Original Author: Frank, PANews
Following Solana, Base Chain has become a hotbed for MEME coins. On May 5th, there were 2821 new DEX trading pairs on Base Chain within 24 hours, compared to Solana's 1508 pairs. This data trend has been consistent, with Base Chain consistently adding more trading pairs daily than Solana over the past month. Can it be considered that Base has taken over the meme coin scepter from Solana and become the new king of meme coins on the latest public chain?
This article will comprehensively compare Base and Solana in the meme race, analyzing their differences and similarities from the perspectives of user habits, code vulnerabilities, transaction speed, fund preferences, cultural characteristics, deployment costs, and exploring the secrets of meme popularity flow.
Characteristics and Origins of Meme Culture in Both
Meme coins themselves originate from a meme culture, where "meme" typically refers to a cultural fragment spread through the internet, such as images, videos, text, or concepts, often containing humorous elements and quickly gaining widespread online circulation. Therefore, while memes differ from other types of projects, they still require certain meme culture materials as the core of their dissemination. The more well-known and widely appealing meme materials are, the easier they are to spread.
Meme coins on Solana did not receive much attention in the previous market, but the rise of meme culture in this bull market can be traced back to September 6, 2023, when Solana co-founder Anatoly appeared at the annual Solana Breakpoint conference dressed as a green dinosaur and referred to himself as a silly dragon. On November 8, Anatoly posted "year of the silly dragon" on social media and called for a silly dragon meme to appear in the community. Subsequently, the SILLY token was deployed in the community's anticipation and airdropped through leaving wallet addresses on social media.
In fact, this issuance process also represents the origin of meme culture on the Solana chain, initiated by the founder, with multiple interactions between the official and the community. After the explosive dissemination effect, contracts were deployed, and the wealth effect attracted even more people to join.
During the recent frenzy of airdrops, Solana experienced a wave of meme frenzy, mainly due to the large user base of the Solana community, which spontaneously formed a pattern in the search for high-quality meme targets. It can be said that the meme culture characteristic of Solana is that, under the vision of wealth effect, users find materials from meme culture.
In contrast, Base, backed by Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, has meme coin cultural attributes with a more distinct American style and a strong association with Coinbase, such as several meme coins in the top ten holders list: 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), Young Peezy (another character of Pepe in the "Boys' Club" comic series).
User Habits: Solana Creating a New Ecosystem, Base Relying on Ethereum's 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 was the first major threshold to attract users to participate in memes. Unlike the Ethereum ecosystem, Solana is written in Rust or C language, so the architecture of the wallet is completely different. The mainstream crypto wallet Metamask is not compatible with Solana tokens. Therefore, meme tokens on Solana also benefited from the rapid rise of SOL tokens in the early stages of this bull market, making more people accustomed to new wallet forms like Phantom.
Base is essentially Ethereum's L2 network, so it is perfectly compatible with Ethereum users' familiar wallet products such as Metamask. In addition, Coinbase has introduced the AA wallet, eliminating the need for cumbersome operations for ordinary users, allowing them to directly use mobile or computer devices, touch ID, Google accounts to generate accounts, and directly connect to Coinbase accounts, laying the foundation for Base Chain to attract users and funds on a large scale.
DEX:
The operation of DEX products on Solana is not much different from the Ethereum system. However, it has many advantages in terms of speed and operational convenience.
Most of Base's trading pairs are still built on DEX such as Uniswap, perfectly compatible with Ethereum users' habits.
Trading Bots:
Trading bots in the Solana ecosystem were developed by several sensitive bot developers at the beginning of the meme frenzy, with no significant difference from Ethereum trading bots in terms of usage.
There are currently not many trading bots on Base Chain, with products like Sigma and Shuriken, but they do fill a market gap.
Market Panels:
Products like Birdeye and Dexscreener can currently support market panels and token information from multiple public chains.
In summary, in terms of user habits, Solana has successfully carved out an independent system and quickly gained acceptance among meme players, while Base has saved a lot of construction costs in this regard by leveraging the user base advantages of Ethereum and Coinbase.
Code Vulnerabilities: Solana's Innate Advantages and Base's Remedial Measures
As two outstanding meme ecosystem chains, a high-quality contract environment is a factor that meme players must consider. Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, as the main soil for memes in the past, had one of the biggest problems, which was the large space for contract malfeasance. According to PANews' previous statistics, about 98% of meme coins issued daily on the Ethereum chain have code issues.
Solana uses a completely different programming language and architecture, which can better avoid contract vulnerabilities. General token contract issues only exist in a few risks such as code issuance volume and ownership.
Base uses the same programming language and architecture as Ethereum, inheriting Ethereum's vulnerability system. Base's corresponding function is to create a verified contract label on the chain, which helps users avoid some contract code issues at the source. However, according to a research report by Cointelegraph, a sample security analysis of 1000 new meme coins launched on the Base chain from March 19 to 25 found that the vast majority of meme coins on this network have security vulnerabilities that could cause users to suffer significant losses, with almost one-fifth of meme coins intentionally malicious.
Contract Deployment Costs: Base's Lower Issuance Costs May Attract More Developers
The cost of deploying a contract on Solana is about 1 SOL (around $150).
The cost of deploying a contract on Base is around a dozen dollars. This may be why the number of new trading pairs added daily on Base has increased significantly.
Transaction Speed and Gas Fees: Differences Exist but Have Little Impact
The transaction speed on Base is about 35 TPS, with gas fees of about $0.11.
Solana's transaction speed is about 1300 TPS, with transaction fees of about $0.0029.
In this comparison, although Solana still has a significant advantage, Base's speed and fee levels are relatively user-friendly and hardly become the main consideration for users.
Funding and Active Users: Base Needs a Phenomenal Meme Frenzy to Narrow the Gap
TVL on the chain: Solana's TVL on the chain is about $3.9 billion, while Base's TVL on the chain is about $1.5 billion.
24-hour on-chain trading volume: Solana is about $1 billion, Base is about $400 million.
Base: As of May 4th, the total number of users on Base is about 8.4 million, with approximately 350,000 daily active users.
Solana has approximately 850,000 daily active users.
In terms of liquidity trends, there was a net outflow of $1.77 million from Solana to Base. Overall, the gap between Base and Solana is no longer at a significant level, and perhaps this gap will narrow further after the emergence of some phenomenal products.
Official Attitudes: Solana Hopes for Meme Cooling, Base Aims for Meme Brilliance
In addition to the relatively objective factors mentioned above, the official push is also an important factor in the development of meme coins. The meme frenzy on Solana originated from the co-founders and official organizations. Currently, it seems that the Solana official does not want to be solely associated with the impression of a meme chain. In April of this year, Solana co-founder Raj tweeted that meme coins are scaring away serious builders. However, he reminded these serious builders that "if you are so fragile that you are afraid of young people choosing to have fun in a permissionless system, then you cannot succeed." Previously, after experiencing the frenzy of "airdrops," Solana co-founder Toly also called on the community to stop the airdrop pre-sale model.
In contrast, Base's attitude towards memes seems different. Also in April, Jesse Pollak, the head of the Base ecosystem protocol, stated, "Meme coins are an important part of the on-chain economy, and it is great to see the spread of meme-based diffusion, helping the world enter the on-chain economy; the vitality on Base is very strong, and we notice that these meme coins are now bringing thousands of people into this new economy. We see an exceptionally active meme economy shining brightly in the Base ecosystem."
Overall, the meme journey of Solana and Base seems to be like a meeting between a god descending from the mountain and someone climbing up the mountain, one full of its past self, and the other hoping to achieve its goal. Objectively, both have the soil for developing meme culture in terms of product characteristics and cultural background, with a large number of users and distinct community cultures forming the basis of their respective meme cultures. Subjectively, as a beneficiary of meme coins in this bull market, Solana also to some extent feels the backlash of memes on other projects in the ecosystem, and therefore hopes to moderately reduce the temperature of memes to balance ecosystem development. Base, on the other hand, hopes to continue climbing towards the peak of memes as a window to expand ecosystem activity.
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