Base network sees surge in transactions and new users following Dencun

The daily transaction volume of Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network incubated by Coinbase, has seen significant growth over the past week – likely due to low transaction fees following the Dencun upgrade.

This Layer 2 network witnessed a sudden spike in the number of daily users and transactions and reached record highs shortly after the Dencun upgrade. This led to a dramatic drop in transaction costs on most Layer 2 systems, including Base.

The number of daily transactions on the Base network was approximately 440,000 just before Dencun. The number of transactions, based on a seven-day moving average, reached a new peak of more than 1.05 million transactions on March 17 – just days after the Dencun upgrade, according to The Block’s data dashboard.

This exceeded the transaction volumes of other leading bullish rollups. Arbitrum had 960,000 transactions on March 17 and Optimism had 519,000 transactions.

A similar trend was observed in the influx of new users on Base. The number of weekly new users on Base increased to 800,000 last week, an increase of 600% from the previous week before the Dencun upgrade was implemented and an all-time high for the network.

The upgrade introduced a new transaction type for Layer 2s called blobs. These blobs provide a new location point for chains when posting information on Ethereum, moving away from the traditional ‘call data’ method and thus providing a direct route to reducing costs.

Average gas costs on Base fell from about $0.5 on March 13, just before Dencun was activated, to about $0.003 today – one of the lowest among several Layer 2 networks. Meanwhile, the average fee on Base is currently $0.09.