Layer 2 Expansion: SDHB Lists on Base
By DeHub Team — 2024-04-01
sDHB listed on Base in Q2 2024, one quarter after DHB went live on Ethereum mainnet.
Why so quickly after mainnet
Because mainnet had already demonstrated the problem it was always going to have.
DHB is a consumer token. It is used to tip creators, enter arcade games and unlock content — transactions frequently worth a few pounds. On Ethereum mainnet in 2024, the gas to perform those actions could exceed their value.
You cannot design around that. A platform whose core interactions are small payments needs a chain where small payments make sense.
Why Base specifically
Several reasons, and only one of them is technical.
Fees and speed. Base was targeting confirmations in the low hundreds of milliseconds and fees below a cent — the range where tipping a creator is a normal action rather than a considered one.
Where the users are. Base carried a very large share of total L2 activity, with millions of weekly active addresses. Being on the busiest L2 is a distribution decision.
The Coinbase relationship. Base users see Base tokens in their Coinbase wallets and can onboard without the usual bridging exercise. For a consumer product, removing that step is worth more than any technical advantage.
Ecosystem direction. Ethereum's own thesis is L2-centric scaling. Building on an L2 is not a workaround for mainnet, it is what mainnet's roadmap asks applications to do.
What sDHB is for
Staked DHB. Listing it on Base rather than only the base token was deliberate: staking is where the utility concentrates — airdrop eligibility has run through staking since the first whitepaper in 2021 — and putting that on the chain with the lowest friction meant participation was not gated by transaction cost.
What it led to
Base became the primary chain. In Q1 2025 we discontinued Ethereum mainnet support for DHB and concentrated on Base, with Solana on the roadmap behind it.
That sequence — mainnet, then Base one quarter later, then leaving mainnet a year after that — reads like indecision compressed into twelve months. It is more accurate to say we tested a hypothesis about reach, got a clear answer about usage, and acted on it rather than defending the earlier decision.
The infrastructure that made moving between chains cheap was the automated liquidity provision built in late 2023 and the plain ERC-20 contract that deploys anywhere without special handling. Both were decisions made under duress in 2022 that kept paying.
What multi-chain actually costs
More than the deployment, which is the part everyone budgets for.
Every additional chain is another liquidity position to fund and defend, another set of integrations to keep current, another surface where a bridge or an aggregator can behave unexpectedly, and another place for a user to end up holding the right token on the wrong network.
That last one is the real cost. Support load from cross-chain confusion is substantial and it falls hardest on exactly the non-technical users a consumer product is trying to serve.
Concentrating on Base rather than accumulating chains was partly a response to that. Being present in more places is not the same as being usable in more places, and the second is the only one that helps anybody.