Base leads L2 growth
Layer‑2 networks are showing uneven but notable activity: Base reports about 6.2 million active addresses—roughly twice Arbitrum—while some rollups like Starknet are posting explosive percentage growth (x.com). Base’s DeFi footprint was also highlighted as approaching $5 billion in TVL since launch, underscoring its scale among L2 ecosystems (x.com).
Base has pulled ahead in Ethereum’s layer‑2 race, with about 6.2 million monthly active addresses versus roughly 2.6 million on Arbitrum and about $4.65 billion locked in DeFi apps. (tokenterminal.com) (defillama.com) A layer‑2 is a second lane built on top of Ethereum: it batches transactions off the main chain, then posts the result back to Ethereum to keep costs lower. L2BEAT says rollups do that by sending state commitments and data back to Ethereum rather than settling every step directly on the main network. (coinbase.com) (l2beat.com) Base is Coinbase’s layer‑2, built with Optimism’s OP Stack and launched from a company that says it can connect builders to more than 110 million verified users and more than $80 billion in assets across the Coinbase ecosystem. Coinbase also says Base does not have its own network token. (coinbase.com) The latest DeFiLlama snapshot puts Base at $4.653 billion in total value locked, nearly $4.844 billion in stablecoins, and about $13.695 billion in bridged value. Its 24‑hour dashboard also showed roughly $986 million in decentralized exchange volume and 423,089 active addresses. (defillama.com) Those figures put Base among the largest layer‑2 ecosystems by onchain capital, even as activity across the category remains uneven. L2BEAT’s market overview shows $41.54 billion in value secured across the broader layer‑2 sector as of April 18, 2026. (l2beat.com) The split inside the market is visible in the technology choices. Base uses the optimistic rollup model through OP Stack, while Starknet says it uses validity proofs — advanced cryptographic checks that verify batches mathematically before they are posted to Ethereum. (coinbase.com) (starknet.io) Starknet is pitching that design as a way to scale more complex apps, and its website says the network is a “Validity Rollup” with native account abstraction and its own Cairo programming language. The tradeoff is that developer tooling, user habits, and liquidity are still spreading unevenly across layer‑2 networks. (starknet.io) Base’s current footprint is concentrated in a few large protocols. DeFiLlama’s latest chain page shows Morpho at about $2.61 billion on Base, followed by Steakhouse Financial at roughly $815.7 million, Aave V3 at about $768.0 million, Uniswap at about $420.6 million, and Aerodrome at about $381.4 million. (defillama.com) The contest now looks less like a single leaderboard and more like a split field: Base is leading on raw user and DeFi scale, while other rollups are trying to win on different technology and growth curves. On April 18, 2026, the clearest read from the public dashboards is that Base has become the network to catch. (defillama.com) (l2beat.com)
