$4B Flees Coinbase’s Base as Bridges Bleed Capital—Ethereum Rakes in $8.5B Amid Chaos
Money talks—and right now, it's screaming into Ethereum's pockets while Base watches the exits. Cross-chain bridges hemorrhaged over $4B from Coinbase's layer-2 darling this week, but the real plot twist? ETH somehow vacuumed up $8.5B in inflows like a DeFi black hole. Guess even in a bear market, the OG chain still plays king.
Where’s the cash going? Not your broker’s yacht—this time. The numbers suggest a brutal reshuffling of capital, not a crypto exodus. Traders clearly still believe in the space; they just don’t trust the plumbing. (Cue the usual 'infrastructure risks' think pieces.)
Bottom line: When bridges wobble, money sprints back to the fortress. Ethereum’s moat just got $8.5B deeper—and Wall Street’s 'blockchain consultants' just got another PowerPoint slide.
The data show the momentum behind the Base chain has decelerated, with ethereum reclaiming its top spot.
Crypto bridges are protocols that facilitate communication and interaction between different blockchains, enhancing interoperability. Bridging, therefore, refers to the act of moving tokens between different networks.
The cumulative supply of stablecoins on Base has also flattened above $4 billion since mid-May alongside slower trading volumes, as the chart below shows.
BASE bleeding ETH
According to the data source L2BEAT, the total number of ether (ETH) deposited on BASE has crashed from 1.82 million ETH to just over 835,000 ETH in four weeks.
The trend is consistent with other LAYER 2 solutions, which have seen notable ETH outflows in recent weeks, according to Michael Nadeau of The DeFi Report on X.
According to Coinbase's Protocol Specialist Viktor Bunin, the outflows are likely due to Binance withdrawing capital to the Layer 1.
"The vast majority is just Binance withdrawing to L1. They kept an ungodly amount on the L2s. Unclear if they were getting incentives to keep it there or just didn't balance across their supported chains," Bunin said on X.
