T he web3 world is fresh with new excitement, as we watch a handful of significant headlines across the screen: the skyrocketing volumes of stablecoins on Solana, and the rumors of Elon Musk’s X joining the payments ecosystem. These ostensibly disparate stories contribute to a bullish sentiment that keeps prices afloat after the long-anticipated Bitcoin spot ETF approval news. The stablecoin volume on Solana has reached a monthly record high of $300 billion (casting a shadow on the $297 billion mark left in December 2023. This figure represents a 2,520% increase from January 2023, highlighting the massive growth seen in the Solana ecosystem. This could be because of the buzzing Solana ecosystem, with new projects joining the space and constantly making waves. We’re also seeing buzz created once again by Elon Musk , where he mentioned that his “everything app” X (formerly Twitter) has some movement around its upcoming payments feature. This is still up in the air, but on mere speculat
Coinbase, one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges, launched its own layer 2 blockchain in February 2023 - called Base. Base is built using Optimism , a popular layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution. Using Optimism allows Coinbase to offer lower gas fees and faster transaction speeds than Ethereum. At the time of writing, over $60 million ETH has been bridged to Base. This might sound good, but it comes with a big warning sign. There have already been a handful of rug pulls on this platform. The major one seems to be BALD token, which skyrocketed over 4M% within two days of launching. Alas, the token started to plummet as the BALD team address (0xccFa0530B9d52f970d1A2dAEa670ce58E4176389) removed most of the liquidity that was in LeetSwap - the exchange where you can purchase BALD tokens. Overall, Base is a promising layer 2 solution that has the potential to make Ethereum more scalable, efficient and user-friendly. However, people ought to tread carefully as there seems