Base is becoming a dazzling star in the EVM field, but according to Dune data analystsJapan dominatesfound that Uniswap’s trading volume on the Base platform seems to be prosperous, but a large number of transactions are driven by capital pools that repeatedly “unplug the network cable”. This also seems to confirm the view of some communities that there are many “big cuts” on Base. What is the real data? BlockBeats compiled it based on the research of jpn memelord.
The false prosperity of Uniswap on Base
In early September, Uniswap tweeted that 98.9% of new trading pairs on Base were launched through the Uniswap protocol.
Data shows that the Base platform has launched more than 600,000 Uniswap v2 liquidity pools in the past few months, accounting for 98.9% of all newly created trading pairs on the platform, which is undoubtedly quite eye-catching. However, it is worth further exploring who created these trading pairs?
In fact, a considerable part of the fund pool is deployed by a few addresses, and the top three addresses are actually related, which means that a certain person or entity created 3.7% of the fund pool on Base, and also Some addresses are also related.
Image source:Dune
Taken together, addresses that have created more than 500 fund pools have collectively contributed to more than 127,000 fund pools, and more than 20% of all fund pools deployed on Base are comprised of just 87 independent addresses (and even fewer independent entities) create.
What is the actual situation of these capital pools?
In fact, most of them are ordinary altcoins that are “unplugged” within minutes and lack any real value. As the examples below illustrate, these pools are not productive projects but outright scams.
The strategy usually used by these operators who create large-scale fund pools is to first send ETH to multiple wallets, then issue new tokens, then conduct buying operations through these backup wallets, and finally quickly drain away the liquidity. Not only did this operation make quick profits, it also artificially inflated trading volume indicators.
Each new “unplug” operation typically results in thousands of dollars in transaction volume. These operations are carried out around the clock by dozens of addresses, and each pool lasts only 20-30 minutes, so a single address can launch more than 50 such projects every day.
In this way, each address can generate a daily transaction volume of $250,000 with only a small initial capital.
“This is equivalent to sticking a few $100 bills on a boomerang and throwing it out 50 times. You don’t really generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in trading volume, you are just entertaining yourself.” jpn memelord believes.
There may be many reasons why this phenomenon occurs frequently. On the one hand, it is to trick unsuspecting users into buying these tokens; on the other hand, it may be to use untuned front-running robots to make profits; in addition, it may also be for possible (but unlikely) Base airdrops in the future. A strange hair-pulling behavior.
The key question is how to filter and filter these operations effectively.
Initially, jpn memelord believed that setting a cap on the number of pools created by each address could act as a filter to remove spam addresses that consist of large pools. However, he found that more than half of the pools were deployed by addresses with fewer than five creations.
He speculated that many fund pools may have been created by hair-pulling or “plugging the network cable” bots, which frequently change addresses to evade detection, and may even change addresses after deploying only one fund pool. Therefore, jpn memelord decided to dig deeper and try to find traces of human factors in the creation of fund pools.
He tries to focus only on pools created by ENS users. This approach was more productive, with only 17,000 pools created by addresses owning ENS, a number that is far lower than the total number of pools and likely effectively excludes most pools created by bots.
Coincidentally, jpn memelord believes that this screening process may also reveal some Internet celebrities who have repeatedly “unplugged” the Base token. However, this method still needs to be improved, and the existing filtering method may miss some real fund pools created by anonymous deployers, while also including some scams or “plug-in” projects of vanity influencers.
jpn memelord started focusing on pools with multiple liquidity addition events. “Unplugging” projects usually only perform one liquidity injection and removal operation, while productive capital pools will have other liquidity providers inject liquidity multiple times.
Only about 7,800 v2 fund pools have experienced multiple liquidity additions. When the filtering conditions are increased to more than 2 liquidity additions, this number is halved again, leaving only about 3,500. These are productive fund pools, and It’s not just a “pull the cord” project.
These valuable fund pools only account for 1.2%-0.5% of the initial total, which means that after taking into account junk projects and scams, the actual data is exaggerated by about 99%, and this number is also consistent with the one given by Uniswap at the beginning of the article The numbers are close.
jpn memelord believes that this behavior is not essentially Uniswap’s fault, because it is a permissionless protocol and anyone can create a fund pool for any asset, which is one of its design features. However, Uniswap has the ability to control the promotion of indicators that are artificially inflated by worthless garbage projects.
Uniswap should filter its metrics. Whether it is 8,000 pools or 3,500, these pools that actually generate some value are still impressive numbers. This filtering should also apply to transaction volume, as a significant portion of the transaction volume is actually generated by these “unplugged” projects cycling between the same 5 ETH.
“Pools created” is an activity indicator that can easily be manipulated by bots for a permissionless protocol that costs only a few cents to operate. Metrics of this type should be carefully filtered and not simply promoted at face value. Those capital pools that go beyond the “unplug the network cable” routine and are truly interactive are worthy of attention.
Rug is a disaster, Uniswap’s real trading volume is not as good as Aerodrome
jpn memelord further explores whether these easy-to-implement “unplug the cable” projects have a significant contribution to transaction volume.
At its peak, the capital pool with only one liquidity addition event contributed about $300 million in trading volume per month, accounting for a relatively small proportion. As of now, this data in September is only about 30 million US dollars, which actually verifies that about 99% of the capital pools created by Uniswap on Base are of low value.
jpn memelord wants a clearer picture of where this volume really comes from. In previous analysis, he mentioned that although these low-cost “unplug” projects do contribute to transaction volume, he suspects that more sophisticated operators will frequently change addresses when launching new scams to avoid detection.
So, how can you tell these operators apart?
jpn memelord turned to AerodromeFi and its whitelisting process as a possible way to filter Uniswap’s trading volume on Base. On Aerodrome, if a capital pool wants to receive incentives, its tokens need to pass the Aerodrome team’s whitelist review, which helps distinguish the transaction volume of high-quality projects from other projects.
Its analysis shows that a significant portion of Uniswap’s trading volume on Base actually comes from assets that are not whitelisted. Since the explosion of projects on Base in March this year, this proportion has been close to 50%.
Does Uniswap have an advantage on certain assets? What’s driving these volumes?
jpn memelord extracted individual pool transaction volume data for non-whitelisted assets and found a large number of meme coins. Some meme coins he had never heard of had trading volumes of $10 million in September alone.
After checking these fund pools one by one, he found that most of the tokens were in a “unplugged” situation. In fact, among the top 150 fund pools sorted by monthly trading volume, jpn memelord only found 4 that did not “unplug the network cable”.
The performance of these fund pools is roughly the same: within a few hours of going online, the transaction volume reaches millions of dollars, and then they are quickly “unplugged”, the tokens are sold to zero, and the deployers make profits of more than 90 ETH.
This operation is repeated over and over again.
So, how do you identify these scams in transaction volume data? A systematic approach to identifying them is needed.
When a coin is so completely “unplugged,” trading ceases. Therefore, these scams can be identified by setting up a filter to check how much time has passed since a coin was last traded.
The approach taken by jpn memelord is to apply a filter to filter tokens that have been traded in the last N days, which can distinguish “active” tokens from “inactive” tokens. Combined with the whitelist filters already used, Uniswap’s trading volume can be divided into four categories:
· Active tokens in the whitelist: including premium tokens, stable coins and established meme coins.
· Inactive tokens in the whitelist: refer to tokens that have fallen sharply in recent months.
· Non-whitelisted active tokens: Contains new tokens, both scam and real projects.
· Non-whitelisted and inactive tokens: usually serious “unplugged” projects or assets that are gradually forgotten by the market.
So, what exactly does Uniswap’s trading volume look like?
First, these “unplugged” tokens, which had a trading volume of $1.85 billion in September, have not conducted any transactions in the past two days (about 10% of the month), which means that these tokens constitute Uniswap’s current trading volume. 57% of the total monthly trading volume on Base.
The situation is even more serious. Some of these “active” tokens have just been “unplugged” in the last 48 hours and are classified into the pink part of the chart (non-whitelisted active). If the “unplugged” transaction volume remains almost the same, it can be expected that every month About another 6% of the trading volume is also scam projects.
This segment accounted for 12% of the total transaction volume this month, and last month it accounted for about 6% of the total transaction volume, so it is likely that by the end of the month, after the activity filter identified the recent “unplugging the network” project, These 6% will join 57%. In other words, approximately 63% of Uniswap’s trading volume on Base comes from “unplugging the network cable” projects.
Whitelist assets (high-quality token pairs, stablecoins, mature meme coins) accounted for only 30% of Uniswap’s trading volume this month. The remaining approximately 7% of monthly trading volume is the “advantage” that Uniswap has.
jpn memelord has attached two sets of charts, one showing unprocessed Uniswap transaction volume (the data usually used to compare these transaction volumes), and the other removing the “unplugged” transactions in Uniswap data. Aerodrome’s volume dominance is much stronger than one might think.
Interestingly, even after filtering out scam transactions, the overall transaction volume on Base is still rising steadily, and Aerodrome’s market share is gradually expanding. By looking at the volume percentage increase, you can also see the significant incremental impact from Aerodrome’s launch of Slipstream (CL) at the end of April.
Going deep into the details of Rug, a few lines of code “white wolf with empty gloves”
As the market heats up, jpn memelord continues to pay attention to the continuous “unplugging the network cable” operations on Base. This time, he discovered that these large number of abnormal operations may come from an individual or group.
Their operation began by deploying a token, oddly enough, to a non-standard 9 decimal places and adding the majority of liquidity to the Uniswap v2 pool. They then opened the trade, gave up ownership of the contract, and destroyed the liquidity tokens, a series of operations that looked like a compliant setup.
The wallet holding the most tokens on Basescan is the liquidity provider, and everything looks safe, attracting many people to flock to it.
The “security checks” also appear to be passed (LP destroyed, contract ownership relinquished, no honeypots, etc.). Nonetheless, @Token_Sniffer has flagged the scammer.
They then used bots to manipulate trading volumes to trick unsuspecting users into taking the bait.
ETH is distributed semi-randomly among dozens of wallets controlled by deployers, which use buy and sell operations to simulate natural market demand and drive chart movements.
Everything seemed normal until the deployer received a token transfer that far exceeded the number shown in the “circulating supply”. All the ETH in the pool was withdrawn to the deployer’s account, and this seemingly safe meme currency was no longer available. People care.
Where do these tokens come from?
There is a constructor in the contract that intentionally uses integer underflow to allocate a maximum uint256 balance to a “hidden” wallet controlled by the deployer. Therefore these tokens will not show up in the Max Supply or holder list on Basescan.
It is these lines of code that make the chart behave like this.
The ETH is recycled for the next operation, and the whole “show” starts over with a new token code, usually using the name currently popular on Ethereum or Solana.
Has Base become a “death minefield”?
jpn memelord continued to follow up on Uniswap’s transaction volume analysis on Base and discovered an active and continuous “unplugging” operator. In short, this person or group now accounts for 65%-80% of Uniswap’s transaction volume on Base every day. %.
The orange part represents the transaction volume of fund pools that have not traded in the past two days (i.e., “unplugged” tokens/fund pools). In October alone, this part of the transaction volume was close to $5 billion, reaching the highest level since April. level.
To make matters worse, this proportion of total trading volume has increased in recent weeks, reaching 82% of total trading volume on October 12. Most of the remaining trading volume comes from token pools on Aerodrome’s whitelist (including WETH, cbBTC, DEGEN, etc.).
This means that Base has become a minefield, and anyone trying to find new tokens there has a high probability of encountering these “unplugged” projects.
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