- Base easily outperformed Ethereum, hitting a peak TPS of 300–400, which led to parallels with Solana.
- Amid a memecoin craze, Base’s TVL surpassed $4 billion to achieve a record $1.5 billion, outpacing Ethereum and Arbitrum.
The remarkable growth in Total Value Locked (TVL) and remarkable transaction per second (TPS) throughput of Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, Base, have garnered media attention.
In his observations of X (formerly Twitter), Coinbase’s Head of Protocols, Jesse Pollak, revealed that Base was able to achieve an impressive throughput of 300–400 TPS without experiencing any operational problems, demonstrating its scalable infrastructure.
just saw a few minutes of ~300-400 tps on @base with no issues pic.twitter.com/9O2IrEqX6c
— Jesse Pollak (jesse.xyz) 🛡️ (@jessepollak) April 9, 2024
In contrast to Pollak’s upbeat reports, Chainspect data presents a more cautious picture, indicating a maximum recorded TPS of 292 and a real-time TPS of 26.8.
But according to L2Beat, an analytics tool for layer-2 ecosystems, Base’s average TPS peaked on April 8 at 37, much higher than Ethereum’s TPS of 14, and this was a new high for the network’s efficiency.
Analyzing in Comparison with Solana
Pollak’s report of a high TPS sparked parallels with the Solana network, which is known for having a high throughput.
Based on the observation that a significant percentage of Solana’s stated 1,000 TPS is made up of failed transactions, which effectively reduces Solana’s actual TPS to 400, an anonymous trader named Wazz conjectured that Base’s performance might be comparable to that of Solana.
CEO of Helius Labs in Solana, Mert Mumtaz, expressed doubt about this claim, questioning the reason for the omission of unsuccessful transactions from Base’s TPS statistics. He also noted that 94% of the largest Base block data consisted of unsuccessful transactions, indicating an actual TPS of 41.
seeing this get DM'd to me
sadly, it is incorrect
OP excludes failed txns on Solana, but not Base
the biggest Base block (link below) has 94% failed txns => 41 TPS
(I disagree w the logic that failed txns don't count btw — and I'm pretty stoked to see Base pushing limits) pic.twitter.com/f7S1FJ6sV5
— mert | helius.dev (@0xMert_) April 9, 2024
Growth and Difficulties of Ecosystems
Amid these technological achievements and discussions, Base has seen an increase in network activity, mostly due to a growing memecoin craze. According to DefiLlama data, this tendency drove the TVL on the Base network to an all-time high of $1.5 billion on April 9, representing a 235% rise from the year’s commencement.
This expansion fits with a broader pattern; earlier, Base surpassed a $4 billion TVL and outperformed Ethereum and Arbitrum in terms of market share and transaction volume, as previously reported by ETHNews.
On Base, there are drawbacks to the growing interest in memecoins, though. A thorough investigation showed that more than 90% of newly added memecoins to the network had at least one security flaw, and that 17% of them were blatant scams, underscoring the dangers of the quickly growing ecosystem.