Much of Base’s profitability has been driven by the meme coin mania that gripped the crypto market in early 2024.
The Ethereum layer 2 network Base has recently achieved a significant milestone, with its total value locked (TVL) surpassing $8 billion. This achievement comes just days after Base overtook Optimism’s OP Mainnet.
According to the latest data from L2Beat, Base’s TVL stands at $8.08 billion. This includes $5.92 billion in natively minted assets and $2.14 billion in canonically bridged value, which implies assets locked on Ethereum to be represented on Base.
Base, incubated by Coinbase, is built on the open-source OP Stack, which allows developers to deploy reliable, secure applications with low transaction fees. It first reached the $1 billion mark in TVL on February 27, around seven months after its launch in August 2023. The network has since experienced a remarkable growth trajectory, increasing eight-fold over the last 104 days.
Amid its growing popularity, Base surpassed OP Mainnet last week and became the largest chain within the Superchain ecosystem. It is now the second-largest Ethereum scaler in terms of TVL, trailing only Arbitrum One, which holds $18.27 billion in TVL.
Notably, Base also leads all Ethereum layer 2 networks in transactions per second (TPS) over the past month, averaging 30.36 TPS, outpacing Arbitrum One’s 23.52 TPS. Over the last 30 days, it has processed a total of 64.86 million transactions, highlighting its growing adoption.
Financial Performance and Challenges
Base has seen significant on-chain profits over the past three months. In March, it reached a record profit of $16.9 million. Despite a 58.6% drop to $6.98 million in May, Base still outperformed other Ethereum layer 2 networks, including OP Mainnet, which recorded $1.57 million in profits during the same period.
Much of Base’s profitability has been driven by the meme coin mania that gripped the crypto market in early 2024. However, this popularity has also attracted scammers. In March, phishing scammers stole $3.35 million from the network, according to blockchain anti-scam platform Scam Sniffer. This represents a 1,880% increase from January when only $169,000 was lost to such scams.
Despite these challenges, the future looks promising for Ethereum layer 2 scaling networks. Analysts at asset manager VanEck predict that these networks could collectively achieve a $1 trillion market cap by 2030. Their evaluation considers five key areas: transaction pricing, developer experience, user experience, trust assumptions, and ecosystem size. The analysts write:
“When users interact with L2s, familiar tools and interfaces are paramount. The adoption of familiar wallets and blockchain explorers from Ethereum to L2s greatly enhances user comfort.”
Meanwhile, the broader cryptocurrency market appears to be in a consolidation phase, with Bitcoin trading around $69,500.
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