I think whale capital plays a huge role in making a chain good for token speculation. Until Base gets to stage 2 I do not think you’ll see a bunch of multi-B memecoins like there are on ETH and SOL.

But when it does, so much higher

This is also a bear case for Gaias tbh. Or not a bear case, but a reason why the ceiling may be suppressed

figuring out my next thing | marketing, content, growth | prev. Juicebox, Nouns, RAW DAO | casting about coffee, hi-fi, and other rabbit holes

Yea I don't know if it like scales linearly, more that there is some threshold (perhaps stage 2) that unlocks a new level of capital, which is not on any L2 yet

underneath that threshold you can use whatever GTM/marketing/brand/incentives but it won't be enough to get that next level of eth whale capital

but yea this is all theory, could be wrong.

counter argument here is that Arb is stage 1 vs. Base stage 0, and speculation on Arb (so far) has been even less successful than Base. so maybe not closely correlated.

building a crypto hedge fund | /comma, comma.org/, & /ic | in pursuit of more aliveness | prev: founding team @ Tally Health, investor @ L Catterton

You ultimately need large amounts of buy pressure to send a token into the billions, whales (ie people deploying 6-7 figs) make this happen

This ETH whale capital probably isn't comfortable keeping that much money on a centralized chain like most ethereum L2s

IMO this is why there are really high memecoins on ETH L1 (pepe, shib, mog) and the super high NFTs from last cycle, but you don't have anything like that on Base, despite Base being much better for trading in terms of UX and cost. 

Given the above assumptions, it also means that small capital sees less upside in those tokens because of this ceiling, making the entire chain "suppressed" for speculation.