原文作者:inpower王骏
Original source: Crypto Market Watch
Previously, we mentioned that Solana's pull marketing is huge, and it has the potential to be on an equal footing with the Ethereum ecosystem.
However, the Ethereum ecosystem is not vegetarian, and although the performance of the Ethereum main chain is relatively poor, the public chains of Ethereum L2 are actually relatively good.
Looking at the recent posture, relying on Coinbase's base chain is to lead the battle, and it is necessary to break the wrist with Solana.
Will the projects on the base chain be short-lived, and will there be long-term opportunities to make money in the future?
01
Launched for less than a year, it has been continuously exploding
When it comes to the L2 track, Base is actually a bit late.
The Arbitrum one we are familiar with was launched in August '21, and the OP was launched in December '21. The BSC chain is backed by Binance, in fact, the background is similar to Base, and the BSC chain was also launched in February 22. The base chain was only launched in August 23, and it has not been a year now, so it can be said that it was a late set.
Let's briefly sort out the development history of the base chain: February 23, 2022: Coinbase announced the launch of the Ethereum Layer 2 network Base and the establishment of the Base Ecosystem Fund. After about a year of development, in February 2023, Coinbase announced the launch of the Base testnet. After half a year of test network operation, it was officially launched in August 23. When it comes to pull marketing, the base chain is also very generous, just on the official network issued a meme coin called $BALD, a few days to pull up tens of thousands of times, running to now can almost be used as an active indicator of the base chain, with the recent popularity of the base chain is also all the way up.
It doesn't matter if you haven't heard of Bald, you won't say you haven't even heard of Friend.Tech, right? Although this project is almost finished now, it was so popular half a year ago. On August 10, 2023, friend.tech was officially launched on the base chain, and two months later, the TVL of friend.tech exceeded $50 million. The main gameplay of this app is that big V can settle in to generate tokens, and fans can buy tokens to enter the small group of big V. What various analysts said at the beginning Friend.tech combining the fan economy and on-chain games is the future of SocialFi. Now Friend.tech should have cooled down, looking back on the original popularity, there is a high probability that there is still a Base chain quietly supporting behind it to create a wealth effect. At the beginning, the product that imitated the Friend.tech model was not made, and I don't know if it was considered a model falsification.
02
Capital from all walks of life has come to the scene
After experiencing the popularity of Friend.tech, the base chain has also undergone a series of adjustments. It wasn't until this year's Cancun upgrade that there was a new wave of outbreaks:
A few days ago, the founder of the base chain listed a large number of projects of the base chain, which can be regarded as a clear card to express support:
In this list, the previously mentioned Friend.tech are also impressively listed, referring to the trend of $BALD, maybe there will be a wave of violent marketing.
Behind these applications are a number of well-known VC institutions in the crypto market, such as Paradigm, a16z, Multicoin, DragonFly, Variant Funds, 1confirmation, etc. Due to their different investment styles, these VC institutions have also differentiated into two characteristics in the Base ecosystem, one is the "gambler culture" player led by Paradigm, and the other is the long-term faction centered on a16z. But they all have one purpose - to bring more real users to Base and create an active and prosperous on-chain ecosystem.
At present, the TVL of the Base chain has also climbed to the 6th place of the mainstream public chain, and Ethereum L2 is second only to Arbi. Compared to Solana, it needs to grow 3 times to catch up.
03
Marriage with OP, the pattern is very large
The ecological logic of the Base chain is actually very distinctive, and there is still a lot of room for growth in the future.
First of all, the structure of the base is very large, so large that it is close to the bottom where anything can be open to cooperation
Not only does Coinbase always have a compliant style, but like Da Mei, it only provides services and does not issue coins.
As early as when the mainnet was launched, it jointly announced a governance and revenue sharing protocol with Optimism, and at a very early stage, Base Chain used OP Stack in technology selection. After signing this sharing agreement, Base and OP are also deeply bound at the governance and income levels, and can even be regarded as a "family" under the same ecosystem
At the governance level, OP and Base will transfer multisig governance authority to a Security Council composed of independent community members distributed around the world, which will be responsible not only for the upgrade of Base, but also for OP Mainnet and other OP Stack blocks, as well as Base
At the revenue level, Optimism pays up to 118 million OP to Base over six years, and Base provides a revenue share to Optimism in perpetuity.
Because Base feels that the OP's governance system is relatively complete, he directly uses it to let the OP govern itself, is this pattern big?
04
背靠Coinbase好乘凉
Compared with other chains, the biggest advantage of the Base chain ecosystem is that it is backed by Coinbase, a compliant exchange.
In terms of trading volume, Binance is several times higher than Coinbase, but in fact, the United States is the actual master of the world's finance, and its support for Coinbase is much greater than that of Binance.
For example, at about the same time that Binance was sanctioned and fined, Coinbase was deeply trusted by the SEC, and all BTC spot ETFs needed to adopt the shared supervision protocol provided by Coinbase before they would be accepted by the SEC.
The Coinbase exchange will also provide solid support for the star projects of the Base chain.
For example, the liquidity protocol Aerodrome, a fork protocol deployed on Base by OP head protocol Velodrome Finance, whose native token is AERO, and on January 25 this year, Coinbase added Aerodrome Finance (AERO) to the topband roadmap. On February 27, Aerodrome announced that it had received an investment from the Base Ecosystem Fund, led by Coinbase Ventures, by purchasing AERO tokens, Aerodrome's native token.
After such a wave of operations, the AERO token has risen 20 times in just one month. As a business token, this increase is staggering.
I believe that there will be more star projects on the base chain in the future, supported by Coinbase, from pulling the plate to the one-stop ~
05
The exchange supports the public chain or becomes the mainstream
After experiencing the popularity of Friend.tech, on the other hand, Binance's support for projects on the BSC chain seems to be picky and searching.
Although the TVL on the BSC chain is large, much higher than Base, second only to the Ethereum main chain and Tron.
Tron everyone is mainly for the first U use, and there is basically no ecology.
The BSC chain also feels big but not strong, not to mention the technical governance, the development of the BSC chain in recent years has also won the title of "soil dog chain", and Binance officials have almost never supported BSC projects like Coinbase.
Some time ago, the so-called $ENTS project, which wants to reshape the glory of BSC, staged a live broadcast to turn into a smashed disk in seconds!
Not only that, but some serious projects will also be dragged down if they are on the BSC chain. For example, the bibi community, as a Chinese-initiated ownerless community, has been building from May 23 to the present, and even the red god can't stand it, thinking that the BSC chain is dragging down bibi., otherwise this meme would have taken off long ago.
BS officials have only recently engaged in a little bit of the so-called innovation competition, which is also based on the trading volume to determine the winner, and the transaction fee is used as a bonus, compared to the support of the base chain, it is really not enough.
Therefore, the TVL on the BSC chain is not even as good as it was in 21 years when it did not support smart contracts. Compared with other L2 public chains, it is not bad in terms of technology/resources, and if this round of bull market does not support ecological projects, it may be hopeless.
However, the old L2 contributions such as Arbitrum/Polygon lack the support of top exchanges like Coinbase, so their ability to support ecological projects is also limited.
Solana's previous approach was to rely on FTX's support, and after the collapse of FTX, there is a high probability that it will find another exchange for ecological binding in the future. Maybe it's Kucoin, which was recently sanctioned (guess, there is no evidence).
In fact, OKX has also launched its own OKTC chain for layout.
Therefore, the future competition pattern may be the model of performance public chain + exchange support.
There will definitely be viewers asking: what about BitChain and the Ethereum main chain?
As we mentioned before, the performance of this bit chain and the main chain of Ethereum is actually not good, and it is okay to send a flash of asset speculation, but if the application ecology of the blockchain explodes in the future, it must still go to the high-performance chain.
At present, there is only one exchange that is clearly and vigorously supported: Coinbase is to support the base chain with practical actions
Binance is still paying lip service to BSC, probably considering that the first choice for all projects is the listing mortgage, there is no need to support it.
The OKTC has just begun, and the follow-up opportunities can also be focused on.
And other mainstream exchanges will gradually stand in line, just as each public chain will support its own ecological Dex. It's just that the strength of most public chains may not be advantageous compared with the head centralized exchanges, so this process mainly depends on the strategic rhythm of major exchanges.