Following Solana, Base Chain has become a hotbed for meme coins. On May 5th, there were 2,821 new DEX trading pairs on Base Chain in 24 hours, compared to Solana’s 1,508. This data trend has been consistent for the past month, with Base Chain consistently surpassing Solana in daily new trading pairs. Can Base be considered the new meme king of public chains, taking over from Solana?
In this article, PANews will compare Base and Solana in terms of user habits, code vulnerabilities, transaction speed, funding preferences, cultural characteristics, and deployment costs in the meme race. Through this analysis, we will explore the secrets of meme popularity flow.
Meme coins themselves stem from meme culture, which typically refers to cultural fragments spread through the internet, such as images, videos, texts, or concepts. They often contain humorous elements and can quickly gain widespread circulation online. Therefore, while meme projects are different from other types of projects, they still require a certain amount of meme culture material as their core for dissemination. Consequently, the more well-known and widely recognized the meme material is, the better it will be for dissemination.
Meme coins on Solana did not receive much attention in the previous market. The rise of meme culture on Solana can be traced back to September 6, 2023, when Anatoly, co-founder of Solana, dressed up as a green dinosaur at Solana’s annual event, Solana Breakpoint, and called himself a silly dragon.
On November 8th, Anatoly posted on social media, “year of the silly dragon,” and called for a silly dragon meme to emerge in the community. Subsequently, the SILLY token was deployed in response to the community’s expectations and was airdropped through social media by leaving wallet addresses.
In fact, this issuance process also represents the origin of meme culture on the Solana chain, initiated by its founder, with multiple interactions between the official team and the community. After the explosive spread of the meme, the contract was deployed, attracting more people to join and creating wealth.
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 spontaneously formed a pattern in the search for quality meme targets.
It can be said that the meme culture characteristic of Solana is that users seek materials from meme culture under the vision of wealth creation.
In contrast to Solana, due to its affiliation with Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, Base’s meme coins have a more distinct American style and a strong association with Coinbase. 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 (making America great again), and Young Peezy (another character from the “Boys’ Club” comic series, aside from PEPE).
Further reading:
Meme Coin Party! Is the “Altcoin” Season Coming? Analysts Can Judge from Two Major Signs
What are the similarities and differences in meme ecosystems between the two?
User habits: Solana creates a new ecosystem, while Base relies on the Ethereum tree for shade
In terms of user habits, several factors need to be considered: wallets, DEX (decentralized exchanges), trading bots, market panels, project information, etc. 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 gateway to attract users to participate in memes. Unlike the Ethereum ecosystem, Solana is written in Rust or C languages, so the architecture of the wallet is completely different. The mainstream crypto wallet, Metamask, is not compatible with Solana tokens. Therefore, Solana’s meme tokens also benefit from the rapid rise of SOL tokens in the early stages of this bull market, which has made more people accustomed to the new wallet form of Phantom.
Base is essentially an Ethereum L2 network, so it is perfectly compatible with Ethereum in terms of EVM compatibility. This allows users to use familiar wallet products like Metamask for transactions. In addition, Coinbase has launched the AA wallet, eliminating the need for cumbersome steps for ordinary users. They can directly generate accounts using their mobile or computer devices, touch ID, or Google accounts, and they can also directly connect to their Coinbase accounts. This lays the foundation for Base’s large-scale user and funds attraction.
DEX (decentralized exchanges):
The operation of DEX products on Solana is not significantly different from the Ethereum system. However, Solana has many advantages in terms of speed and convenience.
Most of the trading pairs on Base are still established on DEXs like Uniswap, making it perfectly compatible with Ethereum users’ habits.
Trading bots:
Solana’s ecosystem has seen the development of trading bots by sensitive developers since the beginning of the meme frenzy. They are not significantly different from Ethereum trading bots in terms of usage.
There are currently not many trading bots on Base Chain, but products like sigma and Shuriken have filled the market gap.
Market panels:
Products like Birdeye and Dexscreener are currently compatible with market panels and token information from multiple public chains.
Overall, in terms of user habits, Solana has successfully established an independent system and quickly gained acceptance among meme players, while Base relies on 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 subsequent improvements
As two outstanding meme ecosystem chains, the quality of the contract environment is a crucial factor that meme players need to consider. Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, as the main soil for memes in the past, have had the major problem of extensive malicious activities in contracts. According to PANews’ previous statistics, about 98% of meme coins issued on the Ethereum chain daily have code problems.
Solana, with its completely different programming language and architecture, can better avoid contract vulnerabilities. General token contract issues are only present in the risks of code issuance, ownership, etc.
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 from the source.
Nevertheless, 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 vast majority of meme coins on the network have security vulnerabilities that could cause significant losses to users, with almost one-fifth of meme coins intentionally malicious.
Contract deployment costs: Base’s lower issuance cost attracts more developers
The cost of deploying a contract on Solana is approximately 1 SOL (around $150).
The cost of deploying a contract on Base is around a few dollars. This may be why the number of new trading pairs on Base has increased significantly each day.
Transaction speed and gas fees: Differences exist, but have little impact
The transaction speed on Base is about 35 TPS, and the gas fee is about $0.11.
Solana has a transaction speed of about 1300 TPS and a transaction fee of about $0.0029.
In terms of comparison, although Solana still has a greater advantage, the speed and cost levels of Base are relatively user-friendly and hardly a major consideration for users.
Funding and active users: Base needs a phenomenon-level meme frenzy to narrow the gap
Total value locked (TVL) on Solana is around $3.9 billion, while TVL on Base is around $1.5 billion.
24-hour on-chain trading volume on Solana is approximately $1 billion, while on Base it is around $400 million.
As of May 4th, Base had a total of approximately 8.4 million users, with a daily active user count of about 350,000.
Solana has approximately 850,000 daily active users.
In terms of liquidity trends, there has been a net outflow of $1.77 million from Solana to Base. Overall, the gap between Base and Solana is no longer in orders of magnitude. Perhaps this gap will narrow further with the emergence of some phenomenon-level products.
Official attitudes: Solana hopes for a meme cooldown, while Base eagerly embraces meme brilliance
In addition to the relatively objective factors mentioned above, the role of official promotion is also an important part of meme coin development. Solana’s meme frenzy originated from the promotion by its co-founders and official organizations.
Currently, the Solana team seems to not want to be solely associated with meme chains. In April of this year, Raj, co-founder of Solana, tweeted, “Meme coins are scaring away serious builders.” But he reminded these serious builders that if they are too fragile to accept the way young people choose to have fun with permissionless systems, they will not succeed.
Previously, after experiencing the frenzy of “money printing,” Solana co-founder Toly also called on the community to stop the practice of money pre-sales.
On the other hand, Base’s attitude towards memes seems different. Also in April, Jesse Pollak, the ecosystem protocol lead at Base, stated, “Meme coins are an important part of the on-chain economy. It is exciting to see the diffusion based on meme coins, helping the world enter the on-chain era. Base has a strong vitality, and we have noticed that these meme coins are now bringing thousands of people into this new economy. We see an exceptionally active meme economy shining in the Base ecosystem.”
Overall, the meme journeys of Solana and Base seem to be like a god descending the mountain encountering someone climbing up the mountain. One is full of memories of its past, while the other is looking forward to achieving its goals.
Objectively, both have the soil for developing meme culture in terms of product characteristics and cultural backgrounds, with factors such as a large user base and distinctive community culture forming the foundation of their respective meme 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 hopes to reduce the temperature of memes to balance the ecosystem’s development. On the other hand, Base hopes to use memes as a window to expand the ecosystem’s vitality and continue climbing towards the peak of memes.
This article is a collaborative reprint with PANews.
