UPDATED: March 18, 2024, 12:41 p.m. EDT
Daily transactions on Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network incubated by Coinbase, have seen significant growth over the past week, likely driven by low transaction fees following the Dencun upgrade.
This layer 2 network saw a sudden increase in users and daily transactions, reaching record levels shortly after the Dencun upgrade. This has led to a dramatic drop in transaction fees across most Layer 2s, including Base.
The number of daily transactions on the Base network was around 440,000 just before Dencun. The number of transactions, based on a seven-day rolling average, reached a new high of more than 1.05 million transactions on March 17, just days after Dencun’s upgrade, according to the data dashboard from The Block.
This exceeded the trading volumes of other leading bullish cumulatives. Arbitrum had 960,000 transactions and Optimism had 519,000 transactions as of March 17.
A similar trend was observed in the influx of new users on Base. The number of new weekly users on Base has reached 800 000 last week, which was a 600% increase from the previous week before the Dencun upgrade was implemented and a record for the network.
The upgrade introduced a new transaction type for Layer 2 called blobs. These blobs provide a new location point for chains when publishing information on Ethereum, moving away from the traditional “call data” method, providing a direct way to reduce fees.
Median gas fees on Base have fallen from around $0.5 on March 13, just before Dencun was activated, to around $0.003 today – one of the lowest among various Layer 2 networks. Meanwhile, the average fee on Base is currently $0.09.
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