14/21, or 66%, of the largest gas-consuming smart contracts on Base, a layer 2 platform for building and deploying smart contracts, are unverified. According to TokenTerminal facts on October 24, the same contracts are among the most active, given the trends in gas rates over the past month.
Friend.tech leads the gas race at the base
Base is a layer 2 scale solution and one of the competitors of OP Mainnet and Arbitrum. The platform relies on the Optimistic Rollup technique, which allows transactions to be merged off-chain before being confirmed on the mainnet. This is the same approach that competitors, including Arbitrum and OP Mainnet, have taken.
As of October 24, Friend.tech is the most gas-hungry protocol already tagged and known to be deployed by a given developer. Yet the developer remains anonymous.
The decentralized social media protocol allows users to buy and sell keys to each other’s X accounts. In this way, trading parties have access to exclusive in-app chat rooms and content from a specific user.
By deploying to Base, Friend.tech users benefit from lower trading fees than they would have if they launched on the mainnet. In addition to cost, the protocol can also scale because the layer 2 solution can handle higher throughput than the main network.
In the past month, Friend.tech generated more than $253,000 in gas costs. The execution costs, also called layer 2 costs, on Base, which uses Optimism, are determined by the network and are fixed.
The fee prevents users from spamming the network and rewards nodes that prove all transactions submitted on the platform. The other costs are approximate for confirming the same transaction batch on the mainnet. This fee is usually higher than the execution fee.
The case of popular but unverified smart contracts
Although the gas costs generated by Friend.tech are over $253,000, they have fallen by more than 47% in the past month. This could indicate that trading activity has declined, as the fee generated by a network is directly proportional to how often it is used.
Friend.tech’s fees remain suppressed at this writing and are underperforming unverified smart contracts activity, looking at fees generated over the past month. In the last 30 days, one unverified contract has seen a 104% increase in trading costs to $42,000. Another contract rose 1,690% to over $11,000 over the same period.
As the name suggests, these unverified codes have yet to be confirmed by a third party. This may mean that there is no guarantee that the same developer built and deployed code on Base. At the same time, the code may contain malicious code that can steal from addresses the code communicates with.
Feature image on Canva, chart from TradingView