFi contracts on the Coinbase-incubated Base network reached a new all-time high of $301.2 million, rising 53% overnight, per DeFiLlama data.

This surge in deposits on the Ethereum layer-2 network can be attributed to the liquidity mining incentives on the newly deployed Aerodrome decentralized exchange.

Liquidity mining, also called yield farming, refers to the incentives a project doles out for users joining the platform. In this case, Areodrome is essentially paying users to simply make trades on the platform.

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Aerodrome is a fork of Velodrome, itself a popular decentralized exchange on Optimism.

Aerodrome was also launched on August 29 by the same team and introduced liquidity mining for its native governance token, AERO.

The project designated 10% of Aerodrome’s initial token supply of 500 million tokens for liquidity mining. The team also airdropped 40% of the initial supply to Velodrome’s VELO token holders.

The AERO emissions began on August 30.

Shortly after, Aerodrom’s total liquidity surged from around $3 million to $144 million, per DeFiLama data, as users rushed to farm AERO tokens.

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Base ecosystem still nascent

Base’s DeFi ecosystem is still in its early innings with meme coins dominating activity and lending protocols like Aave seeing scarce liquidity, currently hosting less than $1 million in total collateral, per DeFiLlama.

The Ethereum layer-2 witnessed significant usage due to social media app Friend.tech.

User transactions on Base mainnet.
Daily transaction count on Base. Source:  Base Mainnet explorer.

However, the daily transaction count on Base appears to have fizzled out, falling from a peak of 1.4 million on August 21 to just over 400,000 transactions yesterday, as activity on the social media app plummeted.

The total value bridged on the Base layer-2 jumped from $254.6 million to $311.7, recording a 22% increase overnight, according to L2Beat data.

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