Following Solana, Base chain has become a hot spot for MEME coins. On May 5, Base chain added 2,821 new DEX trading pairs in 24 hours, 1,508 more than Solana. This data status is not short-lived. In the past month, the number of new trading pairs added daily on Base chain has almost exceeded Solana. Can it be considered that Base has taken over the scepter of Meme coins from Solana and become the latest Meme king of the public chain?
In this article, PANews will conduct a comprehensive comparison of Base and Solana in the Meme track, analyze the similarities and differences between the two from the perspectives of user habits, code vulnerabilities, transaction speed, capital preferences, cultural characteristics, deployment costs, etc., and also explore the secrets of Meme heat flow.
The characteristics and origins of both meme cultures
Meme coin itself originates from a Meme culture. The term Meme usually refers to a piece of cultural information spread through the Internet, such as pictures, videos, texts or concepts. They often contain humorous elements and can quickly spread widely on the Internet. Therefore, although Meme is different from other types of projects, it still requires certain Meme cultural materials as the core of dissemination. Therefore, the more well-known and widely-read Meme materials are, the easier it is to spread better.
Meme coins on Solana did not receive much attention in the previous market. The rise of Meme culture in this round of bull market can be traced back to September 6, 2023, when Solana co-founder Anatoly entered Solana's annual event, the Solana Breakpoint Conference, dressed in a green dinosaur costume and called himself a silly dragon. On November 8, Anatoly posted a post on the social media platform "year of the silly dragon" and called on the community to have a silly dragon Meme. Subsequently, the SILLY token was deployed in the community's expectations and airdropped by leaving a wallet address on social media.
In fact, the process of this issuance also represents the origin of the Meme culture on the Solana chain. It was initiated by the founder, and the official interacted with the community many times. After the dissemination effect exploded, the contract was deployed, and the wealth-creating effect attracted more people to enter.
During the recent money-making craze, Solana has ushered in a wave of meme climax. The main reason for the rise of this trend is that the Solana community has a large user base, and a pattern has spontaneously formed in the process of searching for high-quality meme targets. It can be said that the characteristic of Solana's meme culture is that users look for materials from meme culture under the vision of getting rich.
Unlike Solana, Base is backed by Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States. The cultural attributes of its Meme coins are more obviously American in style and closely related to Coinbase, such as the top ten Meme coins in terms of holders: Degen, Jogeco Dog (the dog of the founder of Coinbase), Ollie Dog (the dog of the chief independent director of Coinbase), ROCKY (the dog of the founder of MetaWin), Bento (a space dog), BASED USA (Make America Great Again), and Young Peezy (another character of Pepe in the "Boys Club" comic series).
User habits: Solana creates a new ecosystem, while Base relies on Ethereum for its shade
In terms of user habits, the following aspects usually need to be considered, including wallets, DEX (decentralized exchanges), trading robots, market panels, project information, etc. The ease of use of these products directly affects the threshold for users to participate in Meme coin speculation.
wallet:
The wallet on Solana is the first major barrier to attract users to participate in Meme in the early stage. Unlike the Ethereum ecosystem, Solana is written in Rust or C, so the wallet architecture is completely different. The mainstream crypto wallet Metamask is not compatible with Solana tokens. Therefore, the Meme tokens on Solana also benefited from the rapid increase of SOL tokens in the early stage of this bull market, allowing more people to get used to the new wallet form of Phantom.
Base is essentially Ethereum's L2 network, so it is perfectly compatible with Ethereum in terms of EVM compatibility, which also allows users to use familiar wallet products such as Metamask to trade. In addition, Coinbase launched the AA wallet, and ordinary users no longer need cumbersome operation steps. They can directly use mobile phones or computer devices, touchid, and Google accounts to generate accounts, and can also directly connect to Coinbase accounts, which lays the foundation for the Base chain to attract users and funds on a large scale.
DEX：
The operation of DEX products on Solana is not much different from that of the Ethereum system. On the contrary, it has many advantages in terms of speed and ease of operation.
Most of Base's trading pairs are still built on DEXs such as Uniswap, and are perfectly compatible with Ethereum users in terms of usage habits.
Trading robots:
The trading robot of the Solana ecosystem was developed by several sensitive robot developers at the beginning of the Meme craze, and its usage is not much different from the Ethereum trading robot.
There are not many trading robots on the Base chain at present, there are only a few products such as Sigma and Shuriken, but they can be regarded as filling a gap in the market.
Market panel:
Products such as Birdeye and Dexscreener are currently compatible with the market dashboards and token information of multiple public chains.
Overall, in terms of user habits, Solana has successfully developed an independent system and has been quickly accepted by Meme players, while Base relies on the user base advantages of the two major ecosystems of Ethereum and Coinbase to save a lot of construction costs in this regard.
Code vulnerabilities: Solana’s inherent advantages and Base’s acquired remedies
As two outstanding Meme ecological chains, a high-quality contract environment is a factor that Meme players must consider. Ethereum and Binance Chain, as the main soil for Meme before, have one of the biggest problems: the contract has too much room for malicious behavior. According to previous statistics from PANews, about 98% of the Meme coins issued daily on the Ethereum chain have code problems.
Solana uses a completely different programming language and architecture, which can better avoid contract loopholes. General token contract issues only exist in a few risks such as code issuance and ownership.
Base uses the same programming language and architecture as Ethereum, and therefore inherits Ethereum's vulnerability system. The corresponding function of Base is to make a verified contract label on the chain, which can be regarded as helping users avoid some contract code problems at the source. Nevertheless, according to a research report by Cointelegraph, through a sample security analysis of 1,000 new Meme coins launched on the Base chain between March 19 and 25, it was found that the vast majority of Meme coins on the network have security vulnerabilities that may cause users to suffer huge losses, and almost one-fifth of the meme coins are intentionally malicious.
Contract deployment cost: Base’s lower token issuance cost may attract more developers
The cost of deploying a contract on Solana is about 1 SOL (about $150)
The cost of deploying a contract on Base is about a dozen dollars. This may also be the reason why the number of new trading pairs on Base has increased significantly every day.
Transaction speed and gas fee: the difference between the two exists but the impact is not significant
The transaction speed on Base is about 35TPS, and the gas fee is about US$0.11.
Solana's transaction speed is about 1300TPS and the transaction fee is about $0.0029.
In terms of comparison in this regard, although Solana still has a significant advantage, Base's speed and fee levels are relatively affordable and are hardly the main consideration for users.
Funding and active users: Base needs a phenomenal meme boom to close the gap
On-chain TVL: The TVL on the Solana chain is approximately US$3.9 billion, and the TVL on the Base chain is approximately US$1.5 billion.
24-hour on-chain transaction volume: Solana is approximately US$1 billion, and Base is approximately US$400 million.
Base: As of May 4, Base has approximately 8.4 million total users and approximately 350,000 daily active users.
Solana has approximately 850,000 daily active users.
In terms of flow trends, the net outflow from Solana chain to Base chain is 1.77 million US dollars. Overall, the gap between Base and Solana is no longer an order of magnitude gap, and perhaps this gap will be narrowed after some phenomenal products emerge.
Official attitude: Solana hopes that the meme fever will subside, while Base hopes that the meme will shine
In addition to the above relatively objective factors, the official boost is also an important part of the development of Meme coins. Solana's Meme craze comes from the boost of co-creation and official organizations. For now, Solana officials do not seem to want to stay in the impression of the Meme chain. In April this year, Solana co-founder Raj said in a tweet that meme coins are scaring away serious builders. But he reminded these serious builders: "If you are fragile enough to be afraid of the way young people choose to use permissionless systems for fun, then you can't succeed at all." Previously, after experiencing the "money transfer" craze, Solana co-founder Toly also called on the community to stop the money transfer pre-sale model.
Base seems to have a different attitude towards Meme. Also in April, Jesse Pollak, head of Base's ecological protocol, said, "Meme coins are an important part of the on-chain economy. It is great to see more Meme coins spread and help the world enter the chain. The vitality on Base is very strong. It is noted that these Meme coins are now bringing thousands of people into this new economy. We see an extremely active meme economy is shining in the Base ecosystem."
Overall, the Meme journey of Solana and Base seems to be like a god coming down the mountain and meeting a person going up the mountain. One is full of his former self, while the other is looking forward to achieving his goal. Objectively, both have the soil for developing Meme culture in terms of product characteristics and cultural background. The huge number of users and distinctive community culture constitute the basis of their respective Meme cultures. Subjectively, Solana, as a beneficiary of Meme coins in this round of bull market, has also felt the backlash of Meme to other projects in the ecosystem to a certain extent, so it hopes to moderately reduce the temperature of Meme to balance the development of the ecosystem. Base, on the other hand, hopes to use Meme as a window to expand the activity of the ecosystem and continue to climb to the top of Meme.
