This week on Base: OpenSea Mobile, onchain FX pairs and $400M of USDC from Spark

A busy week, in Base’s own words

Every Saturday Base publishes a recap of what apps on its network shipped that week. The 24 October edition, posted as an X Article and titled “This Week on Base: Meme Summit, Mastercard, and more”, is split into a News list and a Launches list and names more than thirty projects. The figures in it are Base’s summary of what those teams announced; Base cites Token Terminal for one of them and does not give a source for most of the others.

Several entries already have their own pages on Exchange.news: Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines, the Thunes stablecoin payout deal, the study on what it costs to send $200 in USDC, and Aave’s loans against tokenized stocks. This article walks through the rest, grouped by what a reader can actually do with them, and skips items that only matter to developers.

Where the USDC went

The largest number in the recap is a lending one. Base says Spark, the lending arm of the Sky ecosystem, supplied more than $400 million in USDC to Morpho’s cbBTC/USDC market on Base, a market that now has $1.8 billion in total supply. In plain terms, that is a pool where people borrow USDC against Coinbase’s wrapped bitcoin (cbBTC), and Spark is one of the biggest lenders in it. The recap adds that Morpho Midnight passed $100 million in total deposits and that Avant Protocol reached $8.7 million in deposits on its own Morpho market.

Pendle added PendleLoop on Base, which lets users loop long positions in tokenized stocks on Aave markets, with incentives on top. Looping means borrowing against a deposit and redepositing the loan to increase exposure, so gains and losses are both amplified and a falling share price can trigger liquidation. Suno Finance brought solar-backed yield assets to Base and says it finances more than 25 solar plants with $5 million under management.

Six currencies that are not the dollar

Most stablecoin activity on Base is in dollars. Frax Finance’s addition is different: it added onchain FX markets on Base that pair six local-currency stablecoins on Aero, the network’s main exchange. The tickers Base lists are BRZ, CADD, tGBP, IDRX, ZARP and AUDF, which track the Brazilian real, the Canadian dollar, the British pound, the Indonesian rupiah, the South African rand and the Australian dollar. Aero itself also launched what Base calls a unified liquidity layer this week.

For someone paid in one currency and spending in another, onchain FX pairs are a way to swap without a bank. Liquidity in new pairs is often thin, so a large swap can move the price; check the quoted rate against the market rate before confirming. The recap also notes that a Verantax trader opened a $19 million long position in EUR/USD with 190x leverage on Base, a reminder that the same currencies are traded with far more risk elsewhere on the network.

Wallets, payments and everyday apps

OpenSea opened its mobile app to all users, with trading across more than 25 chains including Base. Keeper Wallet added Base support, so its users can hold assets, buy crypto with a card and open DeFi apps in the wallet’s built-in browser. ChatterPay brought WhatsApp payments to Base, letting people send money from a chat without installing a separate app. Cloaked launched on Base with a fresh address for each app while the user keeps control of the keys, and Credifi added Zero, which lets a wallet qualify for credit without forms, ID or a bank login.

For readers deciding where to hold USDC on Base, two self-custody wallets cover most of these apps. The Base app at base.app is Coinbase’s own self-custody wallet and connects directly to the network. Phantom, best known on Solana, also supports Base and is a common choice for people who use both chains. With either, check that you have selected Base before receiving funds, because sending USDC on the wrong network is the most common way to lose it.

Trading contests and the GMGN Base Track

Three competitions appear in the recap. Verantax’s “Treasures & Trades” contest on Base entered its last week with a $30,000 prize pool, TrueMarkets announced a fee-free trading competition starting the following Monday, and GMGN’s Base Track for its GGC championship runs through 26 October. According to Base, the top trader on Base gets $20,000 and a place at the finals in London.

On 25 October Base invited followers to tune in on 26 October to a Base Day livestream with GMGN. In a reply to that post, Base said the contest is owned and operated by GMGN and pointed readers to GMGN’s official rules for eligible assets, dates, prize conditions and geographic exclusions. Base is promoting the event, not running it, so anyone who entered should treat GMGN’s rules as the final word on who qualifies and how prizes are paid.

The recap also lists Grow Advanced, which offers leveraged long and short positions across stocks, crypto, commodities and currencies, and Forecast, which is preparing a mainnet for high-leverage trading. Leverage multiplies losses as quickly as gains, and none of the posts state which countries can use these products.