Base, the Ethereum layer-2 scaling network incubated by crypto exchange Coinbase, hit a daily record of $1.22 billion worth of trading volume at decentralized exchanges (DEXs) on Saturday. The frenzied surge in trading is due to a gold rush for meme coins that has Base-native coins like DEGEN and BRETT hitting over half a billion dollars each in market cap.

The network set a record for unique daily wallets interacting with a DEX on Saturday with 172,000, according to public blockchain data curated by Dune, and nearly matched that total again on Sunday.

Decentralized exchange (DEX) volume on Base has dropped into the new week—but is still holding significantly higher than previous months, with about $965 million in volume on Sunday, and already $847 million worth so far on Monday as of this writing. As of this writing, Saturday's record is the only day that Base DEX volume has topped the billion-dollar mark.

The vast majority of that volume is coming from Uniswap, the cross-chain decentralized exchange, which sucked up $1.14 billion worth of the Saturday total. Uniswap has held a roughly 90% daily share of Base DEX volume over the past several days.

Broadly, the Base network has seen a "parabolic" surge in overall transactions, tweeted Alex Svanevik, founder and CEO of crypto analytics platform Nansen. The platform's data points to an all-time daily peak of nearly 2.39 million transactions on Friday, the most recent day shown on its Base dashboard.

With the increase in volume and a significant surge in daily active users, Base might end up being the go-to destination for meme coins for this cycle—at least in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Other meme coins have even started migrating to Base, with HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu launching a Base version of their token last week. The price briefly spiked to over $10 before coming back down to parity with its Ethereum mainnet counterpart.

Many traders are calling for “Base season” in an effort to match the momentum of layer-1 network Solana. For the past few months, Solana has been the go-to destination for meme coins, with tokens like Dogwifhat (WIF) hitting over a billion dollars in market cap, and many others with hundreds of millions in market cap as well.

Will the crypto gods give degens a chance to run it all back on Base? There’s only one way to find out.

Edited by Andrew Hayward