Original title: Base Season: My Thesis
Original author: ZENECA
Original translation: White Paper Blockchain
In this article, I’ll share why I think Base is still very important, the areas I’m currently focusing on in Base, and how you can get involved from an operational perspective. I will provide an overview of the ecosystem and share some indicators that make me increasingly confident that the 'Base era' is about to arrive.
However, before delving deeper, it's necessary to clarify some obvious things: Most of the content covered 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, with huge 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 reluctant to sell because of others' moral coercion. Ultimately, you have to do what is most beneficial to yourself. If your investment has reached an amount sufficient to change your life, then sell, cash out, and change your life.
I’ve seen too many people ride the wave from peak to 'back to square one,' so I want to clarify these risks here. The following 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 pronounced.
Next, let's start with Coinbase and talk about why I'm optimistic about Base.
1. Reason One: Coinbase is a major player
Coinbase is one of the largest and most influential cryptocurrency trading platforms in the world and an important company in the crypto industry. Whenever a memecoin is listed on Coinbase, memecoin investors around the world rejoice because they know that this usually means the price of that Token will (generally speaking) rise. This is because Coinbase provides a convenient channel for ordinary users (or, say, general 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 happy to have 1 billion users on any chain, they clearly hope 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 occupies an important position commercially but also frequently represents the entire crypto industry in legal and political struggles.
Last year, when the SEC decided to sue Coinbase, it was one of the few moments in the crypto space when almost everyone united under a common goal. There is nothing like a common enemy to inspire group cohesion. Of course, there were some dissenters, but to hell with the dissenters; they are insignificant and hardly worth mentioning.
About Coinbase, I want to add that this company seems to be filled with sincerity from top to bottom, and the employees are very capable. It’s not to say that other trading platforms can’t do this, but Coinbase emits a particularly positive vibe.
In summary, Coinbase is a very important player. They have their own Layer 2 blockchain, which is likely to be a significant event to watch.
Speaking of Base, we cannot forget Ethereum—a blockchain that people love and hate. However, I believe the ETH era is also about to arrive...
2. Reason Two: The ETH Era
By the way, Ethereum is also a major player. I know that nowadays it seems to have become a trend on social media to complain about Ethereum, 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 people 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 ways. It is slow, expensive, and because of the numerous L2s (and L3s), the entire ecosystem seems a bit fragmented and clunky.
Even so, Ethereum remains the second-largest blockchain by market capitalization, with a market cap nearly four times that of other competitors.
Among the 328 blockchains tracked by DeFi Llama, Ethereum still occupies over 50% of the total locked value (TVL). What a 'dead chain' indeed (laughs).
Clearly, Ethereum's price performance this year has lagged behind almost all other coins. But I believe this situation is about to change.
This is the ETH/BTC chart over the past roughly five years. Clearly, Ethereum's performance over the last two years has not been ideal! But anyone with any understanding of charts, markets, and investments would tell you that such times are an opportunity to buy, not to sell.
18-24 months ago was the time to exchange ETH for BTC or SOL.
I'm not saying you have to exchange BTC or SOL for ETH right now, but it's certain that the timing is much better than any time in the last few years.
Yes, yes, I’m going to bring up this old chestnut again, but it’s just too accurate and applicable. The best time to buy SOL was at the peak of panic when FTX collapsed.
I must admit that I reacted a bit late to SOL's miraculous performance in this wave (at least relatively speaking, I entered when SOL reached about $40). And as a stubborn ETH bull, I may have held on longer than a qualified trader should. But there are reasons I have remained bullish on ETH, many of which are mentioned in this article.
Many people's dissatisfaction with ETH mainly comes from friction when 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: The use of friction is rapidly disappearing
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; undeniably, the barrier to entry for the average person using the Solana blockchain is much lower compared to other major blockchains. While low transaction fees and fast transaction speeds are certainly important, mobile-friendly wallets like Phantom and applications like Moonshot have had a huge impact on user acquisition.
Coupled with the popularity of memecoins, especially the hype around the Pump Fun protocol, and the network effects brought about by these factors, the success is clearly not surprising.
But I think Base is experiencing a similar trend, or is very close to it. For instance, just today, Phantom announced support for Base:
In the past few weeks, I’ve talked to people in dozens of Discord/TG chats, and I can't count how many times I've heard someone say: 'Ah, I only have SOL in my wallet and don’t know how to use Base.'
I think this is just the beginning; we will see more and more protocols and applications starting to support Base, and there will also be more applications native to Base emerging.
Additionally, many people still have lingering fears from the high gas fees on 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 earns 4.7% native yield on held USDC, quite nice).
4. Reason Four: Strong Team Strength
When investing in traditional companies or projects, I have always believed in betting on outstanding talents. 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 really an amazing figure; you can read this article from 2020 (yes, sorry, I'm asking you to read more), and think about what the world was like then, as well as the political stances of most major tech companies at the time, and compare that to the completely different approach Brian has led Coinbase to take.
Then there’s the face of Base, Jesse Pollak, who simultaneously leads Base and the Coinbase wallet.
I really saved dozens of tweets because I was looking for some tweets to post here to showcase his personal qualities, especially how he has shaped Base into what it is today. Browsing through his Twitter timeline is an endless delight. I recommend you check it out 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 is spreading good news during a 21-day global tour, visiting builders and leaders:
About trying to break into Instagram and TikTok:
About understanding meme culture (recommended to watch the video):
And there’s more. The above are just two outstanding figures working hard to achieve the goals of Base. Supporting this team feels quite reassuring.
5. Reason Five: Data performance is outstanding
Data shows that activity on Base has increased significantly, and capital inflows are also considerable. For me, the most important indicators to predict whether a chain may achieve significant success are: 1) the number of builders/developers creating applications; 2) whether capital is flowing into that chain.
Looking back over the past three months, the net capital inflow into Base is almost equivalent to that of Solana:
Looking back over the past week, Base has outperformed all other platforms by a wide margin:
Trading volume is also steadily increasing, having risen in recent days:
In the past few days, many of Base's AI agents have gained significant attention on Twitter:
Overall, it is clear that traffic and attention are moving towards Base. Whether this can be sustained or is just a temporary fluctuation remains to be seen. Many people claim this is temporary and that Solana will retain most of the attention in this round. I clearly disagree, but I’m not arrogant enough to think I’m 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; I have no insider information and do not know whether there will be a Base Token. They have made it clear that there will not be a Token, but similarly, Optimism and many other chains have made similar promises.
However, with the significant changes in the legal and regulatory environment, I do not completely rule out the possibility of an airdrop happening at some point in the future.
That said, I won't put too much energy into this. I personally see it as a nice addition rather than something to keep in mind all the time. I recommend using the chain normally and doing some experiments or trials, as this is often the best way to participate in airdrops when the protocol actually launches them.
Alright, those are the six reasons I’m optimistic about Base and believe the Base Szn may be coming soon. Now let’s delve into some areas worth paying attention to and where I spend my time on Base:
7. Base Chain Ecosystem
1) Virtuals Protocol
You may have already heard of Virtuals, whether through my tweets/retweets 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:
Over the past few months, it has gained slow but steady adoption, with an uptick a few weeks ago, and it has started to show parabolic growth in the last few days.
I think I don't need to tell you that AI is currently an important topic in the crypto space, and it may be a mainstream topic and industry for some time (perhaps forever) in the future. We have already seen AI meme coins like GOAT and ZEREBRO becoming popular on Solana, and many other projects are also performing well.
Currently, the market value of top AI Tokens and agents on Virtuals is still just a small fraction of that on Solana, but if you look at the capital flows and anticipate an ETH season + Base season, then I think paying attention to the Virtuals ecosystem will be one of the best places to be.
The two tokens I’m most optimistic about (and hold the most of) are AIXBT and VADER, in addition to the native token VIRTUAL. I hold about 20 agent tokens on the platform, and there are many others I think will perform well, considering they already have considerable 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 full whitepaper to gain a comprehensive understanding of the protocol.
Additionally, here’s a great thread from last month about Virtuals, providing a high-level overview in an easy-to-understand way: link.
2) Farcaster
Base and Farcaster are closely related. While Farcaster supports and utilizes multiple chains, Base is currently almost consuming the entire world. From this chart, you can see that for most of this year, Base accounted for 60% to 80% of all on-chain transactions from Farcaster users, and in recent days, that number has risen to over 95%.
About Farcaster, there have recently been two integrations that have attracted a lot of attention: clanker and anoncast.
Clanker is an AI agent deployed on Farcaster that deploys tokens for users; anyone can simply @ mention it to request it to create a token for them. It creates liquidity pools for the tokens using its own funds and generates some fees for the creators. People see it as Base's 'pump fun', 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 on Farcaster or even Twitter 100% anonymously using zk-proof technology (which I wrote about last year). You can post content through this website, and you need to hold an anon Token (as a utility for tagging).
As developers and experimenters try various new implementations, things are rapidly evolving, making it worth paying attention to and deeply 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 with AI-related coins capturing most of the attention, I think it’s also worth paying attention to some older coins that have been around on Farcaster for a while and have loyal communities.
There are too many coins to list them all, but by checking the Base page on Dexscreener and sorting by market cap, you will find some good old memecoins.
I suspect that if we really enter Base Season, there may come a moment when the focus shifts from AI/Farcaster content to cute animals and traditional memes (or perhaps both will happen in parallel).
While the Virtuals ecosystem has recently experienced explosive growth, many of those old coins have also seen declines during the same period. Remembering the old saying, 'Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful,' it may be a good time to observe those areas that people rarely pay attention to.
4) Other points worth paying attention to
I intended to write a whole paragraph here but just saw a fantastic tweet that covered 10 cool applications worth trying, 10 ways to earn on-chain returns, 10 communities worth joining, and 10 articles worth reading. So, since that’s the case, I won’t ramble on anymore; just go check out that tweet.
https://x.com/davidtsocy/status/1861507879792189769?s=46t=sQ0QVUQyoiZQeVyh-DXZpg
There are countless other cool things being built on Base, the vast majority of which I clearly cannot cover. The aforementioned are just the things I’ve personally focused on over the past few weeks, but I suggest you explore for yourself and find areas that interest you.
Alright, this is the main area I’m focusing on; finally, a few words about logistics.
I have received many questions about how to get started operating 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 easy to use and have low fees; bridging usually takes about a minute.
If you have SOL funds in your wallet, you can also use Relay to bridge, or directly select the bridge option in the Phantom wallet.
If you want to trade on Base, you can manually trade like I do 90% of the time without using trading bots, but there are also some trading bots that support Base; I guess there will be more soon. The two most popular trading bots are BullX and Photon (disclaimer: these are referral links).
The main decentralized trading platforms for buying and selling Tokens on Base are Aerodrome and Uniswap. Personally, I prefer to use the decentralized trading platform aggregator LlamaSwap, which finds you the cheapest trading path to get the best rates.
The trading of Virtuals Tokens is a bit different, as 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 Tokens, 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 have also heard that Rainbow Wallet is very good. Of course, Coinbase also has its own wallet, but to be honest, I think it lacks features compared to the other two wallets (or I just am not familiar with it).
8. Summary: Final thoughts on SOL and Base, and general views on blockchain competition
I've always felt that the fierce competition between blockchains is actually quite unnecessary. I personally view 'competing chains' as friendly rivals, much like the United States and Canada, or Australia and New Zealand. We tease each other, joke about Solana having occasional issues, Ethereum's high transaction fees, and Cardano, well, it’s just Cardano.
But ultimately, if you are here to make money (I guess 99% of people are), then you should keep an open mind, experiment, and go with the flow.
If you care more about the future of finance, about a decentralized and censorship-resistant future rather than just making money, then boldly stick to your views. In this field, you will encounter a range of extreme opinions: Bitcoin geeks believe everything except Bitcoin is harmful to this industry; Ethereum geeks believe Solana is a plague on the industry; and Solana geeks think Ethereum and Base are a plague on the industry.
There are even some of Bitcoin's biggest supporters who hate ETFs and MicroStrategy, while others quite like them.
I'm saying this to express that—no matter which side you stand on, you'll encounter a group of people who think you're 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 that too. The most valuable information (Alpha) is not to follow my curiosity, my posts, or anyone else's footsteps, but to follow your own curiosity, explore deeply, and think independently.
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