Base makes a U-turn against Arbitrum and zkSync, beats Optimism

• User interaction on Base fell, affecting the protocol’s revenue and profit in the process.
• While zkSync topped the active addresses chart, its TVL dropped.

After a long period of dominance, Coinbase L2 Base has now taken a back seat among its peers in the Ethereum [ETH] L2 scaling ecosystem. According to data shared by Chris Burniske, the unique daily active addresses that interacted with Base on 6 October was 74,850.

Realistic or not, here’s ARB’s market cap in OP’s terms

At long last, Arbitrum overtakes Base

This number was much lower than the number of active addresses on zkSync and Arbitrum [ARB]. Burniske shared that Arbitrum’s active addresses were 155,070, while zkSync was the highest with 235,510 distinct addresses.

Unique Daily Active Addresses
–@zksync: 235.51K
–@arbitrum: 155.07K
–@BuildOnBase: 74.85K
–@optimismFND: 57.99K pic.twitter.com/nNdPRZRYOK

— Chris Burniske (@cburniske) October 6, 2023

From the post above, Base was able to top Optimism [OP] which only recorded 57,990 active users within the same period. While there could be many reasons for Base’s decline, one obvious one is the activity on the decentralized social network Friend. tech. 

For the past few weeks, Friend.tech, which operates on the Base network, recorded a surge in fees, revenue, and Total Value Locked (TVL).

However, in the last few days, Stars Arena, which is a similar social interaction platform but existing on the Avalanche [AVAX] seems to have taken the shine off Friend.tech. Hence, the effect of the shift appeared to have been reflected in the Base network.

Despite having impressive active addresses, the network growth on Arbitrum was nothing to be excited about. Network growth shows the number of new addresses being created on a network daily.

At the time of writing, Arbitrum’s network growth was 940. This means that user adoption over time was low. It was a similar situation with Optimism, whose network growth was down to 738, meaning that traction on the OP Mainnet was not exactly splendid.

Source: Santiment

zkSync trips, Base’s revenue falters

zkSync, on the other hand, could not replicate the hike in active users on its TVL. The TVL is a metric used to measure the total value of assets locked or staked in a decentralized Application (dApp). 

The higher the TVL, the more trustworthy the dApp is perceived to be. Whenever the TVL decreases, it means that there is some sort of skepticism about using the protocol. At press time, zkSync Era’s TVL was down to $120.47 million.

This was because chains like SyncSwap and Mute.io could not attract enough liquidity into the zkSync ecosystem.

Source: Defi Llama

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Meanwhile, the decrease in Base’s active users did not help overthrow the weekly cost over profit. According to Dune Analytics, Base had a weekly revenue of $155,532.  Between this amount, operational costs were $75,921, while the profit was $79.611.

Source: Dune Analytics

While the network made some gains, the profit was not exactly encouraging, especially when it’s compared to previous weeks. For Base to revive the incredible performances of the said weeks, activity on the network needs to improve.