Memes are creating a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of crypto onboarding: Base creator

Base creator Jesse Pollak believes memes will be key to onboarding millions of users to his Coinbase-adjacent layer-2 network, which has already tripled in total value locked since March. 

During a memecoin hackathon in New York on April 20, Pollak said memes are an important part of the on-chain economy, adding that he is “excited to see more based memes proliferate to help bring the world on-chain.”

“There’s been a ton of energy on Base,” said Pollak, adding:

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.

The growth in memecoins and transactions on Base surged following the Ethereum Dencun upgrade in mid-March which reduced fees on layer-2 networks.

As a result, Base total value locked has surged almost 250% since the beginning of March, hitting an all-time high of $1.61 billion on April 21, according to DefiLlama.

Base TVL 2024. Source: DeFiLlama

Pollak said that aside from speculation, memes creators on Base have also bred countless new ways to onboard people to their communities. 

And what that’s creating is this kind of Cambrian explosion of onboarding experiments where people are taking tons and tons of shots on goal to say ‘how do we get our culture into the hands of more people.

“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,” he added. 

He added that there were “hundreds of teams and hundreds of sub-cultures” that are evolving, building, and creating, “bringing their culture and energy into this economy,” and capital market.

The most popular memecoin on Base at the moment is BRETT which has a market cap of $567 million and saw a price explosion of 7,780% since the beginning of March.

Other large-cap memecoins on the Coinbase blockchain include DEGEN with a market cap of $435 million and TOSHI with $185 million, according to CoinGecko.

Blockchains such as Solana and Base have become a magnet for memecoin degens in recent months due to their high throughput and low fees.

However, an in-depth investigation by Cointelegraph revealed that 16.7% of new Base memecoins were scams, and more than 90% of them have vulnerabilities.