Base Activity Surges After Public Launch

Activity on Base, the freshly-launched Layer 2 network from Coinbase, is at an all-time high after opening its doors to all users earlier this week.

Base processed 8.76 transactions per second (TPS) on average over the past 24 hours. That makes it the second-most popular Layer 2 network behind zkSync Era with 10.2 TPS.

Base Opens For Business

Base completed its “general access” launch on Aug. 9 following a limited launch for developers three weeks earlier. Activity on the highly-anticipated L2 abruptly skyrocketed to 7.6 TPS on July 30 as degen traders raced to trade memecoins on the LeetSwap DEX.

But activity dropped in the first week of August, trending between 3 TPS and 5 TPS after a series of rug pulls and an exploit targeting LeetSwap dampened trader sentiment.

Transaction volume hit an all-time high on Aug. 10. The surge coincided with a record 136,000 active wallets on the network, 42,000 of which were first-time Base users.

Onchain Summer

It’s a promising start to Base’s “Onchain Summer” campaign, a multi-week event intended to attract users to the network featuring daily NFT and showcases of on-chain art, gaming, and music.

More than 142,000 wallets have already bridged assets over to Base and claimed the “Bridge to Base” NFT since the campaign launched, according to Etherscan.

friend.tech, a Base-native social networking marketplace, is also generating a surge in on-chain activity. The app allows users to trade tokens associated with Twitter profiles, with the platform taking a commission on transactions.

The upstart project said it was suffering issues on Aug. 10 after reaching its server capacity. After upscaling its resources twice, it resumed operations.

“We genuinely did not realize there were still so many people in crypto,” the project tweeted.