Base network sees big surge in transactions and new users following Dencun upgrade

The daily transactions on Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network incubated by Coinbase, has experienced significant growth over the last week — likely driven by low transaction fees following the Dencun upgrade.

This Layer 2 network witnessed a sudden spike in daily users and transactions, reaching record highs shortly after the Dencun upgrade. This led to a dramatic drop in transaction fees on most Layer 2s, including Base.

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

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

A similar trend was observed in the influx of new users on Base. The number of weekly new users on Base spiked to 800,000 last week, marking a 600% increase from the previous week before the Dencun upgrade was implemented and a record 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 “calldata” method, thereby offering a direct route to reducing fees.

The median gas fees on Base dropped from around $0.5 on March 13, just before Dencun was activated, to about $0.003 now — one of the lowest among various Layer 2 networks. Meanwhile, the average fee on Base is currently $0.09.