Coinbase’s Base Hits $742M TVL Milestone: Ethereum Layer-2 Soars

• Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer-2 network Base has set a new record: its total value locked hit $744 million for the first time, with Ether, DAI and USDC the most locked cryptos.
• This represents a parabolic surge in just six months—on July 30th, Base had just over $2 million in TVL as it rolled out to the public after a developer beta.

When Coinbase launched its Ethereum Layer-2 scaling solutions Base in July, the expectations were massive and the projections bold. However, at the time, few would have expected the network to top $700 million in total value locked (TVL) before the end of the year and rival some of the mainstay networks.

Base has enjoyed a meteoric rise since its launch. It debuted with around $2.2 million in TVL as it began to roll out to the general public in early August. Two weeks later, it had hit $200 million as interest in L2 networks soared.

According to data by L2Beat, Base now has $696 million in TVL, ahead of established projects like Cardano. The network hit $744 million a few days ago, its highest locked value since its launch six months ago. Of this, $560 million was canonically bridged. This includes $422 million worth of Ether and $115 million in USDC, while other tokens like the DAI stablecoin account for smaller values.

$181 million of the TVL is natively minted, most of which is in USDC. A measly $2.3 million is externally bridged through Wormhole in the SDEX token.

The Rise of Base

Base is built on Optimism, the Ethereum scaling solution that made the headlines recently for underpinning the migration of Lisk from an independent L1 into an Ethereum L2. Base’s growth was rapid and overtook Optimism’s daily activity in weeks. It only took 11 days to hit a million addresses, the fastest any L2 has hit this milestone.

When it launched, Base was synonymous with the American exchange. However, it has become an ecosystem of decentralized projects not allied to Coinbase.

“There are hundreds of apps that people are using regularly that aren’t built by Coinbase. [And] millions of users, many of whom are interacting with Base through non-Coinbase products,” explained Jesse Pollak, the brain behind the project.

A great exhibition of the evolution of Base is the type of projects that contribute the highest user base. One of the frontrunners was Friend.tech, a social media platform that took off rapidly in August and September. However, the hype died down, but Base’s popularity continued. The network attracted other projects with their own legion of users. These include Maple Finance, an institutional-focused on-chain lending platform; Chainlink, the leading oracle network; and 1inch, the leading DEX aggregator.

Avichal Garg explains that Base demonstrates how apt Coinbase is at building ecosystems beyond its trading platform. Garg, whose Electric Capital has invested in dYdX, Kraken, NFT marketplace Magic Eden, and more, told one outlet:

Most people don’t realize it, but Coinbase is as much a developer tooling company as it is a consumer company. Between their custody, wallets, and Coinbase Cloud, they have a lot of expertise in how to work with developers and partners and build ecosystems.