Written by: ZENECA
Translation: Plain Blockchain
In this article, I will share why I believe Base is still very important, the areas I am currently focusing on in Base, and how you can participate from an operational standpoint. I will provide an overview of the ecosystem and share some indicators that make me more certain that the 'Base era' is approaching.
However, before diving deeper, it's necessary to mention some obvious things: most of the content in this article, as well as the vast majority of projects in the current crypto market (especially those related to Memecoins), carry extremely high risks, massive bubbles, and almost everything could plummet 95%-100% from current levels. Like others, I am trying to trade this market, and I will sell when I think the price is close to the peak and gradually lock in profits as the price rises. In fact, I have already realized some gains.
Don't be a stubborn 'diamond hands' holder, and don't be unwilling to sell due to moral coercion from others. Ultimately, you need to do what is best for yourself. If your investment has reached a life-changing amount, then sell, cash out, and change your life.
I've seen too many people take large sums of money from peak to 'back to square one', so I want to clarify these risks. Here are my personal views; they may be wrong, the timing may be off, or there may be other issues. The importance of 'Do Your Own Research' (DYOR) has never been so prominent.
Next, let's start with Coinbase and discuss why I am bullish on Base.
1. Reason One: Coinbase is a Big Player
Coinbase is one of the largest and most influential cryptocurrency trading platforms globally and is a major player in the crypto industry. Whenever a Memecoin lands on Coinbase, Memecoin investors around the world rejoice because they know it usually means that the Token's price will (generally speaking) rise. This is because Coinbase provides a convenient channel for ordinary users (or crypto enthusiasts) to trade these Tokens.
Coinbase's mission is to increase economic freedom globally and bring 1 billion people into the on-chain ecosystem. While they would be pleased to have 1 billion users on any chain, they are clearly particularly keen to attract these users to their own Base chain.
I believe that most people still underestimate the power of Coinbase's marketing machine and its importance as a company.
As one of the largest trading platforms in the U.S., Coinbase not only holds a significant commercial position but also often represents the entire crypto industry in legal and political battles.
Last year, when the SEC decided to sue Coinbase, it was one of the few moments in the crypto space where almost everyone was united under the same goal. Nothing sparks group cohesion more than a common enemy. Of course, there are some dissenters, but to hell with the dissenters, they are insignificant and hardly worth mentioning.
Regarding Coinbase, I want to add that — the company seems genuinely full of sincerity from top to bottom, and the employees are all very outstanding. It's not to say that other trading platforms can't achieve this, but the atmosphere that Coinbase radiates is particularly positive.
In conclusion, simply put, Coinbase is a very important player. They have their own Layer 2 blockchain, which is likely to be a significant event worth watching.
Speaking of Base, we must mention Ethereum — a blockchain that people love and hate. However, I believe the era of ETH is also approaching...
2. Reason Two: The ETH Era
By the way, Ethereum is also a big player. I know it seems to have become a trend to complain about Ethereum on social media nowadays, but honestly, I think these voices are just a few loud opinions on Twitter. Most truly influential people do not spend all day on Twitter. Of course, this applies to all blockchains, but especially to Ethereum (partly because many have already moved to Farcaster).
I won't deny that Ethereum has indeed experienced some failures. Over the past 12-18 months, it has 'lost to' Solana (SOL) in many respects. It is slow, expensive, and due to the presence of many L2s (and L3s), the entire ecosystem seems somewhat fragmented and clunky.
Even so, Ethereum remains the second largest blockchain by market cap, with a market cap nearly four times that of its competitors.
Among the 328 blockchains tracked by DeFi Llama, Ethereum still accounts for over 50% of the total value locked (TVL). What a 'dead chain' (laughs).
Clearly, Ethereum's price performance has lagged behind almost all other coins this year. But I believe this situation is about to change.
This is the ETH/BTC chart over the past five years. Clearly, Ethereum's performance hasn't been great over these two years! But anyone with even a slight knowledge of charts, markets, and investments will tell you that this is a buying opportunity, not a time to sell.
18-24 months ago was the time for you to swap ETH for BTC or SOL.
I am not saying you should definitely swap BTC or SOL for ETH right now, but it is certain that the timing for swapping is much better now than it has been in the past few years.
Yes, yes, I’m going to bring up this old cliché again, but it is just too accurate and applicable. The best time to buy SOL was during the peak panic after the FTX collapse.
I must admit that I reacted a bit late to SOL's miraculous performance during this wave (at least relatively speaking, I entered when SOL was around $40). And as a stubborn ETH bull, I might have held on longer than a qualified trader should. But there are reasons why I have remained bullish on ETH, and many of these reasons are mentioned in this article.
Many people's dissatisfaction with ETH mainly comes from the friction encountered while using the chain, such as high gas fees and slow transaction speeds. L2 has solved many of these issues, and they are quickly catching up in their weak areas. And so we come to...
3. Reason Three: Usage Friction is Rapidly Dissipating
One important reason for Solana's recent success is its focus on consumer applications and end-user experience. They minimize friction as much as possible, and undeniably, the barrier for ordinary people to use the Solana blockchain is much lower compared to other major blockchains. Low transaction fees and fast transaction speeds are important, but mobile-friendly wallets like Phantom and applications like Moonshot have had a huge impact on user acquisition.
Along with the popularity of Memecoins, especially the heat of the Pump Fun protocol, and the network effects brought by these factors, it is not surprising that all of this has been successful.
But I believe Base is experiencing a similar trend, or is very close to it. For example, just today, Phantom announced it would support Base:
Over the past few weeks, I've heard people in dozens of Discord/TG chat rooms say, 'Ah, I only have SOL in my wallet, and I don’t know how to use Base.'
I believe this is just the beginning, and we will see more and more protocols and applications starting to support Base, as well as more applications that are native to Base appearing.
Additionally, many are still haunted by the high gas fees of Ethereum in 2021 and the poor user experience of MetaMask, but they haven't experienced the convenience of interacting with Base using Rabby, Rainbow, Phantom, or the native Coinbase Wallet (which offers a 4.7% native yield on held USDC, which is quite nice).
4. Reason Four: Strong Team Strength
When investing in traditional companies or projects, I have always believed in betting on great talent. Base has a very strong and extremely reliable team that is working their magic:
Brian Armstrong casually met with Trump to discuss cryptocurrency policy. By the way, Brian is truly an amazing figure, and you can read this article from 2020 (yes, sorry, I’m asking you to read more) and reflect on what the world was like back then, and how most large tech companies were politically positioned, compared with the radically different approach that Brian has led Coinbase to take.
Then there's Base's face, Jesse Pollak, who leads both Base and the Coinbase wallet.
I have saved dozens of tweets because I was looking for some tweets to post here that showcase his personal qualities, especially how he has shaped Base into what it is today. Browsing through his Twitter timeline is endlessly fascinating. I recommend you check it out for yourself, but for the lazy 99% of you (if I were in your position, I would be too), here are a few of my favorite tweets:
Jesse has been visiting builders and leaders during a 21-day global tour to spread the good news:
Regarding attempts to break into Instagram and TikTok:
On understanding Meme culture (recommended video to watch):
There are many more. The above are just two outstanding individuals working hard to achieve Base's goals. Supporting this team feels quite reassuring.
5. Reason Five: Outstanding Data Performance
Data shows that activity on Base has significantly increased, and capital inflows are also considerable. For me, the most important indicators to predict whether a chain might achieve significant success are: 1) the number of builders/developers creating applications; 2) whether capital is flowing into the chain.
Looking back over the past three months, Base's net capital inflow has been nearly on par with Solana:
Looking back over the past week, Base has far outperformed all other platforms:
Trading volume is also steadily increasing, with a recent uptick over the past few days:
In recent days, many AI agents on Base have gained considerable attention on Twitter:
Overall, it is evident that traffic and attention are shifting towards Base. Whether this can be sustained, or if it is just a temporary fluctuation, remains to be seen. Many claim this is just a temporary situation, and Solana will maintain most of the attention in this round. I obviously disagree, but I am not arrogant enough to think that I am definitely right and others are definitely wrong.
The data looks good, but it may be temporary.
6. Reason Six: Airdrop Speculation
I want to make it clear that this is purely speculation, and I have no insider information about whether there will be a Base Token. They have explicitly stated that there will be no Token, but likewise, Optimism and many other chains have made similar promises.
However, with significant changes in the legal and regulatory landscape, I do not completely rule out the possibility of an airdrop at some point in the future.
That being said, I won’t put too much energy into this; I personally view it as a nice-to-have rather than something to keep always on my mind. I recommend using the chain normally and trying some experiments, as this is often the best way to participate in airdrops when the protocol does indeed roll out airdrops.
Alright, those are my six reasons for being bullish on Base, and I believe Base Szn may be coming soon. Now, let’s dive into some areas worth paying attention to and where I've been spending time on Base:
7. Base Chain Ecosystem
1) Virtuals Protocol
You may have heard about Virtuals by now, whether through my tweets/shares or other discussions on the timeline. In simple terms, Virtuals is a platform that provides a launchpad for on-chain AI agents. In their own words:
It has seen slow but steady adoption over the past few months, beginning to rise a few weeks ago, and has recently started to show parabolic growth.
I think I don't need to tell you that AI is currently a major topic in the crypto space, and it could be a mainstream topic and industry for a while (perhaps forever) to come. We have already seen AI Meme coins like GOAT and ZEREBRO explode on Solana, and many other projects are performing well.
Currently, the market value of the top AI Tokens and agents on Virtuals is still just a small fraction of the giants on Solana, but if you look at the capital flows and anticipate an ETH season + Base season, I think focusing on the Virtuals ecosystem will be one of the best places to be.
The two Tokens I am most bullish on (and hold the most of) are AIXBT and VADER, along with the native Token VIRTUAL. I hold tokens from about 20 agents on the platform, and there are many others that I think will perform well, considering they already have significant market capitalizations, their performance could far exceed the aforementioned Tokens.
You can find new Virtual AI agent Tokens being released (and also publish your own Tokens). I recommend reading their complete whitepaper for a comprehensive understanding of the protocol.
Additionally, here’s a great thread from last month about Virtuals that provides a high-level overview in an easily digestible way: link.
2) Farcaster
Base and Farcaster are closely related. While Farcaster supports and uses multiple chains, Base is currently almost consuming the entire world. From this chart, you can see that for most of this year, Base has accounted for 60% to 80% of all on-chain transactions by Farcaster users, and in recent days, this figure has reached over 95%.
Regarding Farcaster, two integrations have recently gained a lot of attention, namely clanker and anoncast.
Clanker is an AI agent deployed on Farcaster that deploys Tokens for users, and anyone can simply request it to create a Token for them by mentioning @. It uses its own funds to create liquidity pools for Tokens and generates some fees for creators. People see it as the 'pump fun' of Base, but I think that’s not a completely equivalent comparison.
This website is a good place to track new clanker Token releases.
Anoncast is a very cool technology that allows people to post content 100% anonymously on Farcaster and even Twitter using zk-proof technology (which I wrote about last year). You can publish content through this website and need to hold anon Token (as a tagging utility).
As developers and experimenters try various new implementations, things are evolving rapidly, and it’s worth paying attention to and exploring the development of Farcaster.
I recommend watching this interview where ThreadGuy interviews one of the founders of Farcaster, Dan Romero.
3) 'Old' Coins, Memes, Traditional Memes, etc.
While most attention is currently focused on the two areas mentioned above, especially the AI-related coins occupying most of the attention, I also think it is worth paying attention to some of the old coins that have long existed on Farcaster and have some loyal communities.
There are too many of these currencies to list individually, but by checking the Base page on Dexscreener and sorting by market cap, you'll find some good old Memecoins.
I speculate that if we really enter Base Season, there may be a moment when the focus shifts from AI/Farcaster content to cute animals and traditional memes (or perhaps both will occur in parallel).
Although the Virtuals ecosystem has recently experienced explosive growth, many of these old coins have also seen declines during the same period. Remember the old saying 'be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful'; it may be a good time to observe those areas that people rarely pay attention to.
4) Other Points of Interest
I intended to write a whole paragraph here, but I just saw a fantastic tweet that covers 10 cool applications worth trying, 10 ways to earn on-chain yields, 10 communities worth joining, and 10 articles worth reading. So, since that’s the case, I won’t ramble anymore and will just point you to that tweet.
https://x.com/davidtsocy/status/1861507879792189769?s=46&t=sQ0QVUQyoiZQeVyh-DXZpg
There are countless other cool things being built on Base, and the vast majority of which I obviously cannot cover. The above-mentioned are just the areas I have personally been paying attention to over the past few weeks, but I suggest you explore for yourself to find those areas that interest you.
Alright, that's the main area I'm focusing on, and finally, a few words about logistics.
I've received many questions about how to get started on Base, so here is a quick start guide/some tips:
If you have funds in your Ethereum wallet, you can bridge them to Base using websites like Relay or Bungee. These platforms are very user-friendly and have low fees, with bridging typically taking around a minute.
If you have SOL funds in your wallet, you can also use Relay to bridge, or directly choose the bridging option in the Phantom wallet.
If you want to trade on Base, you can do it like I do, manually trading 90% of the time without trading bots, but there are some trading bots that support Base, and I guess there will be more soon. The two most popular trading bots are BullX and Photon (disclosure: these are referral links).
The main decentralized trading platforms for buying and selling Tokens on Base are Aerodrome and Uniswap. Personally, I prefer using the decentralized trading platform aggregator LlamaSwap, which finds the cheapest trading path for you and helps you get the best rates.
The trading of Virtuals Token is somewhat different because all AI agents can only trade using the native VIRTUAL Token. The simplest way to trade is through their website, but you can also use LlamaSwap to exchange Virtuals Token, as long as you choose KyberSwap as the decentralized trading platform.
If you are looking for a wallet suitable for all Base/EVM Tokens, I personally use and recommend Rabby, and I've also heard that Rainbow Wallet is quite good. Of course, Coinbase has its own wallet, but to be honest, I personally think it lacks the functionality of the other two wallets (or I just don't use it well).
8. Summary: The Final Topic on SOL and Base, and General Views on Blockchain Competition
I have always felt that the fierce competition between blockchains is somewhat unnecessary. I personally view 'competing chains' as friendly rivals, like the United States and Canada, or Australia and New Zealand. We tease each other, joke about Solana's occasional issues, Ethereum's terrifying transaction fees, and Cardano, well, it just is what it is.
But ultimately, if you're here to make money (I guess 99% of people are), then you should keep an open mind, try experiments, and go with the flow.
If you care more about the future of finance, about a decentralized and censorship-free future rather than making money, then boldly stick to your views. In this field, you will encounter various extreme opinions: Bitcoin maximalists believe everything other than Bitcoin is harmful to the industry; Ethereum maximalists believe Solana is a curse to the industry; and Solana maximalists believe Ethereum and Base are the curses of the industry.
There are even some of Bitcoin's biggest supporters who hate ETFs and MicroStrategy, while others are very fond of them.
I say this to express — no matter which side you stand on, you'll encounter a group of people who think you are foolish and that your views are silly. Honestly, that’s life; you can let it affect you, or, like me, accept it calmly, go with the flow, follow the money, follow the developers, follow the attention, and most importantly: follow my own curiosity.
I suggest you try doing the same. The most valuable information (Alpha) is not following my curiosity, my posts, or anyone else's footsteps, but following your own curiosity, exploring deeply, and thinking independently.
