A Deep Dive into the Base Ecosystem

The Base ecosystem has shown significant growth from 2024 to early 2025. By the end of 2024, it had already leapfrogged Arbitrum in TVL and hasn’t slowed down since. The ecosystem now feels alive, packed with projects across DeFi, SocialFi, NFTs, AI, and GameFi. What really fuels this growth is the muscle of Coinbase, with its 100-plus million users, and the easy fiat on-ramps that pull in both fresh capital and everyday users. Together, these pieces have created the perfect storm for Base’s breakout moment.

The Big Picture of An Overall Thriving Ecosystem

Kicking off 2025, Base was already flexing some big numbers, more than a million daily active addresses and around four million showing up weekly. To put it in perspective, that’s way ahead of rivals. Arbitrum is hovering around a quarter million to 300k. Optimism is barely touching 80k a day. Base isn’t just keeping pace; it’s running laps around the competition. On a monthly basis, Base boasts approximately 24.9 million active addresses, leaving Arbitrum (4.7 million) and Optimism (1.5 million) far behind. Notably, around 40% of these active users are new to Web3, drawn in over the past year by memes, airdrops, and social mechanics. This demonstrates Base’s incredible effectiveness in onboarding new users to the crypto space.

Base dominates the Layer 2 scene 🔥

In the last 30 days, @Base recorded a massive 24.9M monthly active addresses, leaving #Arbitrum (4.7M) and OP Mainnet (1.5M) far behind.

Check out Top 10 L2s by Monthly Active Addresses ⬇️

🥇@base
🥈@arbitrum
🥉@Optimism
🏅@GravityChain… https://t.co/Aq9Tf28awj pic.twitter.com/RBN3bFmNBK

— Base Daily (@BaseDailyTK) August 8, 2025

There have been moments when Base outpaced even Ethereum itself on raw transaction volume. On New Year’s Day 2025, it cranked out a staggering 13.39 million transactions in just 24 hours. It is a flex of how far its scaling has come. The money side tells a similar story: by mid-2025, TVL shot up to around $4.7 billion, putting it ahead of Arbitrum’s $3.8 billion and Optimism’s stack. And it’s not just about cash, the builder scene exploded too, with the number of dApps tripling over the past year to more than 300. Put together, the picture is clear: Base is in full-on boom mode, flush with both capital and users, and laying down the tracks for an ecosystem that just keeps expanding.

Thanks to its EVM compatibility and the OP Stack, the number of dApps on Base has soared. According to DeFiLlama, around 323 dApps were active on Base by the end of 2024—more than a threefold increase from the previous year. Base also consistently ranks in the top three among Layer-2s for its number of core developers. The deployment of smart contracts has accelerated as well, with 1.36 million verified contracts on Base as of July 2025.

Compared to Arbitrum (which has over 400 dApps), Base is rapidly closing the gap in ecosystem diversity despite being younger. Furthermore, Base has no native token, meaning it lacks the token-based incentive programs that Arbitrum and Optimism used to attract users. That’s what makes Base’s engagement numbers hit even harder — people are actually here to use it, not just to farm the next airdrop.

Stablecoin activity backs that up. In just the first half of 2024, circulation on Base exploded more than tenfold, jumping from $319 million to $3.77 billion. A huge chunk of that is USDC, which feels right at home thanks to native support from Coinbase and Circle. By the time 2024 wrapped, USDC trading on Base DEXs had already cleared $20 billion in total volume, locking it in as one of the main engines of liquidity across the whole network.

Base’s TVL experienced a breakout surge in late 2024 and 2025. Back in October 2024, Base was sitting at around $2.2 billion in TVL. Fast forward a few months, and by mid-2025 it had blown past Arbitrum to claim the top Layer-2 spot, landing somewhere between $4.3 and $4.7 billion. That’s more than 400% growth in just a year, while Arbitrum’s numbers barely budged. Base now ranks among the top 6 chains by TVL (including Layer-1s), demonstrating the immense capital flowing into its DeFi and dApp ecosystem.

Base DeFi

The TVL on Base is somewhat concentrated, with the DEX Aerodrome accounting for about $0.6 billion. The rest is distributed across lending protocols like Morpho and Aave, yield farms, and NFT staking.

At the heart of this surge is Aerodrome Finance, which has basically become the backbone of Base DeFi. Spun up in late 2023 as a fork of Velodrome from Optimism, Aerodrome wasted no time in taking over the liquidity game. By the end of 2024, it was sitting on a TVL of about $1.68 billion, almost 40% of the entire Base ecosystem at that point.

And it’s not just Aerodrome holding things down. Trading across all Base DEXs is pushing close to $2 billion, with Uniswap, Aave, and Morpho all adding serious weight. On top of that, Base has built out a solid safety net of Risk Curators like Gauntlet, B.Protocol Curator, and Block Analitica, giving protocols an extra layer of security.

Meanwhile, the DeFi scene keeps spreading into lending and yield aggregation, powered by Coinbase’s fiat rails that make it easy for liquidity to flow in from more traditional users. Aggregators like YO Protocol, Beefy, vfat.io, and Harvest Finance are all running steady. With Base DeFi TVL climbing more than 400% year-over-year, the trend is obvious: capital isn’t just showing up, it’s pouring in, chasing yield and liquidity across the network.

SocialFi: A User Explosion Fueled by Farcaster

SocialFi has been the loudest and fastest-growing corner of Base, blending the pull of social networks with the mechanics of on-chain activity. At the heart is Farcaster, a decentralized social protocol that has quickly become the heartbeat of SocialFi on Base.

Early in 2024, Farcaster hit escape velocity by rolling out its flagship app, Warpcast, and airdropping the DEGEN token, which first started as a Base memecoin, to its community. Clearly there is a mix of meme culture and social interaction. It ignited a surge in user numbers, solidifying Farcaster’s leadership position. Things went up another notch when Coinbase itself stepped in.

In July 2025, Coinbase launched the Base App, essentially a rebranded Coinbase Wallet with built-in social tools. With Farcaster and Zora wired in, users could post, mint, and even trade content without leaving the app. That move kicked off a fresh wave of SocialFi, pulling in not only crypto natives but also mainstream creators and casual users.

For more: The Base SocialFi – From Friend.tech to Farcaster

Zora has been another breakout. Originally focused on NFT minting, Zora went viral on Base in the summer of 2025 by letting users tokenize posts and flip them as NFTs. After the Base App launch on July 16, activity went wild: 7,557 new social tokens in a single day, then 22,098 the very next, and by July 23 Zora was leading the whole industry with 38,254 tokens minted in just 24 hours. To put it into perspective, that beat out the combined token count of Solana’s biggest memecoin launchpads, LetsBonk and Pump.fun.

Of course, Base didn’t start here. Friend.tech lit the first SocialFi fire back in late 2023, but its hype fizzled as quickly as it came. Farcaster and Zora, backed by Coinbase, took that momentum and turned it into something more sustainable.

Game, NFT, and Meme coins

Outside of SocialFi, NFTs and gaming on Base are finding their rhythm too. The Onchain Summer 2023 campaign planted the seeds, and by 2025 Zora had doubled as both a social hub and a decentralized NFT marketplace, sparking comparisons to Solana’s role in meme and NFT culture.

Big-name NFT games are also joining in. Parallel, a trading card game with a strong community, expanded to Base to take advantage of cheap fees, onboarding 50,000 players and building a Discord of over 100,000 members.

For more: Best Base Network Gaming and NFT Ecosystem

Alongside this, multi-chain platforms like OpenSea and QuikNFT brought in cross-chain liquidity, while deep Coinbase Wallet integration kept onboarding smooth for Web2 users.

The meme coin aspect of Base hasn’t slowed either. Since mid-2023, tokens like BALD and Base PEPE have kept new capital flowing in, feeding the “get-rich-quick” narrative that crypto never seems to shake. The Base community even spun up a Degen L3 chain to experiment with memecoin-based tipping on Farcaster, showing just how intertwined memes and SocialFi have become.

For more: Meme Coins on Base: The Case of BRETT, DEGEN, and TOSHI Memecoin

AI and Integrated Intelligence Protocols

And then there’s AI. Base hasn’t missed that wave either. The Virtuals Protocol is leading the charge, building an economy around AI agents that run fully on-chain. These agents can meet a diverse array of user needs and requirements.

The VIRTUAL token went live at the tail end of 2024 and wasted no time making noise—by early 2025 it had already blown past a $4 billion market cap. Virtuals isn’t just about one token though; it’s shaping an entire economy built around AI agents that live and work on-chain. Spin-offs are already popping up. Take AIXBT, for example—an agent that stalks and scrapes the feeds of 400+ crypto influencers to guess where the market’s heading. That one alone swelled to a market cap of around $432 million.

This kind of growth only works because Base keeps things cheap and fast—exactly what AI agents need when they’re firing off real-time tasks on-chain. Coinbase even jumped in with its “Based Agents” initiative, handing these bots their own wallets so they can actually hold, move, and manage crypto themselves. It’s not just code running in the background anymore; it’s AI with on-chain skin in the game.

Challenges and Future Outlook

Despite its impressive statistics, Base also has to face its challenges. The big question is whether user growth can hold up once the initial hype cycles fade. Friend.tech is a clear reminder of how quickly excitement can vanish. There’s also the matter of ecosystem balance. The Base ecosystem still needs to build up a strong DeFi foundation rather than pursuing short-term trends such as SocialFi. Coinbase’s heavy involvement is both a blessing and a risk—it provides scale and credibility, but also raises concerns about how decentralized Base really is.

That said, the bigger picture is hard to ignore. Base has already proven it can scale its community and its on-chain economy faster than almost anyone expected. If the team can keep improving the infrastructure, including decentralizing its sequencer, hardening security, and nurturing a more balanced ecosystem across DeFi, NFTs, and SocialFi, Base is on track to become more than just another Layer-2. It could evolve into a fully fledged universe of its own, packed with users, capital, and the tech stack to back it up.

Since the start of 2025, Base has looked less like a newcomer and more like a phenomenon. Explosive growth in users, transactions, and TVL is more than just bragging rights—it’s proof that the network is widening crypto’s reach, pulling in new money, and stress-testing the limits of what a Layer-2 can do. Although there are still obstacles to overcome, the foundation is already established. If momentum continues, Base could stand toe-to-toe with the big Layer-1s—not just in numbers, but in cultural and economic weight.