What Are Whales Investing in on Coinbase’s Base Network? Nansen Investigates

Nansen – a blockchain market intelligence firm – released a report on Tuesday analyzing how the earliest whales to onboard Coinbase’s layer 2 blockchain – Base – are using their money.

Here’s what the company found.

• Early whales largely allocated to Ethereum and its layer 2 networks. As of August 7, the most value held by these whales ($19.6 million) was on Ethereum itself, followed by Base ($17.6 million), Arbitrum, and Optimism.
• Regarding tokens, ETH was the most common holding at $11.6 million. Beneath it were relatively large memecoin allocations, including Bald at $2.7 million (skewed by the BALD deployer), UNIBOT ($284,000), and BITCOIN ($273,000).
• Some of the most common entities these whales are interacting with include commonly used decentralized exchanges, such as Uniswap and 1Inch.

“Most of their activity comprises DEXs, stables, L2s, and common DeFi apps,” wrote Nansen. Much like token and chain allocation, protocol usage tends to congregate around a few “trustworthy” DeFi apps.

• The analysis pertains to whales who bridged assets to Base before its official launch this week, meaning they had to access the ecosystem without a prepared front-end.
• Based on this, Nansen assumes many of those early depositors were “crypto native degens.”

“In reviewing the landscape of Early Base Bridgers, it’s evident that the crypto-native segment is actively engaging with the BASE platform even prior to its official launch,” concluded the report.

• Base officially launched on August 9, accruing 136,000 daily active users within the first two days.