Powered by Friend.tech, Base gets off to a solid start

Posted: September 17, 2023

• Base’s on-chain activity exploded over the past week, outpacing even OP mainnet and Arbitrum.
• The impetus was provided by Friend.tech which saw a rapid surge in user activity.

The Ethereum [ETH] layer-2 (L2) landscape has been buzzing with activity in 2023. The rapid expansion of the existing projects and the launch of several new ones has garnered a lot of interest from the broader crypto industry.

Base’s remarkable growth

A major boost to the already crowded space was received with the launch of Base, the scaling solution launched by crypto behemoth Coinbase. The vision was to create a platform that would host millions of cutting-edge decentralized apps (dApps) and take Web3 adoption to the next level.

More than a month since the mainnet launch, Base has done full justice to the hype and one could safely say that it has exceeded expectations.

According to the popular on-chain analytics firm IntoTheBlock, Base’s on-chain activity has exploded, outpacing even the established names like OP Mainnet [OP] and Arbitrum [ARB].

In just 2 months, Coinbase’s Base L2 has skyrocketed, topping the charts in transactions and unique addresses. Much of this growth is fueled by the new social app, FriendTech. pic.twitter.com/CdVrTcFqot

— IntoTheBlock (@intotheblock) September 16, 2023

Base races past competition

Over the past week, Base has been steadily recording more transactions than any other L2 in operation. In fact, a closer look revealed that Base’s tally was significantly higher than the top two rollups in the space. On 14 September, Base recorded 1.88 million successful transfers, more than the combined tally of OP mainnet and Arbitrum.

Base also clocked its highest transaction throughput on 14 September with an average transactions per second (TPS) of 21.29, as per L2Beat. While efficiency has fallen somewhat since the peak, Base still retained its position as the fastest L2.

For perspective, Base’s TPS increased by 227% in the last week. In contrast, most of the other top L2s saw weekly declines in throughput.

Source: L2Beat

Base’s dominance among the optimistic category of rollups was also noteworthy. As per IntoTheBlock, Base averaged approximately 888k daily active addresses over the last month, accounting for a whopping 60% of all addresses that used optimistic rollups in the same timeframe.

Base’s obvious advantages in transaction settlement attracted a lot of projects into its fold. In little more than a month, the total value locked (TVL) on the L2 has risen to $386 million as of this writing.

Source: L2Beat

The friendly push

The primary driver behind Base’s growing on-chain traffic was the decentralized social app, Friend.tech. The disruptive protocol has taken the online world by storm since its launch in early August.

For the uninitiated, Friend.tech allows users to make money from the popularity, credibility, and social value of creators and influencers. Users buy and sell shares or keys of their friend’s X profiles. The shares then rise and fall depending on the popular sentiment. Additionally, when a person’s shares are bought and sold, they earn 50% of the trading fees. Cool, ain’t it?

The unique model has also attracted people in droves. According to DeFiLlama, liquidity worth $32.89 million was locked on the protocol at the time of writing, representing a 6x jump month-to-date (MTD).

Source: DeFiLlama

Nearly 23,000 users utilized the platform on 16 September to buy and sell shares. In the process, trading fees worth a million dollars were collected by the Web3 social app.

Interestingly, the dramatic surge in usage was partly driven by the need to secure points that may subsequently be utilized for an AirDrop. An AMB Crypto article recently highlighted the phenomenon of flipping which was boosting Friend.tech’s activity.

What to expect next?

2023 has proved to be the moving year for L2 scaling solutions. Base’s launch was an iconic development in the sphere as it was arguably the first time that a publicly-listed company made significant investments into blockchain technologies. The proponents of Base would hope that success doesn’t end up being a fad.

The space had a lot to look forward to, with the EIP-4844 upgrade being the first in queue. The scalability improvement, intended to achieve 10-100x cost savings from Ethereum, could usher in a new era of growth for L2s.