jakiro
author:Charlie Liu
As I mentioned before,The inter-chain war has burned from L2 between Coinbase and Robinhood to L1 between Circle and Stripe.
But this time it’s different.
Base announced the official interoperability path with Solana, which is not just as simple as “the assets can cross over”, but downgrading “what chain to choose” to a background setting, upgrading “who controls the default route from intention to transaction” into an investable and operational business.
In a market where new L1/L2 is frequently released, stablecoin trading volumes are booming, RWA and DAT are rising, and Challenger Exchanges are eroding share, this is a long-term bet on “traffic engineering”.
Why do two “operating systems” need each other
This is not a popular science topic for “What is Base / What is Solana”.The key is what each of them is best at and what they give up.
Base ties distribution, identity and Ethereum settlement power together to form a huge funnel of “compliance portal + EVM assets”; the price is that it does not have the advantage of extremely low latency interactions.
Solana brings throughput and user experience to the extreme; the price is half a step away from EVM native funds and institutional distribution.
in other words,Base hugged the entrance to “people” and “money” and Solana grabbed the “feel” and “speed”.
A bridge that treats these differences as “characteristics” rather than “contradictions” is essentially doing “optimized allocation of workloads”.
Identity, compliance, governance and in-depth funds are left in Base; high-frequency links that require hand speed and smooth experience; routers are automatically arranged in the background, and users do not require changes to their wallets or teams do not force them to change their technology stacks.
The choices on both sides do not have to be smoothed out, but can compound interest in the same user journey.
Why not just an upgrade to the front-end experience
On the surface, this is a two-way channel that has been officially “renamed”: allowing SOL to be called like local assets in the EVM stream, and allowing Base side assets to be naturally expressed on Solana.
More importantly, the position – this is not a side door for geeks, but a “default path” for the public.
When the bridge is productized and embedded into the wallet and payment path, users do the same thing without changing the environment, but just walk the more suitable lane in the backend.
The impact on the market structure is often to reduce switching costs, compress spreads, and deepen the liquidity pool that can be truly traded, and profits will naturally move closer to the side of “controlling the last kilometer routing”.
The moat has changed from technical parameters to “traffic routing rights”
Investors should regard it as a payment network, rather than a simple “some chain”.The “value accumulation” of the entire system lies in the source of intention and the nodes of automatic routing.
Coinbase’s fiat currency entrance and Base’s wallet path naturally hold the upstream distribution rights; Solana’s execution surface will take advantage of the excess returns of high-frequency scenarios.Whoever can define the default path—wallet, deposit, aggregator—will be able to build a toll station better.
This matter is particularly important at the moment: stablecoins are the fastest growing business in crypto, giants outside the circle have begun to do “payment-type L1”, and routing between different chains has become the top priority of new games.
From an investment perspective, valuation logic will leave the simple worship of TPS and be close to “who grasps the default path and settlement end”.
Incentives do not conflict
For entrepreneurial teams, this bridging means “no migration to distribution, no compromise to experience.”
For investors, it provides a realistic path of “single-user LTV compound interest”: one end is trusted distribution and EVM capital acceptance, and the other end is a stable and low-friction execution loop.
The rise of RWA and DAT requires both ends to be online at the same time: operations should be as predictable as automated systems, and audits should be as understandable as financial notes.
The reason why ETH and SOL have become dual centers on the asset side and the experience side is that this combination of “distribution × execution” is smooth;In the future, one or two “payment L1” will be added as traffic satellites, and it will not split the user’s story.
“Single vs. Module” debate, exiting the main stage
The fundamentalist debate on pursuing gives way to pragmatic operational discussions.
Which links must stand under the shadow of Ethereum’s settlement and compliance, and which links must be on Solana’s low-latency runway, and stablecoins must shuttle between the two sides – the answer is not ideology, but the actual use value.
For product managers, this bridge can be used as an internal API to make products.One balance, multiple lanes, transparent costs and time sensitive.The issuance of coins and the economic model, just say “where is governance and where is the experience”, and don’t let incentives fight with routing.
For market makers, they can unify the positions across runtimes; the balance is cheaper and there are more accessible scenarios, and the terminal spread is naturally tightened.
For wallets and on-ramp entrances, the moat is no longer “who is cheaper”, but “who is better at using the default path”.
When you hold the default, stablecoin payment, DeFi and consumer applications can be packaged naturally, and users do not need to “understand the bridge”.
The battle of L1/L2: From “Train War” to “Transportation Engineering”
Three tips on first principles for investors:
First, the infrastructure ecosystem has been added to the payment giant’s self-built L1, which will spread liquidity demand to more destinations, and the probability of a single “winner-takes all” is reduced.
Second, stablecoins are demand engines, and the nominal quantity will be one order of magnitude; they cannot become a chain of first-class stablecoin channels, and no matter how beautiful they are, they are easily marginalized.
Third, the exchange’s profit structure is being rewritten by the challenger.Perp DEXs like Hyperliquid take away some of the increments by execution and experience; when Base ↔ Solana becomes the native path, it will be easier to go to the places where the spread is tightest and the delay is most stable, and this trend will accelerate.
So how do you verify this wave of changes?Look at the possible phenomena in the three groups.
First, the correlation between Base’s activity and TVL and SOL pricing streams has been enhanced, and Solana’s native applications have begun to naturally connect with EVM funds without “make up lessons”.
Second, deposit points and wallets use cross-runtime routing by default, and cross-ecological transfers have fewer detours to CEX.
Third, in the disclosure of RWA and DAT, more and more “dual designs” are becoming more and more “dual-adjusted designs”: the focus of governance and settlement is on ETH/Base, the focus of interaction and retention is on SOL, and with the implementation of payment type L1, one or two distribution satellites of “stable coin centers” are added.
Ultimate narrative: Make the bridge into a “function”, not a “decoration”
What users buy is a “good experience”, not a “cool bridge”.
When intercom is made into a product that is “observable, dependable, and invisible to users”, we can finally take the “chain selection” back from the user and hand it over to the backend route.
For investors, this means moving from “platform exclusive” to “network and routing” pricing world – value is more stable at the level where you control intention, identity and default paths.
Base × Solana’s connection is an early sample of the world: it may not announce the end of the L1–L2 war, but it will blur the boundaries enough to allow “flow, not territory” to determine the attribution of value.
