Crypto Billionaires Dive into High-Risk Tokens, Memecoins

Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum-compatible blockchain, officially went live today.

However, crypto billionaires have traded high-risk tokens on the new Layer 2 network and other blockchains for days.

In addition to their holdings of market leader ETH, 22 high-rolling depositors to Base have prominent positions in Arbitrum’s governance token ARB, casino token RLB, and memecoins BALD, TOSHI, PEPE, andHarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu, which has the ticker BITCOIN but is not the famous cryptocurrency but rather a memecoin.

UNIBOT, the token for the Telegram trading bot, is also held by these billionaires.

These 22 whales, according to Nansen, exhibit crypto-native tendencies and have bridged over 100 ETH (worth $185,100) since July 31, when Base became accessible to users willing to interact directly with its smart contract via a one-way bridge.

Casual users waited until today, when the Base’s frontend and an exit ramp that enables them to return to Ethereum went live.

One wallet was produced in 2017, whereas fifty percent of the early Base Whales were new wallets made in 2018.

Early Base billionaires have also been active in competing scaling solutions for Ethereum, including Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync Era, and Polygon zkEVM.

“There is a heavy memecoin bias in the selection of these whales,” said Nansen analyst Niklas Polk.

“There was not much else to do on Base besides ape meme coins; therefore, the majority of whales in the report prefer this.”

The 22 early base whales with the most interactions with 1inch, Uniswap, Base, 0x, USDC, and Unibot “illustrate how heavily Ethereum and L2 ecosystems are favored,” wrote Jake Kennis, a research analyst at Nansen.

“Their interactions with well-established DEXs, L2 bridges, and especially the glaring presence of Unibot demonstrate the adoption of Telegram bots and new applications.”