Solana and Base’s Meme Journey seems to be like a meeting between a god descending from the mountain and a person climbing up the mountain, one with eyes full of their past self and the other with the determination to achieve their goals. This article will compare the two platforms from the perspectives of user habits, transaction speed, and other aspects to analyze the differences between them.
(Table of Contents:
Characteristics and Origins of Meme Culture in Both Platforms
User Habits: Solana Establishes a New Ecosystem, Base Relies on the Ethereum Tree for Shade
Wallets
Decentralized Exchanges (DEX)
Trading Bots
Market Panels
Code Vulnerabilities: Solana’s Inherent Advantage and Base’s Compensatory Measures
Contract Deployment Costs: Base’s Lower Token Issuance Costs or Attracting More Developers
Transaction Speed and Gas Fees: Differences Exist but Have Little Impact
Funding and Active Users: Base Needs to Narrow the Gap in Phenomenal Meme Trends
Official Attitudes: Solana Hopes for Meme Cooling, Base Craves Meme Brilliance
Following Solana, Base Becomes the Hotbed for Meme Coins. On May 5th, Base saw a 24-hour increase of 2,821 DEX trading pairs, compared to Solana’s 1,508 pairs. This data trend has been consistent, with Base consistently surpassing Solana in daily new trading pairs over the past month. Can we consider Base as the new meme king of public chains, having taken over the meme coin throne from Solana?
This article, PANews, will conduct a comprehensive comparison of Base and Solana in the meme race, analyzing the differences between the two platforms from the perspectives of user habits, code vulnerabilities, transaction speed, funding preferences, cultural characteristics, and deployment costs. Through this analysis, we aim to explore the secrets of meme popularity.
Meme coins themselves stem from a meme culture, where memes refer to cultural fragments disseminated through the internet, such as images, videos, texts, or concepts. They often contain humorous elements and can quickly spread widely online. Therefore, although memes differ from other types of projects, they still require meme culture materials as the core for dissemination. The more well-known and widely appealing the meme material is, the better its dissemination.
Meme coins on Solana did not receive much attention in the previous market. The rise of meme culture on Solana can be traced back to September 6, 2023, when Anatoly, co-founder of Solana, appeared at the Solana Breakpoint annual event dressed as a green dinosaur, calling himself a silly dragon. On November 8th, Anatoly posted on social media, “year of the silly dragon,” calling for the community to create a silly dragon meme. Subsequently, the SILLY token was deployed based on the community’s expectations and was airdropped through leaving wallet addresses on social media.
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In fact, this issuance process also represents the origin of meme culture on the Solana chain, initiated by the founders, with multiple interactions between the official team and the community. After the explosive dissemination effect, the contract was deployed, attracting even more participants.
During the recent money-making frenzy, Solana experienced a wave of meme enthusiasm. The rise of this trend is mainly due to Solana’s large user base, which spontaneously formed a pattern of searching for high-quality meme targets. It can be said that the meme culture characteristic of Solana is that users find materials from meme culture with the vision of making a fortune.
In contrast to Solana, Base, backed by Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, has a more distinct American style and a strong association with Coinbase in its meme coin culture. Examples include several meme coins in the top ten holder rankings on Base, such as 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), and Young Peezy (another character in the “Boys’ Club” comic series).
In terms of user habits, several factors need to be considered, such as wallets, decentralized exchanges (DEX), trading bots, market panels, and project information. The convenience of using these products directly affects the threshold for users to participate in meme coin speculation.
The wallet on Solana was the first major entry point for users to participate in memes. Unlike the Ethereum ecosystem, Solana uses Rust or C language for development, so the architecture of wallets is completely different. Mainstream crypto wallets like Metamask are not compatible with Solana tokens. Therefore, Solana’s meme tokens also benefited from the rapid rise of SOL tokens in the early stages of this bull market, which familiarized more people with new wallet forms like Phantom.
Base is essentially an Ethereum L2 network, so it is fully compatible with Ethereum in terms of EVM compatibility, allowing users to use familiar wallet products like Metamask for transactions. In addition, Coinbase launched the AA wallet, eliminating the need for complicated operations for ordinary users. They can directly generate accounts using mobile or computer devices, touch ID, or Google accounts, and can also directly link their Coinbase accounts. This has laid the foundation for Base’s large-scale attraction of users and funding.
The operation of DEX products on Solana is not much different from the Ethereum system. However, Solana has many advantages in terms of speed and operational convenience. Most of Base’s trading pairs are still established on DEX platforms like Uniswap, making it perfectly compatible with Ethereum users in terms of usage habits.
Solana’s meme ecosystem had several sensitive developers who created trading bots at the beginning of the meme trend. Their usage is similar to Ethereum’s trading bots. Currently, there are not many trading bots on the Base chain, with only a few products like Sigma and Shuriken, but they can be considered as filling the market gap.
Products like Birdeye and Dexscreener are currently compatible with market panels and token information from multiple public chains.
Overall, in terms of user habits, Solana has successfully established an independent system and gained rapid acceptance among meme players. Base, on the other hand, benefits from the user base advantages of Ethereum and Coinbase, saving a lot of construction costs in this regard.
As two outstanding meme ecosystem chains, a high-quality contract environment is a crucial factor for meme players to consider. Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, as the main breeding grounds for memes in the past, have one of the major problems, which is the large space for contract misconduct. According to previous statistics from PANews, about 98% of meme coins issued on the Ethereum chain had code issues.
Solana, with its completely different programming languages and architecture, can better avoid contract vulnerabilities. General token contract issues only exist in a few risks, such as code issuance volume and ownership.
Base adopts the same programming language and architecture as Ethereum, inheriting Ethereum’s vulnerability system. However, Base has implemented a verified contract label on the chain, which helps users avoid some contract code issues at the source. Nevertheless, a research report by Cointelegraph found that a significant majority of meme coins on the Base chain have security vulnerabilities that could cause users significant losses. Nearly one-fifth of meme coins were found to be malicious.
The cost of deploying a contract on Solana is about 1 SOL (around $150), while on Base, it is around a dozen dollars. This may be one reason for the significant increase in the number of new trading pairs on Base every day.
The transaction speed on Base is about 35 TPS, with a gas fee of around $0.11. Solana’s transaction speed is about 1300 TPS, with a transaction fee of around $0.0029.
In terms of comparison, although Solana still has a greater advantage, Base’s speed and cost levels are relatively user-friendly and hardly the main considerations for users.
TVL on the chain: Solana’s TVL is about $3.9 billion, while Base’s TVL is about $1.5 billion.
24-hour on-chain trading volume: Solana is about $1 billion, while Base is about $400 million.
As of May 4th, Base has approximately 8.4 million total users, with a daily active user count of around 350,000.
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Solana has approximately 850,000 daily active users.
In terms of liquidity trends, around $1.77 million flowed from Solana to Base. Overall, the gap between Base and Solana is no longer in the same order of magnitude, and perhaps this gap will be further narrowed with the emergence of some phenomenal products.
In addition to the above relatively objective factors, the official push also plays an important role in the development of meme coins. Solana’s meme frenzy originated from the promotion by the co-founders and the official organization. Currently, it seems that the Solana team does not want to be solely associated with meme chains. In April of this year, Raj Gokal, co-founder of Solana, tweeted that meme coins are scaring away serious builders. But he reminded these serious builders that if they are too weak to accept the way young people choose to have fun using permissionless systems, they will never succeed. Previously, after experiencing the money-making frenzy, Toly, co-founder of Solana, also called on the community to stop the pre-sale model.
On the other hand, Base seems to have a different attitude towards memes. Also in April, Jesse Pollak, the protocol lead of Base, stated, “Meme coins are an important part of the on-chain economy, and I am delighted to see the diffusion based on meme coins, helping the world enter the on-chain world. The vitality on Base is 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 flourishing in the Base ecosystem.”
Overall, Solana and Base’s Meme Journey seems to be like a meeting between a god descending from the mountain and a person climbing up the mountain, one with eyes full of their past self and the other with the determination to achieve their goals. Objectively, both platforms have the foundations for developing meme cultures, such as large user bases and distinctive community cultures. Subjectively, Solana, as a beneficiary of this bull market’s meme coins, has also experienced the backlash of memes on other projects within its ecosystem. Therefore, Solana hopes to moderate the meme temperature to balance ecosystem development. On the other hand, Base hopes to use memes as an extension to enhance ecosystem activity and continue climbing towards the peak of memes.
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