The Great Memecoin Migration | Bankless

The fervor around memecoin mania shows no signs of slowing, but the emergence of shiny new tokens to ape has caused the battleground for attention to become increasingly competitive, threatening the dominance of existing projects. What plays are top memecoin communities making in hopes of recapturing the market’s attention?

Within the Ethereum ecosystem, Base has emerged as a hotspot of onchain activity, consistently processing over a million transactions per day since EIP-4844 went live and overtaking Blast to become the third largest L2 after experiencing a 2x increase in assets on the chain in the past 10 days.

In efforts to capture a portion of the flows going into Base’s memecoins, a sector with a market capitalization of just over $1B according to CoinGecko, the ticker BITCOIN account tweeted yesterday it would be deploying on Base, prompting a short-lived rally that spiked price by nearly 20% in the 15 minutes following the announcement.

While ticker BITCOIN is migrating to Base in pursuit of greener pastures and fresh capital, the project find itself one step behind DOG, the fractionalized representation of the DOGE NFT which splashed onto Base nearly 2 months ago with an airdrop and announced yesterday that it would be deploying to Solana.

Solana has played a central role in memecoin mania, serving as the host for the majority of new tokens deployed and handling a significant portion of the memecoin trading volumes in recent months; DOG’s deployment to the chain exposes it to this mountain of speculative demand!

As the competition looks to attract buyers by migrating to existing chains, Base’s DEGEN has gone in a different direction, hoping that the creation of its own chain and increased utility for its token will catalyze buyer excitement.

Deployed in conjunction with Web3 infrastructure provider Syndicate, the Degen Chain will use DEGEN as its gas token and is one of the first L3s built exclusively for a community, a move envisioned to foster experimentation across a myriad of DEGEN-enabled applications, ranging from tipping and community rewards to payments and gaming!