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What are Early BASE Whales Doing On-Chain?
Sandra Leow and 1 other
main
Key Takeaways
8 min read
  • Early Base Bridgers were primarily crypto-natives with over $100M total bridged value (TVB) before official launch.
  • 22 'Early BASE Whales' identified, mostly new “fresh” wallets created in 2023, heavily allocated to Ethereum and L2s.
  • Overall, many are allocated heavily to meme coins across BASE and Ethereum.
  • The wallets were predominantly interacting with known DEXs, L2 bridges, and Unibot stands out. Their on-chain behavior has not changed much over the past 1-3 months.

Introduction

Early Base bridgers are an interesting segment given they were early to another chain and likely crypto native. These wallets had to interact with the bridge smart contract itself given there was no frontend for bridging before August 3rd. Given this, we can likely assume a lot of the early Base depositors are crypto-native degens. At the time of writing this, there is $34m of TVL sitting on BASE with DEXs making up for a majority of the TVL. The chain is expected to go live on August 9th, however, and has already amassed >$100M in total bridged value (TVB).

Methodology

We looked at the top depositors to the BASE bridge as of July 31st.

  • This only looks at ETH deposits up until July 31st
  • Wallets deposited 100 or more ETH to the bridge
  • Only looks at EOAs (filters out bots)

From here, we are left with 22 wallets that will be used for the rest of the report. We will refer to this group of users as our ‘Early BASE Whales’.

Wallet Ages

The wallets vary significantly by age, but heavily skew towards fresh wallets made in 2023.

  • 11 of the wallets made in 2023
  • 4 were made in 2022
  • 3 were made in 2021
  • 3 in 2020
  • 1 in 2017

Aggregate Chain Allocation

Early BASE Whales are mostly allocated to Ethereum and L2 ecosystems. As of August 7th, the top chains they are allocated to are:

  • Ethereum ($19.67m)
  • BASE ($17.6m)
  • Arbitrum ($4.97m)
  • Optimism ($2.76m)
  • zkSync Era ($2.22m)
  • Polygon zkEVM ($1.82m)

Top Tokens Held and App Allocation

As for aggregate token holdings, below are the tokens sorted by USD value. We will only look at the top ten tokens sorted by USD value as of August 7th.

  1. ETH ($11.6m)
  2. BALD ($2.7m) - skewed by BALD Deployer
  3. ARB ($564k)
  4. WETH ($477k)
  5. TOSHI ( $462k)
  6. USDC ($444k)
  7. sUSD ($396k)
  8. RLB ($370k)
  9. UNIBOT ($284k)
  10. BITCOIN ($273k)

Interestingly, the tokens held across these wallets vary but some fall in line with previous narratives:

  • Telegram trading bot tokens - UNIBOT
  • Meme tokens - BITCOIN, PEPE, TOSHI
  • On-chain gaming/casino - DMT and RLB

Top Entities Over the Last 30 Days

Continuing to look at the Early BASE Whales, we want to see the top entities they have interacted with in the last 30 days to see what potential new metas there might be. Below is a list of the top entities sorted by interactions and number of wallets.

Source: Nansen Query

Out of the top entities interacted with, most of them are very commonly used DEXs, aggregators or blue chip protocols. Interestingly, Unibot is also in the top 10 by unique number of wallets, suggesting a strong product market fit for traders. Overall, the entities can be grouped into the following categories, which had at least 2 or more unique wallets have interacted with them:

  • DEXs/Aggregators
    • Uniswap
    • Paraswap
    • 1inch
    • 0x
    • Balancer
    • KyberSwap
  • L2s/Bridges
    • BASE
    • Synapse
    • Polygon
    • Arbitrum
  • Stablecoins
    • USDC
    • Tether
  • Telegram Trading Bots
    • Unibot
  • LSDs
    • Lido Finance
    • Rocket Pool
  • DeFi Apps / DeFi Adjacent
    • WETH
    • MakerDAO
    • Aura Finance
    • Aave
  • CEXs
    • Binance
  • Memes
    • Pepe

When extending the timeframe to the last 90 days, the list of entities does not change much. In other words, the Early BASE Whales did not change their on-chain behavior, most of their activity comprises DEXs, stables, L2s, and common DeFi apps. However, in line with their chain allocation and wallet holdings, most of the DeFi apps converge on a few key DeFi protocols on Ethereum and L2s suggesting sticky usage of ‘trustworthy’ apps.

Overlap with Narrative Traders

We previously laid out four narratives and tracked traders across specific timeframes to show ‘early’ and potentially high signal wallets. These narratives were ‘DeFi OGs/RWAs’, ‘Telegram trading bots’, ‘on-chain gaming/casino’, and ‘meme coins’. You can check out the full report here which covers these wallets extensively.

We wanted to see if there was any overlap between early narratives traders and the Early BASE Whales. Out of the top 22 depositors, only 1 wallet was also considered narrative trader. Without getting too sidetracked, lets just give this wallet a quick spotlight.

This wallet was successful in trading the telegram bot narrative and the BITCOIN narrative (Harry Potter Obama Sonic). Additionally, this wallet is holding PENDLE, PEPE, RLB, UNIBOT, USH, ATO, and other tokens that were narratives in the past few months. Next up, lets look at the other Early BASE Whales.

Deep Dives into Wallets

Of the 22 wallets, only two of them are considered smart money. Overall, many are allocated heavily to meme coins across BASE and Ethereum. A few of the wallets were emptied, so we omitted them from the below but you can surely track their outflows to other wallets. We will leave wallet bundles for all 22 wallets, so that you may them investigate them further.

0xccfa0530b9d52f970d1a2daea670ce58e4176389

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • ETH ($8.7m - 72% of total wallet holdings)
  • BALD ($2.6m - 21% of total wallet holdings)
  • sUSD ($396k -3% of total wallet holdings)
  • WETH ($114k -1% of total wallet holdings)

0xb28fc349b02d30ff42fbdb9a1234c11a7e1bab44

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • ETH ($1.16m - 55% of total wallet holdings)
  • ARB ($565k - 26% of total wallet holdings)
  • WETH ($365k - 17% of total wallet holdings)

0x2f25cd2ff250a97e7eb1f6cee8fd77babac7430e

  • Wallet is near emptied but transferred most of its bridged ETH to this wallet
    • All of the ETH is sitting idle in the wallet on BASE

0x42875ae5766dfd4d70772a3a956842e4b708d59a

  • Wallet is mainly LPing Axelar-denominated assets across many chains, suggesting that it may be related to Axelar or market making to allow cross chain liquidity for Axelar assets.

0x7d21d6f8e03746bef7fb64710c1569505f76dc18

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • UNIBOT ($295k - 25% of total wallet holdings)
  • USDC ($250k - 22% of total wallet holdings)
  • ETH ($230k - 20% of total wallet holdings)
  • ILV ($137k - 12% of total wallet holdings)
  • DMT ($112k - 9% of total wallet holdings)

0x2b19fde5d7377b48be50a5d0a78398a496e8b15c

  • Mostly allocated to applications, only a little bit of idle capital consisting of ETH, BALD, FUMO, INK, and PNDC
  • Trading ETH perps on Kwenta
  • Staking on Echelon

0x2c87fd92da54ab1af3683b5e70e6dc065f5df490

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • ETH ($90.1k - 39% of total wallet holdings)
  • USDC ($36.5k - 16% of total wallet holdings)
  • BSWAP ($35.5k - 15.5% of total wallet holdings)
  • LQTY ($22.5k - 9% of total wallet holdings)

0x3bbf28973254828e1d0b089e24adb4c3231a9be2

  • 100% of funds are in ETH sitting idle on BASE

0x0f341837a7581b9cf32f3cf527c5e7d0a203dc03

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • OP ($162k - 74% of total wallet holdings)
  • TOSHI ($29.3k - 13% of total wallet holdings)
  • PEPE ($14.8k - 6% of total wallet holdings)

0xa4aa93c674e8492d2da23951ed6e329e3a6e9fb9

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • 100% of funds sitting idle in ETH, split between mainnet and BASE

0xde6b2a06407575b98724818445178c1f5fd53361

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • BSWAP ($75.3k - 32% of total wallet holdings)
  • ZKUSD ($72.9k - 31% of total wallet holdings)
  • ETH ($58k - 24% of total wallet holdings)

This wallet is LPing millions in BSWAP across the BSWAP-USDbC and BSWAP-ETH. They also staked BSWAP.

0xfaef37ebaaf12077fa8f6e13411b486ed3ef01ec

  • 100% of funds are in ETH sitting idle on BASE

0x31f55d64752686d6b5a7d02d780370c58035226e

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • TOSHI ($227k - 94% of total wallet holdings)
  • NONE ($7.9k - 3% of total wallet holdings)
  • MATH ($4.1k - 1% of total wallet holdings)

0x5593b57d06458f62b1a4f31a997945a3b51fc2fd

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • KOKOS ($147k - 67% of total wallet holdings)
  • WETH ($32k - 14% of total wallet holdings)
  • USDC ($32k - 14% of total wallet holdings)

Has 95% of funds on zkEVM and the rest on BASE. Most of the wallet’s holdings are LPed on Kokonut Swap, across a few pools.

0x1f5bbef0722b6188b87b29dff530d6cfb5a46967

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • TOSHI ($196k -17% of total wallet holdings)
  • BITCOIN ($145k -13% of total wallet holdings)
  • PEPE ($140k -12.5% of total wallet holdings)
  • RLB ($120k -12% of total wallet holdings)
  • ETH ($100k -9% of total wallet holdings)
  • UNIBOT ($94k -8% of total wallet holdings)
  • 0X ($83k -7% of total wallet holdings)

0x189bc3769f13c25ee4aaf3d3ac6fec3ff44f4e78

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • PNDC ($141k - 51% of total wallet holdings)
  • BITCOIN ($101k - 37% of total wallet holdings)
  • UNIBOT ($29k - 10% of total wallet holdings)

0x7805a78a3ad50d460efabf32562d1884c3d0259a

Main token holdings in portfolio:

  • RLB ($243k - 48% of total wallet holdings)
  • ETH ($148k - 29% of total wallet holdings)
  • TOSHI ($114k - 22% of total wallet holdings)

This wallet is staking most of their ETH with Lido, around $3.86m at the time of writing. The rest of their stETH is staked with EigenLayer - around $561k.

Smart Alerts

This link here has Smart Alerts for these wallets and is preset for a minimum of $5k transactions.

Conclusion
In reviewing the landscape of Early Base Bridgers, it's evident that the crypto-native segment is actively engaging with the BASE platform even prior to its official launch. The dominant wallets, termed 'Early BASE Whales', predominantly created in recent years, show how heavily leaning towards Ethereum and L2 ecosystems. Their interactions with well-established DEXs, L2 bridges, and especially the noticeable presence of Unibot, shows the adoption of Telegram bots and new applications.
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Disclosure: The authors of this content and members of Nansen may be participating or invested in some of the protocols or tokens mentioned herein. The foregoing statement acts as a disclosure of potential conflicts of interest and is not a recommendation to purchase or invest in any token or participate in any protocol. Nansen does not recommend any particular course of action in relation to any token or protocol. The content herein is meant purely for educational and informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as financial, investment, legal, tax or any other professional or other advice. None of the content and information herein is presented to induce or to attempt to induce any reader or other person to buy, sell or hold any token or participate in any protocol or enter into, or offer to enter into, any agreement for or with a view to buying or selling any token or participating in any protocol. Statements made herein (including statements of opinion, if any) are wholly generic and not tailored to take into account the personal needs and unique circumstances of any reader or any other person. Readers are strongly urged to exercise caution and have regard to their own personal needs and circumstances before making any decision to buy or sell any token or participate in any protocol. Observations and views expressed herein may be changed by Nansen at any time without notice. Nansen accepts no liability whatsoever for any losses or liabilities arising from the use of or reliance on any of this content.