Understand the BASE ecosystem: Why Base can surpass Optimism in a short period of time and become the ETH Layer 2 with the third in TVL

The establishment and development of Base

Base is a blockchain platform supported by the well-known centralized exchange Coinbase. It has risen rapidly since 2023 and has become the focus of the industry. In the past six months, Base has successfully attracted the implementation of many projects, including the popular SocialFi project Friend.Tech, the decentralized trading platform (DEX) BunnySwap, and the decentralized finance (DeFi) project Synthetix. The deployment of these projects has effectively promoted the rapid increase in the amount of locked positions in the Base chain.

Not only that, Base has recently become the new home of several meme coins, promoting community activity and discussion. For example, the listing of the $BRETT meme coin brought a large amount of transaction traffic and media attention. This series of activities caused Base’s lock-up volume to surge in a short period of time, eventually surpassing Optimism and becoming the third largest lock-up volume among Ethereum Layer 2 solutions.

Although Base has not yet announced plans to issue its own tokens, the strong support behind it — Coinbase’s credibility, diverse ecosystem projects, and the craze of meme coins — has established a solid market position for the Base chain .

The Rise of the Base Meme Coin Ecosystem

When it comes to the development of meme coins on Base, we have to mention $BLAD, which is the first meme coin on the Base chain to attract the attention of the global crypto. Since its name “BALD” means “bald” in Chinese, it is reminiscent of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. This coincidence has caused $BLAD to attract great attention in the community. The creator of $BLAD continued to add liquidity to the market during the price surge, and quickly withdrew when the price reached its peak, reportedly making a profit of 3,163 ETH (approximately $5.9 million) in this wave of operations.

As Base ecological projects and their development mature, the narrative of meme coins on Base becomes more and more active. Especially recently, other meme coins on the Base chain such as $BRETT and $DEGEN have also received enthusiastic participation and extensive discussions from the community. These Base-based meme coins, especially $BRETT, have achieved an astonishing 500% growth in just half a month.

Driven by the recent craze of meme coins and the technical support of the Base public chain, it is expected that the market value and community activity of these meme coins will further increase. Under this trend, meme coins on the Base platform will undoubtedly gradually become a hot topic and investment focus in the encryption market.

Based-Rollup: A new revolution in Ethereum Layer 2 technology

As blockchain technology continues to evolve, Layer 2 solutions have become an important tool to improve Ethereum performance and reduce transaction costs. Although traditional Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup provide certain improvements, they still have considerable technical limitations.

Optimistic Rollup requires long challenge windows to correct possible fraud, resulting in long wait times for fund withdrawals and high gas fees during peak periods. Although ZK Rollup can quickly confirm transactions, it consumes a lot of computing resources in the process of generating zero-knowledge proofs, affecting transaction speed and cost.

In March 2023, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the concept of Based Rollup. This solution completely hands over the responsibility of transaction sorting to the underlying L1 and outsources the sorting work to Ethereum’s verifiers. This not only inherits the security and reliability of Ethereum, but also reduces transaction delays and rollup operation costs. There is no need for additional security mechanisms or consensus algorithms to ensure the validity and order of transactions.

In addition, the ordering responsibility is transferred to the Ethereum main chain and the technical architecture of Layer 2 is simplified, reducing the need for signature verification of the orderer, improving the speed and efficiency of transaction confirmation. Layer 2 can process and confirm transactions in batches more efficiently through Based Rollup technology, significantly reducing verification complexity and resource consumption.

At present, many projects have begun to explore the use of Based Rollup technology. For example, Ethereum’s second-layer network Taiko has built its ecosystem around Based Rollup technology, promoting the development of a series of applications and demonstrating the huge potential of Based Rollup in modern blockchain applications.

Prospects for Base Ecology

Base currently ranks third among Ethereum Layer 2 solutions by lock-up volume, demonstrating its rapidly rising strength. Considering that Base has heavyweight support like Coinbase behind it, even if there is no plan to issue tokens, Base’s market discussion and influence cannot be underestimated.

Observing the development blueprints and directions of other Layer 2 players, I firmly believe that it is only a matter of time before Base surpasses Blast, which currently ranks second. In terms of the number of DApps and transaction volume, Blast is slightly inferior to Base. At present, most users lock their positions in Blast mainly to get the first opportunity for possible airdrops. However, as Blast is expected to conduct a token issuance in June and July, once the token issuance is completed, its locked-up volume is expected to be significantly reduced.

Compared with established Layer 2 public chains such as Arbitrum, if Base wants to challenge its status, it needs to continue to launch innovative applications and expand the project ecosystem. If Base finally decides to issue tokens or even conduct airdrops, it is not impossible for it to strive to become the Ethereum Layer 2 platform with the largest amount of locked positions. Considering Base’s strong background and active promotion of on-chain application development, I believe that Base will become a key force shaking the market in the near future.