Base has what other L2s don’t: a culture



Coinbase may be pulling off a move that runs opposite to crypto’s holiest cypherpunk ideals: fostering an unironic vibe around Base, its corporate-powered L2.



No matter how you look at it, Base is popping off. The rollup network, built on the OP Stack, is posting all-time high transaction counts, stablecoin volumes and unique addresses.



The rising popularity of its native AMM, Aerodrome, has helped push Base’s total value locked to $2.57 billion — more than double Polygon and Avalanche.



It took years for those other networks to attract all that liquidity and mindshare. Base has done it in under eight months. And while Base still has only a small fraction of Optimism and Arbitrum’s TVL, Base is now firmly within spitting distance of Blast, the L2 offering native yield to attract crypto natives. 



Somehow, Base has developed its own culture. Base boasts bustling NFT markets where being “based” is a big deal. 



Ethereum has Bored Apes and CryptoPunks. Base, on the other hand, has Tiny Baseds Frogs, Based Fellas, and Primitives — the latter of which is a generative pixel art collection with “crypto-native” characters. All have seen millions of dollars of trade in the past week.




Base isn’t a narrative, it’s a way of life. pic.twitter.com/9kTi6Nosid — Toady Hawk (Noun 730) (@toady_hawk) March 25, 2024
Turns out, Ethereum layer-2s can be big enough to support their own communities



The sudden popularity of friend.tech was, in many ways, Base’s breakout moment. It gave the crypto crowd a familiar proof of concept with which to fool around as they waited for the bull market: Invest crypto in shares of your favorite social media accounts, like BitClout without its own blockchain or native cryptocurrency. 



Friend.tech has died down but the spirit has lived on. Base creator Jesse Pollak, also head of protocols at Coinbase, has pushed to find ways to fuse the network with Web3 social media app Farcaster and its programmable Frames.



Pollak has even been spotted in Base-flavored memecoin Telegram groups, spreading based vibes. 



Coinbase is so far successfully distilling all that buzz down into revenue. Gross profit for Base nearly cleared $4.5 million over the past week alone, up from under $100,000 in the first week of January. 



The secret source for crypto exchanges is diversifying from transaction revenues, and Base may be the killer ingredient for Coinbase . 



About 60% of Coinbase’s revenue last quarter was transaction fees, more than $500 million. Base’s annualized profit right now, based on the past week, is about $235 million. 



All Coinbase needs to do is keep the vibes high.



— David Canellis



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