The Base ecosystem has shown significant growth from 2024 to early 2025. By the end of 2024, it had already leapfrogged Arbitrum in TVL and hasn’t slowed down since. The ecosystem now feels alive, packed with projects across DeFi, SocialFi, NFTs, AI, and GameFi. What really fuels this growth is the muscle of Coinbase, with its 100-plus million users, and the easy fiat on-ramps that pull in both fresh capital and everyday users. Together, these pieces have created the perfect storm for Base’s breakout moment.
The Big Picture of An Overall Thriving Ecosystem
Kicking off 2025, Base was already flexing some big numbers, more than a million daily active addresses and around four million showing up weekly. To put it in perspective, that’s way ahead of rivals. Arbitrum is hovering around a quarter million to 300k. Optimism is barely touching 80k a day. Base isn’t just keeping pace; it’s running laps around the competition. On a monthly basis, Base boasts approximately 24.9 million active addresses, leaving Arbitrum (4.7 million) and Optimism (1.5 million) far behind. Notably, around 40% of these active users are new to Web3, drawn in over the past year by memes, airdrops, and social mechanics. This demonstrates Base’s incredible effectiveness in onboarding new users to the crypto space.
Base dominates the Layer 2 scene 🔥
In the last 30 days, @Base recorded a massive 24.9M monthly active addresses, leaving #Arbitrum (4.7M) and OP Mainnet (1.5M) far behind.
Check out Top 10 L2s by Monthly Active Addresses ⬇️
🥇@base
🥈@arbitrum
🥉@Optimism
🏅@GravityChain… https://t.co/Aq9Tf28awj pic.twitter.com/RBN3bFmNBK
— Base Daily (@BaseDailyTK) August 8, 2025
There have been moments when Base outpaced even Ethereum itself on raw transaction volume. On New Year’s Day 2025, it cranked out a staggering 13.39 million transactions in just 24 hours. It is a flex of how far its scaling has come. The money side tells a similar story: by mid-2025, TVL shot up to around $4.7 billion, putting it ahead of Arbitrum’s $3.8 billion and Optimism’s stack. And it’s not just about cash, the builder scene exploded too, with the number of dApps tripling over the past year to more than 300. Put together, the picture is clear: Base is in full-on boom mode, flush with both capital and users, and laying down the tracks for an ecosystem that just keeps expanding.
Source: Token Terminal
Thanks to its EVM compatibility and the OP Stack, the number of dApps on Base has soared. According to DeFiLlama, around 323 dApps were active on Base by the end of 2024—more than a threefold increase from the previous year. Base also consistently ranks in the top three among Layer-2s for its number of core developers. The deployment of smart contracts has accelerated as well, with 1.36 million verified contracts on Base as of July 2025.
The Base Ecosystem
Compared to Arbitrum (which has over 400 dApps),