Strategic Shift: Discontinuing Ethereum Mainnet Support for DHB
By DeHub Team — 2025-02-01
In Q1 2025 we discontinued Ethereum mainnet support for DHB and concentrated on Base, with Solana next on the roadmap.
We listed on mainnet in Q1 2024. Reversing that within a year is not a comfortable thing to publish, so here is the reasoning in full.
The problem was arithmetic
DHB is a consumer token. It tips creators, enters arcade games, unlocks content and pays for small things. The transactions are frequently worth a few pounds.
On mainnet, the gas to perform those actions could exceed their value. That is not a user experience problem that better design solves — it is a cost floor beneath which the product does not function. Every consumer behaviour we had spent four years building assumed transactions cheap enough to be thoughtless.
Why this is the ecosystem's own direction
Ethereum's thought leadership, including the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin, has been consistent: scaling happens through Layer 2, not by loading the base chain. Rollups now scale Ethereum by roughly 17x while cutting fees by a similar margin, and an L2-centric ecosystem is treated as necessary for a pluralistic, decentralised future rather than as a workaround.
Read that way, moving to an L2 is not leaving Ethereum. It is doing what Ethereum's roadmap asks applications to do.
Why Base
Speed and cost. Upgrades targeting around 200ms confirmations and sub-cent fees — the range where tipping is a normal action rather than a considered one.
Where users already are. Roughly 4.6 million weekly active addresses, more than half of overall L2 usage.
The Coinbase path. Base tokens appear directly in Coinbase wallets and users can onboard instantly, removing the bridging step that loses ordinary people.
We listed sDHB on Base in Q2 2024, so this was consolidation onto a chain already carrying our staking activity rather than a leap.
Solana next
Base is the focus, not the endpoint. Solana's high-throughput, low-latency design complements it, its DeFi and NFT ecosystems are active, and a Coinbase listing opens cleaner integration paths. It is on the roadmap as a second leg rather than a replacement.
What the freed capacity goes to
- Liquidity provisioning with leading AMMs on Base, building organic depth — an extension of the automated provision strategies running since late 2023.
- Capital deployment from treasury to support incentives and unlocks.
- User acquisition — onboarding rewards, wallet connection bonuses, bridge credits.
- Developer engagement through hackathons, grants and DHB-native tooling.
On reversing a decision
Maintaining a mainnet listing our users could not afford to use, purely because withdrawing would look like retreat, would have been vanity at their expense.
The reach argument for mainnet was real. The consumer-usage argument was wrong, and it was knowable in advance — the fee structure was never a secret. We would rather record that plainly than quietly let the listing decay.
What discontinuing does not mean
It does not mean DHB stops existing for anyone holding on mainnet, and it does not mean support was withdrawn without a route.
Discontinuing support means we stop maintaining liquidity, integrations and product functionality on that chain, and concentrate all of it where users transact. Announcing it explicitly, with notice, is the difference between a decision and abandonment — and abandonment is what usually happens, because quietly letting a listing become illiquid attracts no criticism and requires no announcement.
The version that would have been genuinely wrong is the one where nothing is said, depth erodes over a year, and holders discover the position is unexecutable at the moment they try to use it. That is common in this industry and it is not something we were prepared to do.