OpenChainBench

Arbitrum vs Base

Arbitrum leads on 6 of 8 shared benchmarks, Base on 2. Arbitrum wins on Fastest L2 block time, live across Robinhood, Arbitrum, Base and 7 more (334 ms vs 1.94 s), Fastest free public RPC for Ethereum, BNB, Polygon and 23 more chains (plus Solana and Polkadot) (247 ms vs 254 ms), Fastest Chainlink CCIP source chain by end-to-end delivery latency (18.3 min vs 23.8 min), Fastest LayerZero source chain by end-to-end message delivery (26.78 s vs 59.48 s). Base wins on Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across 15 L1 and L2 chains ($0.000242 vs $0.000807), Fastest Wormhole VAA finalization by source chain, live latency (1.2 min vs 17.5 min).

Read methodology Last measured Window: rolling 24h9 shared benchmarks
Arbitrum logo
Arbitrum

Optimistic rollup built on Nitro stack with a fast-finality sequencer. Sub-second block times (~250 ms) via a 250 ms default block interval, far below the 2 s OP Stack convention. 7-day fraud-proof window for L1 finality.

Base logo
Base

Coinbase-operated optimistic rollup on the OP Stack. 2-second sequencer block time, shared bridge with Optimism via the OP Superchain, fastest-growing L2 by TVL since 2024.

Side by side measurements

Frequently asked questions

Arbitrum vs Base: which one is better?

Arbitrum and Base are compared on 9 shared OpenChainBench benchmarks. Arbitrum leads on Fastest L2 block time, live across Robinhood, Arbitrum, Base and 7 more. Base leads on Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across 15 L1 and L2 chains. See the live table on this page for every metric.

Which is faster on fastest l2 block time, live across robinhood, arbitrum, base and 7 more, Arbitrum or Base?

On the Fastest L2 block time, live across Robinhood, Arbitrum, Base and 7 more benchmark, Arbitrum leads at 334 ms versus Base at 1.94 s. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.

Which is faster on cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across 15 l1 and l2 chains, Arbitrum or Base?

On the Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across 15 L1 and L2 chains benchmark, Base leads at $0.000242 versus Arbitrum at $0.000807. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.

How is the Arbitrum vs Base comparison measured?

Every benchmark on this page uses the same open methodology, published at https://openchainbench.com/methodology. Data is CC-BY-4.0. Measurement harnesses are MIT-licensed.

How this pair was selected

A pair is published when all four conditions hold. Both providers run in the same OpenChainBench benchmark for at least seven consecutive days. Each provider has at least 1000 samples in the measurement window. The head to head query has observable third party search demand. Both providers have a public /products/[slug] page on OCB. The full pair ledger is versioned in the public repo so the methodology is externally verifiable.

Live data refreshes via ISR within 60 seconds of a new run. Sources are the same Prometheus queries surfaced on the parent benchmark pages.