Early Base Whales Have an Affinity for Meme Tokens, Nansen Says

Coinbase’s Ethereum-adjacent blockchain Base technically opened to the public today. But crypto whales have already spent days trading high-risk tokens on the new layer 2 network as well as other blockchains.

Beyond their holdings of market-leader ETH, 22 high-rolling depositors to Base have large positions in Arbitrum’s governance token ARB, casino token RLB and memecoins BALD, TOSHI, PEPE and HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu which has the ticker, BITCOIN, not the famous crypto but rather another meme coin, according to a report by Nansen.

UNIBOT, the Telegram trading bot token, is also among the top tokens held by these whales.

Nansen said these 22 whales display crypto-native tendencies and have each bridged over 100 ETH (worth $185,100) since July 31, when Base was accessible to users willing to interact directly with its smart contract through a one-way bridge. More casual users waited until today, when Base’s frontend went live alongside an exit ramp that allows them to bridge out of the ecosystem, and back to Ethereum.

One wallet was made in 2017, while half of the early Base whales were fresh wallets created this year. Early Base whales have also been active in competing Ethereum scaling solutions Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync Era and Polygon zkEVM.

“There is a heavy memecoin bias in the selection of these whales,” said Nansen analyst Niklas Polk. “There was not much else to do on Base except aping meme coins, hence most of the whales in the report have some affinity to this.”

The 22 early base whales, which had the most interactions with 1inch, Uniswap, Base, 0x, USDC and Unibot, “show how heavily leaning towards Ethereum and L2 ecosystems,” wrote Nansen research analyst Jake Kennis. “Their interactions with well-established DEXs, L2 bridges, and especially the noticeable presence of Unibot, shows the adoption of Telegram bots and new applications.”

“With more apps coming online (DEXs/lending), will likely see a more mature ecosystem not solely revolved around memecoins,” Kennis said to CoinDesk in a telegram message.