Contest wallets inflate Base’s daily users as fees drop 20%

Base hosted a GMGN trading competition, which required new wallets, and logged 943,277 daily active addresses on October 22, a 49.9% increase in a single day.

The same day, user-paid fees dropped 20% to some $91,059 and transactions fell 8.6% to 9.58 million.

Addresses had already jumped 82.5% to 629,142 by October 21, a 30-day high at the time.

Address count ran 167.6% above the prior week’s median

Growthepie data indicated the October 22 count was 167.6% above the median of the past seven days, which was 352,544. It was the highest reading in the 30 days since September 23.

The transactions went the other way. Growthepie had 10.49 million on October 21 and 9.58 million the next day.

BaseScan‘s daily export logged a matching dip, from roughly 10.53 million to 9.63 million, while user fees had risen to about $113,703 on October 21 ahead of the 20% slide.

By October 23 the wave was fading, with active addresses slipping 38% to 584,540, though they stayed 65.8% above the pre-surge median.

Then, fees fell a further 19.8% to about $73,062, and transactions eased to 8.87 million.

GMGN’s $20,000 track demands wallets with no trading history

GMGN unveiled its Base track on October 21 with a $20,000 prize for the winner, running until October 26. “Trade Base coins and climb the leaderboard,” GMGN wrote.

Base promoted the track on October 22, the same day the surge peaked.

GMGN’s rules say that each entrant must register wallets with “no funds, no holdings and no trading history.” Only trades made through GMGN from the wallets registered will count.

Starting money is capped at $2,000, and no one may enter more than once. Traders must create new addresses when they join, and Growthepie counts them as new activity.

Additionally, the rules prohibit people from washing trades or coordinating trades with one another, and the chain totals can’t show the percentage of the jump that came from contest wallets.

Growthepie keeps track of all the different “from” addresses that send transactions every day. It warns that Sybil wallets can increase active addresses during campaigns or airdrops and calls active addresses “one of the most contentious metrics.”

The data firm also says that one person can have many wallets and suggests that the number of wallets be read along with the chain revenue. On October 22 and 23, the fees users paid on Base went down.

Doubts about Base’s activity figures aren’t new. Cryptopolitan reported on October 15 that Chainalysis had logged more than 138 million x402 transactions on Base.

TRM Labs reckoned agents carried out only 0.6% to 7.5% of the x402 transactions it screened, and Artemis and a16z analysts said 48% of transactions and 81% of volume in December 2025 were gamed.