Coinbase's Base blockchain, a layer 2 solution aimed at reducing fees and increasing scalability for Ethereum users, was officially launched today.
However, according to a report by Nansen, a blockchain analytics firm, some crypto whales have already been transacting on the network for days and seem to prefer meme tokens.
Nansen analyzed the 22 wallets with the most deposits to Base as of July 31, each bridging over at least 100 ETH (worth $185,100) from Ethereum to Base.
The report revealed that these early Base whales had assets in various high-risk tokens, such as UNIBOT, a Telegram trading bot token, the management token ARB, RLB, BALD, TOSHI, PEPE, and HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu (BITCOIN), another layer 2 solution, Arbitrum.
Nansen analyst Niklas Polk said of the whales' choices:
“There is a heavy trend of memecoins in the selection of these whales. There wasn't much in Base to do other than mimicking memecoins, so most of the whales in the report have an affinity for it.”
The report also revealed that these early Base whales did not stick to a single layer 2 network, but were active in competing Ethereum scaling solutions such as Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync Era and Polygon zkEVM.
“As more apps roll out (DEXs/lending platforms), we're likely to see a more mature ecosystem that doesn't just revolve around memecoins,” said Jake Kennis, Nansen research analyst.
*Not investment advice.