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 pumpIt’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 summerThere’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.Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the On the Margin newsletter.
