When Base Meets Solana: The Interchain War Ends, and the Traffic Wars Begin

Author: Charlie Liu

As I recently wrote in The New Battlefield for Stablecoins: The Layer 1 Battle between Stripe and Circle, the interchain war has burned from the L2 between Coinbase and Robinhood to the 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 "assets can cross the past", but downgrades "which chain to choose" to a background setting, and upgrades "who controls the default route from intention to transaction" into an investable and operable business.

In a market where new L1/L2 is popping up, stablecoin trading volume is skyrocketing, RWA and DAT are rising, and challenger exchanges are eating away at market share, this is a long-term bet on "traffic engineering".

Why do two "operating systems" need each other

This is not a popular science question about "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, forming a huge funnel of "compliance entry + EVM assets"; The trade-off is that ultra-low latency interactions are not dominant.

Solana takes throughput and user experience to the extreme; The price is half a step away from EVM native funds, institutional distribution.

In other words, Base embraces the entrance of "people" and "money", and Solana grasps the "touch" and "speed".

A bridge that treats these differences as "characteristics" rather than "contradictions" is essentially "optimal distribution of workloads".

identity, compliance, governance, and deep funding remain at Base; high-frequency links that require hand speed and smooth experience on Solana; Routing is automatically arranged in the background, and users are not required to change wallets or teams to change their technology stacks.

trade-offs between the two sides don't have to be smoothed out, but can be compounded over the same user journey.

Why not just upgrade the front-end experience

? On the surface, this is a two-way channel that has been officially "justified": allowing SOL to be called like a local asset in the EVM stream, and allowing Base-side assets to be expressed naturally on Solana.

More important is the position - this is not a side door for geeks, but a "default channel" for the masses.

When the bridge is productized and embedded in the wallet and payment path, users do not need to change the environment and do the same thing, but take a more suitable lane in the background.

The impact on market structure is often to reduce switching costs, reduce spreads, deepen the liquidity pool that can be truly tradable, and profits will naturally move closer to the side of "controlling the last mile route".

The moat has changed from a technical parameter to a "traffic routing right",

and investors should see it as a payment network rather than a simple "chain". The "value accumulation" of the whole system is at the source of intent and at the node of automatic routing.

Coinbase's fiat currency entrance and Base's wallet path naturally hold the upstream distribution rights. Solana's execution side eats the excess returns of high-frequency scenarios. Whoever can define the default path - wallet, deposit, aggregator - will be better able to build a toll booth.

This is especially important now: stablecoins are already the fastest-growing business in crypto, giants outside the circle are starting to do "payment L1", and routing between different chains has become the top priority of the new game.

From an investment perspective, the valuation logic will leave the pure worship of TPS and approach "who holds the default path and the final settlement".

Incentives do not conflict

with entrepreneurial teams, and this bridging means that "distribution does not need to migrate, experience does not need to compromise".

For investors, it provides a realistic path of "single-user LTV compound interest": on one end, trusted distribution and EVM capital undertaking, and on the other end, there is a stable, low-friction execution loop.

rise of RWA and DAT requires both to be online: operations to be as predictable as an automated system, and audits to be as understandable as a financial statement.

reason why ETH and SOL have become the dual centers of the asset side and the experience side is that this combination of "distribution × execution" is smooth enough. In the future, superimposing one or two "payment L1s" as traffic satellites will not cut off user stories.

The "monolith vs. module" debate, the fundamentalist debate of withdrawing from the main stage

retreat gave way to pragmatic operational discussions.

Which links must stand in the shadow of Ethereum's settlement and compliance, which links must be on Solana's low-latency runway, and stablecoins must shuttle on both sides - the answer is not ideology, but real use value.

For product managers, this bridge can be used as an internal API to make products. One balance, multiple lanes, transparent and time-sensitive fees. Coin issuance and economic model, directly say "where is governance, where is experience", don't let incentives and routing fight.

For market makers, positions across runtime can be unified into one account; There are more scenarios where the balance is cheaper and more accessible, and the terminal spread is naturally tightened.

For wallets and on-ramp entries, the moat is no longer "who is cheaper", but "whose default path is better".

When you hold the default, stablecoin payments, DeFi, and consumer applications can be packaged naturally, and users don't need to "understand the bridge".

L1/L2 battle: From "turf war" to "traffic engineering"

Three first-principle tips for investors:

First, the infrastructure ecology has been added to the payment giant's self-built L1, which will disperse liquidity demand to more destinations, and the probability of a single "winner-takes-all" decreases.

Second, stablecoins are the demand engine, and the nominal amount will rise to an order of magnitude. Chains that cannot become first-class stablecoin channels are easy to marginalize no matter how beautiful they are.

Third, the profit structure of exchanges is being rewritten by challengers. perp DEXs like Hyperliquid take away some of the increments through execution and experience; When Base ↔ Solana becomes the native path, it will be easier to go to the "tightest spreads and the most stable latency", and this trend will accelerate.

So how to verify this wave of changes? Look at the three groups of possible phenomena.

First, the correlation between Base's activity and TVL and SOL pricing flow has increased, and Solana native applications have begun to naturally connect with EVM funds without "making up lessons".

Second, deposit accounts and wallets use cross-runtime routing by default, and cross-ecological transfers are less likely to bypass CEX.

Third, in the disclosure of RWA and DAT, there are more and more "amphibious 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 L1, one or two more "stablecoin powerhouse" distribution satellites will be added.

The ultimate narrative: make the bridge a "function", not a "decoration" Users

buy a "useful experience", not a "cool bridge".

When interoperability is made into a "observable, reliable, and invisible to user" product, we can finally take the "chain selection" back from the user's hands and hand it over to the background routing.

For investors, this means moving from "platform exclusivity" to a world of "network and routing" pricing—where value settles more steadily in the layer that controls intent, identity, and default path.

The Base × Solana connection is an early sample of this world: it may not announce the end of the L1–L2 war, but it will blur the boundaries enough to allow "traffic, not territory" to determine value.