Coinspeaker
Jesse Pollak Foresees Meme Coins as Key to Base’s Growth
Jesse Pollak, one of the brains behind the development of Coinbase layer-2 scaling solution Base, said meme coins would be the primary driver of new users to the Ethereum-based protocol. Speaking at a hackathon event over the weekend in New York, Pollak highlighted the significant role memes play in the network’s growth strategy. He also acknowledged that the asset class has brought tremendous success to Base in terms of onboarding so far.
“There’s been a ton of energy on Base. One thing that has really stood out to us is that we’re seeing these memes today onboard thousands and thousands of people into this new economy,” he said.
Bringing the World On-chain
Pollak believes that memes are an important aspect of the crypto economy, and the layer-2 protocol aims to bring the world on-chain.
He further noted that apart from serving as a speculative tool, meme creators on the protocol are actively exploring innovative ways to attract new users into their communities.
As a result of their continuous efforts to creatively engage and onboard more individuals, the Base creator believes the asset class will be instrumental in bringing in millions of new users to Base in the coming years.
“The thing we’ve built more conviction on is that in the years ahead, we’re actually going to see these memes bring in millions more people [to Base] — they’re going to be one of the biggest drivers because they’re doing that work constantly to onboard more and more folks through that in a really creative way,” said Pollak.
Top Meme Projects on Base
Pollak further disclosed that hundreds of meme projects and developers are currently evolving, building, and creating to bring their culture and energy into the Base economy as well as the capital market.
According to data from CoinGecko, BRETT is currently the leading memecoin on Base, boasting a market capitalization of $567 million. Since the beginning of March, the token has experienced a price surge of 7,780%.
Other top meme projects on the layer-2 blockchain after BRETT are DEGEN, with a market cap of $435 million, and TOSHI, with a market cap of $185 million.
Milestone Achievements
In less than a year of launch, Base has achieved a series of milestones and is currently ranked among Ethereum’s top five scaling solutions.
Last month, the protocol recorded $356 million in transactions within 24 hours. Activities on the network continued to surge after the Ethereum Dencun upgrade in mid-March, which reduced fees for layer-2 networks.
According to Web3 firm DefiLlama, Base’s total value locked (TVL) continued to rise, reaching an all-time high of $1.65 billion on April 21. The figure shows a 250% increase since the beginning of March 2024.
Earlier this month, the network achieved another milestone by processing between 300 and 400 transactions per second (TPS) for the first time since its launch.
