Base just took a major L

Become a Smarter DeFi investor in just 7 minutes per week

The DeFi Edge shares the best DeFi strategies, insights, & analysis so you can be early to the next opportunities.

By Edgy - April 18, 2025

Content Coins or Just Another Rug?

Coinbase is one of the trusted names in crypto, but people are accusing them of rugging.

What happened? On Wednesday, Base (Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2 Chain) tweeted a picture that read “Base is for everyone”. And below the tweet, they shared a link to Zora, where users can buy the token of that post.

In other words, Base promoted a coin from their official account. This is a big deal like an unofficial endorsement.

Crypto Twitter didn’t waste time. In an hour, the token’s market cap exploded to $17M. But just 30 minutes later? It crashed over 95%, dropping below <$1M.

The early snipers dumped their bags. The chart looked like a textbook pump-and-dump. And many people lost a lot of money.

To add insult to the injury, Base had launched two other tokens after the first post. Aka, they diluted their token by launching new tokens.

Everyone on Crypto Twitter lost their minds over Base.

Base had used a picture with the text “Base is for everyone” for the memecoin. To many people, it gave the impression that Base is launching a token for everyone.

So people bought in. Hard.

And when it crashed >90%, no one took responsibility. Base didn’t acknowledge any mistake. Jesse, founder of Base, continued to defend their actions.

What’s Base saying? Jesse thinks he’s just supporting a project and narrative related to the Base ecosystem.

Base had issued the tokens on Zora, a web3 social media platform. Every post on Zora will have tokens attached to them. Zora creators can deploy their tokens on Base. In Jesse’s view, Base was just supporting a project in its ecosystem.

Jesse also differentiated Base’s token from memecoins. He calls it “content coin”. This was explained in the description of the Zora post as well.

not all coins are the same pic.twitter.com/qWEjyOexHH
— jesse.base.eth (@jessepollak) April 16, 2025

He’s trying to create a new “content coin” narrative. In his vision, every post will have a token attached to it. Most of them will be worthless, but some of them will be worth a lot. And as he listed in the above tweet, the social expectations surrounding content coins will be vastly different as well.

Coinbase’s official position was that “Base did not launch a token. Base just posted Zora, which automatically created the token.” And Base had been posting on Zora (and thereby launching tokens) long before this disaster.

Neither Base nor Jesse has acknowledged any mistakes on their part.

My Take

Content tokens are an interesting experiment. Despite crashing heavily, Base’s content token is trading at ~$10M at the time of writing. But I don’t think the market is ready for that narrative. It may or may not work in the long term.

But that’s not the issue here. The issue is accountability.

When a big brand like Base promotes a token from its official account, people are going to buy it. They’re going to have expectations from that token. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous. It reminds me of when CZ kinda encouraged memecoins of his dog broccoli, and everyone got rekt’ed.

In the current crypto social environment, telling people they shouldn’t have had expectations is a form of soft manipulation. It’s like flirting heavily for weeks, and then saying, “Wait, you thought this meant something?”

If you launch a token and promote it on X, people are gonna have expectations.

As for me? I’m not a big fan of either memecoins or content coins. Just focus on good DeFi projects with solid fundamentals.

Sponsored Deep Dive

HeyAnon: ChatGPT for DeFi

You ever tried introducing a non-crypto friend to DeFi? It’s like watching someone try to solve a Rubik’s Cube while blindfolded. With one hand. In a hurricane.

Wallets, seed phrases, bridging, gas fees, approvals, random errors, and of course, the constant fear of getting rugged. It’s way too much.

DeFi was supposed to democratize finance. Make powerful financial tools accessible to everyday people. But right now, most folks can’t even get past the wallet setup.

Enter HeyAnon. It’s an AI-powered project designed to simplify crypto interactions.

At its core, it’s a chat interface that acts as your personal DeFi assistant. You talk to it like you’d talk to your techie cousin. Just type something like, “Stake my ETH with @Lido” and it’ll handle everything behind the scenes.

Sounds like a dream, right? Well, HeyAnon already does that for you.

But they haven’t fully achieved their dream completely yet. There are more DeFi activities to support. It’s still in Beta.

But the latest updates are bringing it ever closer to the vision. Let’s talk about the new updates.

#1. Integration with HyperLiquid

HyperLiquid is the only new L1 chain that succeeded this cycle. We’ve already talked about its excellent product-market fit several times.

But even HyperLiquid came with the usual clunky DeFi UX.

Now? HeyAnon has integrated directly with HyperLiquid. Which means you can tap into everything HL offers — just by chatting.

Try stuff like:

“Check my perp positions on @hyperliquid”
“Bridge 10 USDC to @hyperliquid from arb chain”
“Buy $200 5x longs on BTC, ETH, SOL, AVAX, via @Hyperliquid”
“Please close all my positions on @hyperliquid”

It works. HeyAnon will be your personal DeFi assistant on HyperLiquid.

Here’s exactly what HeyAnon lets you do with HyperLiquid via chat:

Bridge assets between Arbitrum and HyperLiquid.
Manage asset flow between Spot and Perpetual trading.
Retrieve info: Perp trading balance, Spot trading balance, Perp positions, funding rates, supported assets, and list of vaults.
Open, modify (by USD value or multiplier), and close perpetual positions.
Add or remove margin from perpetual positions.
Create, close, deposit into, withdraw from, and toggle deposit permissions for vaults.

And that’s not all. Soon, you’ll be able to do much more on HyperLiquid with HeyAnon. Here are some items on the roadmap:

Delta-neutral arbitrage using Hyperliquid.
Buying new perpetual future listings the second they are available.
Implementing strategies. Such as buying below the 7ema on the daily time frame, and selling 90% higher, with a 30% stop loss, on the top 5 trading volume pairs within Hyperliquid.

#2. Revoke Approvals (and Save Some Pain)

Let’s talk security.

In DeFi, you regularly give apps permission (approvals) to move your tokens. Totally normal. But over time, these approvals pile up. You forget about them. And then one day, a protocol gets hacked, and bam — your assets are toast because of some old approval you forgot to revoke.

HeyAnon now helps you handle that. Just chat, and it’ll:

Scan for active approvals
Revoke specific approvals
Review approval history.

For example, try typing: “What are all of my approvals via @revoke”. Boom. HeyAnon will list them. You can then ask HeyAnon to remove approvals that you don’t need.

Another cool feature is the ability to see the capital at risk within smart contracts. You can just ask: “Please tell me the total $ of capital at risk across all approvals via @ revoke”. And you’ll see how much exposure you actually have.

#3. Big Updates to Existing Integrations

HeyAnon was already working with a bunch of DeFi protocols. In the latest Build 0.9 release, they’ve shipped updates to two app integrations.

Meteora updates

Meteora is a liquidity protocol on Solana. It helps projects deploy liquidity pools and helps liquidity providers earn yield. Meteora’s dynamic vaults and DLMM pools are their Liquidity Pool designs to make liquidity more efficient.

New HeyAnon release understands Price Range and optimises your entry into the DLMM. It’ll manage Bins and Fee tiers based on price range.

You can just type “Deposit 1 SOL into the SOL-USDC pool using @meteora”. And HeyAnon will deploy it effectively. You can also ask it to adjust your high/low ranges for liquidity. For example, when Solana moves 2% in either direction, you can get HeyAnon to move your LP range to +/- $2 as well.

Here are the new automations available to you:

Auto-compound vault yields
Adjust DLMM position ranges dynamically
Monitor vault APR changes in real-time

In short, HeyAnon will manage liquidity more effectively and maximize your yield on Meteora.

Drift Protocol updates

Drift Protocol is kinda all-in-one DeFi protocol. But their main focus is perps.

HeyAnon’s new updates give users more flexibility when using Drift. It’ll give users more flexibility in leveraging trading and position management. Below are the specific improvements:

Partial closing of the leverage position
Better language processing. AI now understands leverage by “x”.
Understanding of max leverage possible and play with “half of max leverage”

Here’s an example prompt you can use: “Place a perp market order to long SOL with 10x leverage on account 1 via @drift”.

Super clean, super powerful.

Other Updates

The updates don’t stop there. Build 0.9 also includes:

V3 Pool Updates
Minor UI changes
Refactoring for some AI modules
DeBridge cross-blockchain bridges improvements
User token list. When a user inputs a token address, it’s added to their token list. In the future, users can simply recall it by its symbol (name/ticker).

These may not sound flashy, but they seriously level up the user experience.

HeyAnon isn’t just another shiny DeFi tool. It’s one of the few projects genuinely trying to make DeFi usable for everyone, not just the power users who breathe Solscan and eat Solidity for breakfast.

The vision is simple: using DeFi should feel like texting a smart friend. And with every new update, HeyAnon gets closer to that reality.

Even in its beta form, you can already do a ton: spot trading, taking leverage, providing liquidity, and more.

If you want a peek at the future of DeFi, check out HeyAnon. Beta is almost full! Act fast.

Try the future of DeFi →

DeFi Catalysts

Jupiter launched Jupiter Pro. Users can now access real-time analytics, Smart Likes sentiment tools, Net Buy metrics, and MEV-protected trades.

Everclear, a cross-chain clearing and settlement layer, launched its mainnet. They have added Solana support and Unlimited Rebalancing.

Pendle is updating its fee structure to support a more robust and sustainable ecosystem. This is in preparation to the Boros release.

Euler Finance is expanding to Optimism. They’ve been granted $500k in OP to incentivize the expansion.

Aave is discussing a deployment on Aptos. If approved, this will be Aave’s first non-EVM deployment.

Optimism launched SuperStacks. Until June 30, users can earn XP by using interoperable assets across DeFi pools on the Superchain.

DeepBook released v3.1 on the Sui Network. It promises permissionless pools, lower fees, and deeper liquidity.

Spark Protocol, a sub-protocol from MakerDAO, has deployed $50M into SyrupUSDC. The initial limit is set at $100 M.

Euler went live on BNB Chain. It already supports looping strategies, has four curators, and has $100k in incentives.

GMX has chosen LayerZero as the preferred messaging infrastructure provider for GMX Multichain.

f(x) Protocol has unanimously voted to deploy wstETH/USDC to Aave in order to earn yield, which will be distributed to stability pool depositors.

Uniswap has launched the Uniswap v4 incentives on Unichain. Millions of $UNI have been allocated to Gauntlet pools.

Converge, the blockchain from Ethena, has released the technical specifications of its chain. They’re partnering with Arbitrum and Celestia for the tech.

New Launches

TermMax went live on Ethereum and Arbitrum. It’s a loan AMM offering one-click looping, range orders, fixed/variable rates, and customizable pricing curves.

Vertex Protocol has partnered with Foxify to launch FUNDED v2. It claims to be an onchain prop trading model where users can access capital and trade directly on Vertex.

Avantis launched the public beta of Zero-fee Perpetuals. You can now trade with zero opening, closing, or borrowing fees, and share only a fraction of profits (if any) upon closing.