blockworks.co
Based Brett is off to a ripper onchain summer.
Base’s biggest memecoin has gone from under $10 million market capitalization to nearly $2 billion in 101 days.
$BRETT is now a whisker away from flipping Solana dog coin $BONK (there’s less than 7% between them this morning).
$BONK hit an all-time high in March and has since retraced by about 40%, while $BRETT — which launched only days earlier — has gone 200x.
Read more: These cryptocurrencies hit all-time high alongside bitcoin’s recent pump
It’s rare for memecoins to grow that big so quickly. Compiling market data for about two dozen of the biggest memecoins out there shows $BRETT was the third-fastest to hit a $1.5 billion market cap.
The other Solana dog coin, dogwifhat, did it in about 80 days, a slightly quicker timeframe. Meanwhile, it took floki — Binance Smart Chain’s top memecoin named after Elon Musk’s dog — another three weeks to do the same.
Pepe, on Ethereum, otherwise briefly hit $1.5 billion in the first 20 days but soon corrected to well under $500 million. It took almost a year for $PEPE to run it back.
$BRETT and $PEPE share a parallel crypto universe. They’re both homages to characters in Matt Furie’s webcomic Boy’s Club, which is centered around four college roommates hanging out and playing video games.
Read more: Empire Newsletter: Based Brett kicks off onchain summer
There’s Andy, a dog-like character that eats hot dogs, Landwolf, a scruffy party dude, Pepe the Frog, a “little-brother” type that goes with the flow, and Brett, a tall blue creature who really likes to dance.
Neither $BRETT or $PEPE — or any other memecoin based on Boy’s Club — have any official ties to Furie, who previously launched a flurry of legal fights to prevent Pepe the Frog from being co-opted by the right, including a $15,000 settlement with Alex Jones’ Info Wars.
While there have been popular cryptocurrencies based on Pepe the Frog before, Furie hasn’t really publicly acknowledged either $PEPE or $BRETT (Blockworks has reached out to the Based Brett team).
Furie was asked about $PEPE in a Twitter Spaces last May — around the time of one of the coin’s first major rallies — but didn’t seem totally fussed.
“Actually this is the first I’ve heard of it [$PEPE]…I’ve heard of Ethereum, Bitcoin and Dogecoin, is it like that? … Dogecoin’s the best, I’m a Dogecoin maxi,” he said.
Still, $BRETT’s growth comes amid a push from Base and founder Jesse Pollak to inspire devs to experiment on the Ethereum layer-2 over the summer — Onchain Summer.
And, so far, it seems to be working. Per Blockworks Research data, last week saw the third-highest number of transactions on Base in history, the highest stablecoin transfer volumes at almost $8.4 billion, and the highest-ever unique active addresses at 1.84 million (although that shouldn’t be conflated with unique users, which is practically impossible to measure).
Memecoins like $BRETT aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of Base, and the whole point of Onchain Summer is to build other cool stuff on the network.
But a mascot surely can’t hurt. Especially one that might flip Solana’s $BONK.