Base Chain has emerged as a hotbed for meme coins following Solana. On May 5th, Base Chain saw an increase of 2,821 new DEX trading pairs in 24 hours, compared to Solana’s 1,508 pairs. This trend has been consistent for the past month, with Base Chain consistently surpassing Solana in daily new trading pairs. This raises the question of whether Base has taken over the meme coin throne from Solana and become the new king of meme chains.
In this article, PANews will compare Base and Solana in the meme coin race from various angles, including user habits, code vulnerabilities, transaction speed, fund preferences, cultural characteristics, and deployment costs. This analysis aims to uncover the secrets behind the flow of meme popularity.
Meme coins are rooted in meme culture, which refers to cultural fragments spread through the internet, such as images, videos, texts, or concepts. These memes often contain humorous elements and quickly gain widespread circulation on the internet. Therefore, although meme coins are different from other types of projects, they still require meme culture material as their core for dissemination. The more well-known and widely appealing the meme material is, the better it will propagate.
Meme coins on Solana did not receive much attention in the market until the rise of meme culture in September 2023. On September 6th, during Solana’s annual event, Solana Breakpoint, co-founder Anatoly appeared dressed as a green dinosaur and referred to himself as a silly dragon.
On November 8th, Anatoly posted on social media, calling for a silly dragon meme to emerge. Subsequently, the SILLY token was deployed in the community and distributed through social media by leaving wallet addresses.
In fact, this issuance process represents the origin of meme culture on the Solana chain, triggered by the founder and followed by multiple interactions between the official team and the community. After the explosive spread, the deployment contract attracted more people due to the wealth effect.
During the recent frenzy of “money printing,” Solana experienced a wave of meme climax. The rise of this trend is mainly due to Solana’s large user base, which formed a pattern of spontaneously searching for high-quality meme targets.
Solana’s meme culture is characterized by users seeking material from meme culture under the vision of wealth effect. On the other hand, Base, backed by Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, has a more distinct American style and a strong association with Coinbase in its meme coin culture. Some of the top meme coins on Base include Degen, Jogeco Dog (Coinbase founder’s dog), Ollie Dog (Coinbase’s Chief Independent Director’s dog), ROCKY (MetaWin founder’s dog), Bento (a space dog), BASED USA (Make America Great Again), and Young Peezy (another character in the “Boys Club” comic series, apart from PEPE).
User habits: Solana creates a new ecosystem, while Base relies on the Ethereum ecosystem
When it comes to user habits, several factors need to be considered, including wallets, DEX (decentralized exchanges), trading bots, market panels, and project information. The usability of these products directly affects the threshold for users to participate in meme coin speculation.
Wallets:
The wallet on Solana is the first major hurdle for users to participate in memes. Unlike the Ethereum ecosystem, Solana uses Rust or C programming languages, so the architecture of the wallet is completely different. The mainstream crypto wallet Metamask is not compatible with Solana tokens. Therefore, the popularity of Solana’s meme tokens also benefited from the rapid rise of SOL tokens in the early stages of this bull market, which familiarized more people with new wallet formats like Phantom.
Base is essentially an Ethereum L2 network, so it is fully compatible with Ethereum, allowing users to use familiar wallets like Metamask for transactions. In addition, Coinbase has launched the AA wallet, which eliminates the need for complicated steps for ordinary users. They can directly generate accounts using mobile or computer devices, touch ID, Google accounts, and even directly connect to Coinbase accounts. This lays the foundation for Base to attract a large number of users and funds.
DEX (decentralized exchanges):
The operation of DEX products on Solana is not significantly different from the Ethereum system. However, Solana has advantages in terms of speed and convenience.
Most of the trading pairs on Base are still built on DEXs like Uniswap, which is perfectly compatible with Ethereum users’ habits.
Trading bots:
Trading bots in the Solana ecosystem were developed by sensitive bot developers at the beginning of the meme craze. They are not significantly different from Ethereum trading bots in terms of usage.
Base Chain currently has a few trading bots such as Sigma and Shuriken, which help fill the market gap.
Market panels:
Products like Birdeye and Dexscreener are currently compatible with market panels and token information from multiple chains.
Overall, in terms of user habits, Solana has successfully established an independent system and quickly gained acceptance from meme players. Base, on the other hand, benefits from the user base advantages of Ethereum and Coinbase, saving a lot of construction costs in this regard.
Code vulnerabilities: Solana’s inherent advantage and Base’s efforts to mitigate
As outstanding meme ecosystems, the quality of contract environments is a crucial factor for meme players to consider. One of the major issues with Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, the previous main meme soils, is that there is too much room for malicious activities in contracts. According to previous statistics from PANews, about 98% of meme coins issued on the Ethereum chain have code issues.
Solana, with its completely different programming language and architecture, can better avoid contract vulnerabilities. The general token contract issues are only present in risks such as code issuance quantity and ownership.
Base uses the same programming language and architecture as Ethereum, inheriting Ethereum’s vulnerability system. However, Base has implemented a verified contract label on the chain, which helps users avoid some contract code issues at the source.
However, according to a research report by Cointelegraph, a sample security analysis of 1,000 new meme coins launched on Base Chain between March 19th and 25th found that the majority of meme coins on the network had security vulnerabilities that could potentially cause significant losses for users. Almost one-fifth of meme coins were intentionally malicious.
Deployment costs: Base’s lower token issuance cost attracts more developers
The cost of deploying a contract on Solana is about 1 SOL (around $150).
The cost of deploying a contract on Base is around a few dollars. This may be the reason why the number of new trading pairs on Base has increased significantly.
Transaction speed and gas fees: Difference exists but has minimal impact
The transaction speed on Base is about 35 TPS, and the gas fee is about $0.11.
Solana’s transaction speed is about 1,300 TPS, and the transaction fee is about $0.0029.
Although Solana still has a significant advantage in this aspect, Base’s speed and cost level are relatively user-friendly and hardly a major consideration for users.
Funds and active users: Base needs a phenomenon-level meme craze to narrow the gap
Total value locked (TVL) on Solana is about $3.9 billion, while TVL on Base is about $1.5 billion.
24-hour on-chain trading volume is about $1 billion on Solana and about $400 million on Base.
As of May 4th, Base had approximately 8.4 million total users and about 350,000 daily active users.
Solana had about 850,000 daily active users.
In terms of liquidity trends, there was a net outflow of $1.77 million from Solana to Base. Overall, the gap between Base and Solana is no longer in the order of magnitude, and it may be further narrowed with the emergence of some phenomenon-level products.
Official attitude: Solana hopes for meme cooling down, while Base desires meme glory
In addition to the above objective factors, the official promotion also plays an important role in the development of meme coins. Solana’s meme craze originated from the promotion by co-founders and the official organization.
Currently, it seems that Solana’s official team does not want to be solely associated with meme chains. In April, Solana co-founder Raj tweeted that meme coins are scaring away serious builders. However, he reminded these serious builders that if they are afraid of young people using permissionless systems for fun, they won’t succeed.
Previously, after experiencing the “money printing” frenzy, Solana co-founder Toly also called for the community to stop the pre-sale model.
On the other hand, Base’s attitude towards memes seems different. Also in April, Jesse Pollak, the protocol lead of Base, stated that meme coins are an important part of the on-chain economy. He expressed delight in seeing the diffusion of meme-based coins that are helping the world enter the on-chain economy. He noted the exceptional activity in the meme economy within the Base ecosystem.
Overall, Solana and Base’s meme journeys seem to be like a meeting between a descending god and an ascending person. One sees their past self everywhere, while the other is determined to achieve their goals.
Objectively, both have the foundation for developing meme cultures with their product characteristics and cultural backgrounds, including a large user base and distinct community cultures. Subjectively, Solana, as a beneficiary of meme coins in this bull market, has also felt the backlash of memes on other projects in its ecosystem. Therefore, it aims to moderately reduce the temperature of memes to balance ecosystem development. On the other hand, Base hopes to use memes as a window to expand the vibrancy of its ecosystem and continue to climb towards the meme summit.