We have mentioned before that Solana's marketing is very powerful and it is likely to be on par with the Ethereum ecosystem.
However, the Ethereum ecosystem is not a pushover. Although the performance of the Ethereum main chain is not very good, the public chains of Ethereum L2 are actually quite capable.
Looking at the recent situation, the base chain relying on Coinbase is going to fight and compete with Solana.
Will the projects on the base chain be short-lived? Will there be opportunities to make money in the long term in the future?
Less than a year after launch, continuous explosion
When it comes to the L2 track, Base is actually a little late in development.
The Arbitrum one we are familiar with was launched in August 21, and OP was launched in December 21. The BSC chain is backed by Binance, and its background is actually similar to that of Base. The BSC chain was also launched in February 22.
The base chain was only launched in August 23, and it has been less than a year so far. It can be said that it was late.
Let's briefly review the development history of the base chain:
February 23, 2022: Coinbase announced the launch of Ethereum Layer 2 network Base and established the Base Ecosystem Fund.
After about a year of development and preparation, Coinbase announced the launch of the Base test network in February 2023.
After another half a year of test network operation, it was launched on the official network in August 23.
When it comes to marketing, the base chain is also very generous. As soon as it was officially launched, it issued a meme coin called $BALD, which rose by tens of thousands of times in a few days. It can almost be used as an active indicator of the base chain. With the recent popularity of the base chain, it has also been rising all the way.
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t heard of Bald, but you can’t say that you haven’t even heard of Friend.Tech, right? Although this project is almost unfinished now, it was very popular half a year ago.
On August 10, 2023, friend.tech was officially launched on the base chain. Two months later, the TVL of friend.tech exceeded 50 million US dollars.
The main gameplay of this application is that big Vs can enter and generate tokens, and fans can buy tokens to enter the big V's small group. At the beginning, various analysts said that Friend.tech combined fan economy and on-chain gaming and was the future of SocialFi.
Now Friend.tech should be completely gone. Looking back at its initial popularity, it is likely that Base Chain was quietly supporting it behind the scenes to create a wealth effect. None of the products that imitated the Friend.tech model were successful. I don't know if this is considered a model falsification.
Various capitals have come to support it
After the popularity of Friend.tech, Base Chain has also undergone a series of adjustments.
Until this year’s Cancun upgrade, there was another wave of outbreaks:
And the founder of the base chain listed a large number of base chain projects a few days ago, which was a clear expression of support:
The BS official has only recently organized a little bit of the so-called innovation competition, which is also determined by trading volume, and takes out transaction fees as bonuses. Compared with the support of the base chain, it is really not enough to fill the gaps between teeth.
<span yes'; mso-fareast- mso-bidi- font-size:10.5000pt;mso-font-kerning:1.0000pt;">
Therefore, the TVL on the BSC chain is not even as good as when smart contracts were not supported in 21 years. Compared with other L2 public chains, they are not bad in terms of technology/resources. If the ecological projects are not supported in this round of bull market, there may be no hope.
Arbitrum/Polygon, the old L2 contributors, lack the support of top exchanges like Coinbase, so their ability to support ecological projects is also limited.
Solana's previous strategy was to rely on FTX support. After FTX's collapse, it is likely to find another exchange for ecological binding in the future. Maybe it will be Kucoin, which was recently sanctioned (blind guess, no evidence).
OKX has actually launched its own OKTC chain for layout.
Therefore, the future competition landscape may be a high-performance public chain + exchange support model.
Some viewers will definitely ask: What about the Bitcoin Chain and Ethereum main chain?
Currently, there is only one exchange that clearly supports it: Coinbase supports the base chain with practical actions
Binance is still only talking about supporting BSC, probably considering that the first choice of all projects is to list coins, so there is no need to support it.
OKTC has just started now, and subsequent opportunities can also be focused on.
Other mainstream exchanges will gradually stand in line, just like each public chain will support a Dex of its own ecology. However, the strength of most public chains may not be superior to that of the top centralized exchanges, so this process also depends mainly on the strategic rhythm of major exchanges.