Moonwell’s msUSD on Base
Moonwell’s msUSD pool on Base shows about $5.9 million in TVL and is being quoted at roughly 12.8% APR with an 85/100 safety score in recent protocol snapshots. (x.com) The notes also point to Base’s low gas environment as a factor in the pool’s on‑chain activity. (x.com)
A dollar-pegged token called msUSD has built a roughly $5.8 million to $5.9 million liquidity pool on Base, where recent snapshots showed yields near 12.8% annual percentage rate. (geckoterminal.com) (x.com) The pool trades msUSD against USD Coin on Aerodrome, Base’s largest decentralized exchange, and GeckoTerminal showed about $5.82 million in liquidity, 95 transactions, and about $26,109 in 24-hour volume in its latest read. (geckoterminal.com) GeckoTerminal identified the asset as Metronome Synth USD, priced at about $0.9964 on April 10, 2026, with a 24-hour range from $0.9888 to $1.0024. The same page said the pool was created about one year ago. (geckoterminal.com) In crypto lending and trading, a liquidity pool is a pot of tokens that lets users swap assets without a traditional exchange order book. Bigger pools usually mean traders can move in and out with less price slippage, which is the gap between the quoted price and the price actually filled. (geckoterminal.com) Base’s fee structure helps explain why activity clusters there. Base says every transaction combines a layer-2 execution fee and a layer-1 security fee, and its minimum base fee on mainnet is 0.005 gwei, which it says is about $0.002 for a typical 200,000-gas transaction at an Ether price of $2,000. (docs.base.org) That cost profile has made Base a busy venue for onchain lending and yield products. DefiLlama listed Moonwell at about $79.5 million in total value locked across its deployments on April 12, 2026, and described it as an open lending and borrowing protocol on Optimism, Base, Moonbeam, and Moonriver. (defillama.com) Moonwell’s own documentation says the protocol’s smart contracts are audited before deployment, with reports from Halborn, Kauz Security, CodeHawks and Code4rena across modules released from 2021 through March 2025. The docs also note audited ERC-4626 vault contracts, a tokenized-vault standard used to package deposits into yield-bearing shares. (docs.moonwell.fi) Risk, though, is not the same as a fixed savings account. DefiLlama’s protocol page lists two Moonwell lending incidents on Base and Optimism, including a $1 million oracle price-feed manipulation event dated November 4, 2025, and a $1.78 million cbETH collateral exploit dated February 15, 2026. (defillama.com) The result is a familiar trade in decentralized finance: higher quoted yield in exchange for smart-contract, market, and peg risk. For now, msUSD on Base is attracting capital precisely where cheap transactions make that trade easier to take and easier to unwind. (docs.base.org) (geckoterminal.com)
