OpenChainBench

Base vs Ethereum

Base leads on 4 of 5 shared benchmarks, Ethereum on 1. Base wins on Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across L1 and L2 chains ($0.000355 vs $0.0287), Fastest Wormhole VAA finalization by source chain, live latency (1.0 min vs 13.7 min), Fastest Chainlink CCIP source chain by end-to-end delivery latency (2.8 min vs 16.6 min), Fastest LayerZero source chain by end-to-end message delivery (1.1 min vs 4.1 min). Ethereum wins on Fastest Axelar GMP source chain by end-to-end delivery (17.1 min vs 25.4 min). Data as of 2026-10-07 UTC.

Read methodology Last measured Window: rolling 24h6 shared benchmarks, 5 measured on both sides
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.

Ethereum logo
Ethereum

PoS chain using Gasper (Casper FFG plus LMD-GHOST). 12-second slots with deterministic finality every two epochs, roughly 12.8 minutes.

Side by side measurements

Stablecoin flow by chain: where dollars actually moved over 30 days

Blockchains
Provider30d changeStablecoin floatNet 7d7d change
Base5.58%$5.20B$128.55M2.53%
Ethereum-$147.30B$128.05M0.087%
View
Basen/aEthereumn/a

Stablecoin float is where dollars are parked, not what they do. A chain can take in a billion that sits idle, and lose float to a single issuer redeeming. The figure is DefiLlama's chain-wide pegged-USD aggregate, every issuer combined; it does not separate a bridge inflow from a native mint, and a dollar bridged to an L2 counts on both chains, so rows are not additive. Read the net dollars with the percentage beside them: the same $400M is a rounding error on Ethereum and a doubling elsewhere.

Rolling 24h · Net stablecoin flow (30d)Raw JSON

Frequently asked questions

Base vs Ethereum: which one is better?

Base and Ethereum are compared on 6 shared OpenChainBench benchmarks. Base leads on Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across L1 and L2 chains. Ethereum leads on Fastest Axelar GMP source chain by end-to-end delivery. See the live table on this page for every metric.

Which is cheaper, Base or Ethereum?

On the Cheapest blockchain transaction fee, live across L1 and L2 chains benchmark, Base leads at $0.000355 versus Ethereum at $0.0287. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.

Which is faster, Base or Ethereum?

On the Fastest Axelar GMP source chain by end-to-end delivery benchmark, Ethereum leads at 17.1 min (provisional) versus Base at 25.4 min (provisional). Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.

How is the Base vs Ethereum 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.

Related comparisons

How this pair was selected

Auto-generated pairs require: both providers in the same benchmark for seven consecutive days, at least 1000 samples per provider, observable third-party search demand, and a public /products/[slug] page on OCB. Editorially curated pairs (like this one) may publish early when search demand is high and data is accruing; panels with fewer than 100 samples are shown as provisional. The full pair ledger is versioned in the public repo.

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