Base sequencer fees and Ethereum economic shifts

Base dominates transaction volume

Base processed 292 million user operations for the 30 days ending September 7, 2026. These operations include swaps, contract calls, and account abstraction batches. It paid Ethereum $8,800 in fees for those operations. This amount is small compared to the $14.42 billion in total value locked on the network. Since the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, Base earned approximately $94 million in revenue from user fees while paying only $4.9 million to the Ethereum base layer. The network leads in transaction volume among Ethereum rollups. Base, which you likely know relies on the OP Stack, remains an optimistic rollup.

Base grew from $2.1 billion in TVL in October 2024 to $14.42 billion by September 2026, a five-fold increase in 18 months. This growth happened without aggressive token incentive programs. The network has 4.2 million daily active addresses. This figure exceeds the daily active addresses of Arbitrum at 820,000 and Optimism at 680,000. Base also leads in transaction counts, with 4.2 million daily transactions compared to 820,000 for Arbitrum and 680,000 for Optimism. Median transaction costs on Base were $0.0015 per operation as of September 15, 2026, while Arbitrum One costs $0.0053. Base’s TVL edges past Arbitrum One’s $12.6 billion, meaning Base and Arbitrum together control $27 billion in value.

The $8,800 Base paid over 30 days is trivial next to the $14.4 billion it helps secure, and this gap demonstrates how rollup economics shifted after the Ethereum Dencun upgrade.

Coinbase controls sequencer margins

Coinbase operates the Base sequencer and keeps the resulting margins as corporate revenue. Base uses the OP Stack, which is the open-source rollup framework originally built by the team behind Optimism, and remains an optimistic rollup. The network lacks a native token, meaning users hold ETH or ecosystem tokens like Aerodrome to gain exposure. Coinbase directs 110 million verified users toward the network through its exchange and wallet products. This distribution advantage allows Base to maintain its lead in transaction volume. The lack of a token removes the speculative incentive cycles seen on other chains. Will Coinbase ever release a native token for the network?

Base developers plan to move toward a unified, Base-operated stack to reduce maintenance overhead. This transition involves moving away from the Optimism Superchain and external dependencies like Flashbots and Paradigm. The Base V1 hardfork will add Fusaka support and swap Optimistic proofs to Base-specific TEE/ZK proofs. Node operators must migrate to a new Base client to remain compatible. Base has a Stage 1 classification for its decentralization level.

Ethereum fee revenue declines

Ethereum validators face lower income because L2 rent payments dropped 99% after the March 2024 Dencun upgrade. L2 networks like Base process massive volume while paying negligible amounts to the Ethereum mainnet. This shift caused ETH burn rates to fall to 100 ETH per day. Consequently, the Ethereum annualized inflation rate reached 0.78%. The reduction in transaction costs for users comes from the use of data blobs. This mechanism allows rollups to pay less for data availability.

The total fee revenue for Ethereum fell from over $30 million at the time of the Dencun upgrade to around $500,000 today. Most agentic commerce on Base uses USDC, with 99% of on-chain agentic commerce completed using USDC. 90% of agentic stablecoin transaction volume ran on Base. The concentration of L2 activity means Base and Arbitrum hold 77 percent of all L2 DeFi liquidity. This concentration results in the migration of economic activity to L2s being a significant factor in Ethereum’s fee structure. As ETH returns correlate to fee revenue, market concerns about weakening value accrual persist.