cNGN users on Base hit a high while its volume fell, for the second week running

962

Daily active addresses

up 64.7%, a series high

−28.8%

Base transfer volume

$12.49M to $8.90M

63.4%

Carried by 98 transfers

0.34% of 29,007

$113

Average of everything else

from $328 last week

Last week we argued that cNGN's record transfer volume on Base was not adoption: 70 transfers carried 56.7% of it, most of them one mint walked through a relay into HyperFX solver inventory. The week with the most users had done the least volume.

This week ran the other way, and it makes the same point more strongly.

Daily active addresses rose 64.7% to 962 — the highest we have recorded. Transfers rose 75.4%. Senders rose 68.1%, to 884.

Volume fell 28.8%.

The claim

On Base, cNGN's transfer volume and its user base are moving independently, and the evidence is now two weeks in opposite directions rather than one.

A single week of high volume and low users can be an outlier. A following week of high users and falling volume cannot be explained by the same outlier. Across the last three rows of that table, the correlation between the two is effectively negative.

The concentration did not go away

98 transfers — 0.34% of the week's 29,007 — carried $5,639,957, or 63.4% of Base volume. That is a higher share than last week's 56.7%.

The largest of them are the same machinery: the mint signer sending to and receiving from two flagged business-partner addresses, $1.39M across six transfers; one deposit of $428,861 into the ycNGN vault; and the relay addresses we identified last week, still active.

The part we got too generous about

Last week we said the real growth underneath the headline was worth about $5.4M — the volume left once the concentrated transfers were removed.

This week that same residual is $3,256,599, down 39.7% — while the users behind it rose by two-thirds. The average transfer outside the concentrated set fell from $328 to $113.

So the non-treasury layer is not a clean usage measure either. More people are using cNGN on Base, and each of them is moving less. That is consistent with adoption by smaller users, and it is inconsistent with reading any cNGN volume figure — headline or residual — as a proxy for how many people use it.

What we would report instead

For cNGN on Base, the number that tracks usage is daily active addresses, and this week it is at a high. If someone tells you cNGN fell 25% this week, that is true. If they tell you cNGN usage fell, it is not.