Base continues rolling up the charts

Base recently saw all-time highs in both transaction count and the number of active addresses in the chain. This surge has solidified Base's position as a leading Layer 2 solution, surpassing other optimistic rollups such as Arbitrum and Optimism.

On July 15, Base chain recorded 3.28 million transactions. By the end of the week, on July 19, this number had climbed to 3.52 million transactions, reflecting an average gain of approximately 1.8% per day over the week.

Parallel to the surge in transaction counts, the number of active addresses on Base also hit record highs. Starting at 567,000 on July 15, the number of active addresses rose to nearly 650,000 by Friday, July 19, achieving an average gain of about 3.5% per day over the same period.

With this, Base has experienced a notable spike in fees, reaching its highest single-day total in over a month with $177,000 collected on Saturday, July 20. This surge in activity is reflected in the past week’s cumulative fees, which amounted to $967,000.

Base, a Layer 2 solution, was anticipated to capture a significant retail user base due to potential direct support and onboarding capabilities from Coinbase. This prediction is now materializing as Base has outperformed competing optimistic rollups such as Arbitrum and OP Chain, making it the most popular optimistic rollup in terms of transaction count and number of active addresses.

However, it's worth noting that Base is still behind Arbitrum in terms of total value locked (TVL) within the chain. At the time of writing, Base had $1.77 billion in TVL, while Arbitrum had $3.25 billion. Base has long surpassed OP Chain’s TVL of $787 million.

A notable driver of this recent surge in activity on Base has been the memecoin MIGGLES, which was deployed on ape.fun, a fork on Base of Solana’s popular pump.fun platform. The MIGGLES memecoin was deployed and subsequently saw a surge in popularity following a tweet from the official Coinbase account, which featured an advertisement of a cat with a similar name.

The MIGGLES coin has since reached a market capitalization of nearly $120 million, with daily trading volumes reaching upwards of nearly $150 million per day for the four days it has been live.

This is an excerpt from The Block's Data & Insights newsletter. Dig into the numbers making up the industry’s most thought-provoking trends.