As Base outshines ARB and OP, on-chain traffic surges
- Base recorded a sharp spike in fees as on-chain traffic jumped.
- Much of the activity was driven by Friend.tech.
Layer-2 blockchain Base has been in the news for mostly good reasons ever since its official launch more than a month ago. With each passing day, the Ethereum [ETH] scaling solution was scripting new stories of success.
According to a 14 September post, popular on-chain analytics tool Token Terminal drew notice to another milestone accomplished by the Coinbase ecosystem’s L2.
Base was one of the top-performing L2 chain in terms of network fees, having beaten the more popular OP Mainnet [OP] and Arbitrum [ARB].
Over the past 24h, #Starknet and #Base are two L2 blockchains that have been generating network fees more than #Arbitrum and #Optimism
src: @tokenterminal#Base #Layer2 pic.twitter.com/RR3qKALEzC
— Base Index (@baseindex) September 14, 2023
Base to the top
On examining the trajectory on a wider timeframe, some more intriguing findings came to light. Base raced past competition in the first few weeks of launch to emerge as the L2 with most network fees collected. However, a reversal followed and Base soon lost its numero uno spot.
Since the beginning of this week, things again took a U-turn as Base recorded a sharp spike in fees accumulated from processing transactions. On 14 September, nearly $189.9k was collected, as shown in the graph below.
Recall that Base is built on the OP stack, the software powering Op Mainnet and few other emerging L2s. As part of the revenue-sharing agreement, Base pays either 2.5% of its revenue or 15% of its profits to the Optimism Collective, whichever is greater.
High throughput attracts users
Base also clocked its best ever transaction throughput on 14 September. The L2 witnessed a staggering daily average of 21.29 transaction per second (TPS), data from L2Beat showed. In comparison, Arbitrum and the OP Mainnet could only record TPS of 5.83 and 3.88 respectively.
On expected lines, the jump in network fees was a logical outcome of the increasing on-chain traffic. According to Dune, network growth accelerated as more users onboarded the network over the past 3–4 days.
Most of the new users participated in on-chain transfers as the daily transaction count also soared.
Notably, much of the increased activity was powered by the popular decentralized social network Friend.tech. Built on the Base network, the protocol’s traffic has soared as a result of intense flipping.