Base Blows Up Averaging 4.7 Million New Monthly Users

It’s no shock that Base had a breakout year, but the scale of the chain’s user growth is impressive nonetheless, according to blockchain analytics firm Flipside.

In a new report, Flipside said Base “redefined what exponential growth can look like.”

Looking at the growth in new users and super-users with at least 100 trades per month across the blockchain industry, Base led the way.

New monthly acquired users grew 57x, moving from 244,000 acquired users in January to an average growth of 4.7 million per month through November. In October, Base accounted for 13.7 million of 19.4 million new users overall among the seven chains studied.

The report looked at Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Optimism and Polygon.

Newly acquired users for Bitcoin remained relatively flat throughout the year despite its explosive price growth, Flipside said. It maintained an average monthly user growth of 936,000, putting it in fourth place of the seven chains observed. And newly acquired users actually dropped 28.5% month-over-month in November, despite its price rocketing from $71,000 on Nov. 1 to $97,000 on Nov. 30.

Ethereum averaged 1.56 million new users, while Arbitrum saw 1.2 million and Optimism 348,800.

Super Users Soar

Base also led the way in newly acquired DeFi-related super-users, starting December, with 15.1 million super-users, compared with Ethereum’s 10.7 million and Polygon’s 7.0 million. Arbitrum had 6.2 million and Optimism 1.8 million.

Unsurprisingly, Flipside attributes this strong showing by the Layer-2 chain to parent Coinbase’s “massive user base,” which accounts for about $130 billion in assets.

“This success likely came down to Base's ability to surpass many legacy chains in multiple trending sectors this year, including but not limited to memecoin and NFT trading,” the report said.

As for DEXs, Uniswap grew explosively on Base, going from 36.8% of total acquired user DEX activity to 91.3%.