Base’s native coin is USDC and in some ways the L2 is a vampire attack on $eth. 

Yes? No? Dumb?

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Right, the fact that it’s completely abstracted away and you don’t have to constantly top up is the thing. ETH mindshare dwindles while paying for things in usdc becomes more commonplace

Not sure I follow. Gas still gets paid in ETH even if most users aren't aware of it.

you can see that starting to change though. last cycle it was, 'i made 10ETH on that trade,' now it's probably I made 25k. Zora rebrands eth to sparks, and then there's warps, points meta, sol, emphasis on gasless transactions. if you're exiting a large position rn do you do so to ETH or USDC and then go earn 5% on Coinbase. 

Last cycle i was constantly topping up on ETH to pay for gas, now I, and everybody else doesn't need to. I haven't bought $eth in a long long time.

Idk about USDC native coin. Agree ETH isn’t needed for gas which affects value accrual but most apps and users still price assets in ETH terms

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Transactions moving towards being mostly gasless gets us pretty much there.

If they move to pricing gas in USDC it will change things a bit

Both true, from a merchandise perspective, I would like to settle in USDC, a potential revenue sharing partnership with Cicrle.

On $ETH, just look at revenue generated vs paid for settlement

I think Base’s token is OP. That’s the governance of the underlying structure. COIN is also relevant because if it tanks in value enough, I’m sure they’d cut the Base team, which may or may not lead to downgrading or abandonment of Base. However I see that as extremely unlikely.

I don’t know about native… yet 100% the shift away from pricing in ETH started toward end of last cycle with ape chain and ronin.

Many of the projects with tokens want transactions priced in that token.

Free send usdc and/off ramp = no need to hold sizable amounts of ETH for a lot of activity.

Still using ETH to trade though and as long as that is the case, ETH will have a native essence

Specifically depth of trading pools, are they deeper in ETH or usdc pairs?

Good take. 

Base is about getting people onchain, but primarily with USDC. 

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Doesn't really matter what's happening on the front end. The magic happens in the back.

Most people take profits into whatever the native coin is. Aka eth or sol. They usually only sit on usdc if they are “stabled up” cause they are predicting down price action or to have a healthy stack of usdc as part of their portfolio.

ETH is striving to be the B2B chain. L2 Ponzi games are just one business that main net will serve. 

But for the short term the total addressable market (TAM) is relatively small and so is block space demand. When L2s are taking limited demand away from the L1 they appear vampiric. 

When the TAM is much larger and block space demand is through the roof we’ll be glad we scaled.

does eth price need to correlate with utility?

We could never build to scale if we used vanilla ETH. Its too slow and expensive. Plus blobs? I mean…