Despite its youth, the Base blockchain, powered by Coinbase, has already surpassed 20 million unique addresses. Here’s a look at the statistics to gauge the adoption of this layer 2 of Ethereum (ETH)
Layer 2 Base surpasses 20 million unique addresses
While its mainnet was opened to everyone just over a month ago, Layer 2 Base powered by Coinbase is seeing some particularly interesting adoption figures. And with good reason: this weekend, Ethereum’s second-layer network (ETH) surpassed 20 million unique addresses, i.e. almost 20.5 million :
Figure 1 – Unique addresses on Base
Of course, it should be noted that this does not correspond to 20 million users, who may operate from several addresses. Nevertheless, this statistic already far exceeds other Ethereum scaling solutions.
Arbitrum One and Optimism, launched in 2021, have 12.54 and 12.7 million unique addresses respectively. The temporary hype surrounding the Friend.Tech project could be one of the sources of this large number of new addresses.
In terms of daily active addresses, these generally fluctuate between 60,000 and 70,000 over the month of September.
A month ago, we highlighted the 10 million transactions passed. Today, that number has more than tripled, to 34.4 million.
Beautiful DeFi performance, but still huge room for improvement
While the number of unique addresses can offer interesting indications in terms of adoption, it is far from sufficient to draw any real conclusions.
The total value locked (TVL) in decentralised finance (DeFi), for example, will be a relevant indicator for comparing Base to other blockchains. On this point, layer 2 has already entered the top 10 and has even overtaken Solana (SOL), while the latter is experiencing difficulties due to the FTX affair :
Figure 2 – Top 10 blockchains by TVL in the DeFi
DefiLlama lists 119 DeFi protocols on Base, on which the equivalent of 375 million dollars has been deposited. This is 42% less than Optimism and more than 4.5 times less than Arbitrum, each with 648 million and 1.7 billion dollars in TVL.
In terms of protocols, the decentralised exchange (DEX) Aerodrome leads the way, accounting for 36% of Base’s TVL. Friend.Tech, which we mentioned earlier, came second with $35.4 million, followed by well-known Web3 ecosystem applications such as Stargate, Curve and Compound:
Figure 3 – TVL of DeFi protocols on Base
While all these values show that there is still enormous room for improvement, they are still very respectable performances, given the youth of blockchain. It should also be remembered that we are still in a bear market, and that this data will be given more weight in the coming months so that we can study it better.
