A week ago, Coinbase officially announced that Base, a Layer 2 network for Ethereum, is available for public use. The crypto exchange launched a three-week Onchain Summer festival to celebrate the event together with the crypto community and representatives of major brands.
On August 9, Brian Armstrong, Head of Coinbase, announced that the Base mainnet, an L2 solution for Ethereum, was finally launched for public use. He called its launch an important step in “increasing economic freedom in the world” and suggested celebrating the mainnet’s launch with a huge three-week Onchain Summer festival.
More than 700,000 new users joined Base in just one week. According to Dune Analytics, the peak number of active addresses on the network was recorded on August 10 — 136,000 daily active users. In the first seven days after the launch, users increased its TVL by 64%, which reached $242 million on August 16.
DeFiLlama reported the network’s trading volume grew by 254% over the week and hit $93 million. Due to high user activity, the network’s commissions exceeded the $2.8 million mark.
More than 100 apps and service providers were available in the ecosystem at the time of the official launch. Within the first week of Onchain Summer, such well-known brands and crypto service providers joined the Base network as:
- Coca-Cola. The company launched a collection of non-fungible tokens (NFT) on the network.
- Synthetix. Representatives of the DeFi protocol announced the deployment of V3 on the Base network.
- Friend.tech. The launch of the decentralized social network on Base instantly made it the most popular app — users made over 100,000 transactions in a day. The platform’s functionality allows users to tokenize their social connections.
- anotherblock. The music NFT tokenization platform was launched on Base and featured never-before-heard releases from electronic music producers Boys Noize and Laidback Luke.
- Compound Labs. Representatives of the protocol announced the launch of ICYMI on the Base network.
- Trust Wallet. The crypto wallet began network support.
- Fireblocks. The digital asset platform added support for Base after its public launch.
However, despite the general excitement, the network’s launch also drew the attention of attackers. Since Base’s public launch, analysts have recorded several cases of exploitation:
- On August 14, representatives of the decentralized exchange (DEX) RocketSwap reported that the protocol was hacked, and attackers stole about $865,000.
- On August 17, through a rug pull scheme, SwirlLend withdrew approximately $290,000 in crypto from Base and an additional $1.7 million from Linea.
It’s also worth noting that according to Solidus Labs analysts, over 500 scam tokens have been minted on Base. Among them:
- about 300 have hidden features for unlimited issuance of new tokens;
- 70 include concealed transaction fees;
- 60 don’t involve a resale option.
This could negatively impact the future of Base, as some crypto community members have already warned about it since the start of the network’s test trials in February 2023. Nevertheless, Coinbase reps claim that due to the open development environment and virtually unlimited functionality, various projects, including dubious ones, are likely to appear on Base. Therefore, the team is preparing a specialized monitoring tool called Pessimism to provide prompt notifications about potential anomalies occurring on Base.
