Coinbase’s Base was publicly launched a few hours ago. The L2 blockchain is the first of its kind to be launched by a publicly traded company. For Coinbase, it is a new revenue opportunity. The company will earn user fees from running its own blockchain. Parallelly, the apps built on top of Base will open another stream of revenue for Coinbase. A recent analysis report by Nansen highlighted that many newly created whale wallets are invested “heavily” in meme coins across Base and Ethereum. With respect to the number of new wallets identified, the report highlighted,
“22 ‘Early BASE Whales’ identified, mostly new “fresh” wallets created in 2023, heavily allocated to Ethereum and L2s.”
Meme Coin Inclination
According to Nansen, the wallets were predominantly interacting with “known” DEXs, and L2 bridges, including 1inch, Uniswap, Base, 0x, USDC, and Unibot. Nansen research analyst Jake Kennis highlighted that whales’ ”interactions with well-established DEXs, L2 bridges, and especially the noticeable presence of Unibot, show the adoption of Telegram bots and new applications.”
The analysis pointed out that the on-chain behavior of these wallets has not changed much over the past 1-3 months. Even before the Base mainnet went live for the public, significant meme coin-related activity had been taking place. As analyzed in a recent article, traders had been scooping out tokens like BALD, COIN, and BASED on the network via DEXes.
Currently, Base Whales holds Ethereum. They have also diverted funds towards Arbitrum’s native ARB token and casino token, RLB. Memecoins like BALD, TOSHI, and PEPE continue to be transacted. In fact, another meme coin, HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu with the ticker BITCOIN [not to be confused with the original BTC] also managed to find appeal among whales.
Nansen noted that these 22 whales have crypto-native tendencies. All of them have bridged over 100 ETH [worth $185,100] since July 31, when Base was open to users to interact directly with its smart contract via a one-way bridge. However, the other set of users waited until the launch day to interact with Base.
Also Read: Coinbase’s Base Welcomes Meme Coin Season: Assets Rise Upto 7-Million%