Transaction Count per Block Correlation with Average Gas Target and Base Fee per Gas

To measure the correlation between the base fee and the number of transactions (an indication of the network's activity), the gas target was defined as the amount of gas used over the gas limit in a block.

• In lower TX counts, there is a sudden surge in both gas target and base fee;
• Between the TX count of 50 to 100, while the gas target stabilizes around 20%, the base fee considerably decreases;
• In TX counts of higher than 100, both gas target and base fee fluctuate considerably;
• In TX counts of between 170 and 230, the gas target surpasses 80% and reaches close to 100%;
• After the TX count of 250, both the gas target and base fee decrease to lower values.

Overall, the majority of the fees have been paid for a transaction count of below 50, which considering the capacity of the network demonstrates a low level of network congestion during the first few weeks.

Base mainnet has been open for builders since July 13th ahead of general availability. You can read the breakdown of the following analysis in thread written by the author.

The correlation of transaction count per block with the average fee, gas used, and gas price has also demonstrated that the values have been generally higher in transaction counts of below 50 and gradually decrease as the number of transactions increases. While the average fee and gas price demonstrated a similar trend, the average gas usage had a different trend.

The network has more than 350k unique active users and it rapidly continues to increase. As the chart suggests, the number of new users dictates the trend of daily active users. Thus, the different moving averages of active users (total, 7D, 14D, and 21D) were measured to determine a window for the average number of daily active users. As a result, the data indicated that between 10k to 60k unique addresses have been using the network in recent days.

The surge of users since July 30th and as a consequently, the higher number of transactions, resulted in higher overall gas fees.

DEXs such as Uniswap, PancakeSwap, and LeetSwap (initially), as well as the Base Genesis NFT, have been the dominant addresses that users interacted with. It is worth mentioning that not all addresses were labeled.