Crypto Game Infected Ditches Base for Solana Over ‘Demand’ Issues, Pushback Ensues

Contaminated, a pandemic-simulation crypto sport that gained viral recognition, has introduced its resolution to desert Ethereum’s Layer-2 resolution, Base, and migrate to Layer-1 blockchain Solana.
The transfer follows technical difficulties in the course of the sport’s launch, with Contaminated alleging the platform didn’t deal with the excessive transaction quantity, leading to fuel value spikes and annoyed customers.
“Base couldn’t deal with the quantity of transactions coming in without delay,” the staff mentioned in an X publish on Thursday, noting that this disrupted the person expertise and in the end destroyed the sport’s momentum.
Whereas the staff initially suspected the difficulty was associated to frontend issues, they later confirmed the difficulty stemmed from a fuel spike, which brought about transaction failures in the course of the essential first half-hour of the sport.
Contaminated concluded that the bottleneck was more likely to persist throughout EVM chains regardless of some early optimism that Ethereum’s L2 options would handle scalability.
The staff pointed to Solana’s lively give attention to “real-world purposes” and its rising person base as key causes for his or her resolution.
“We need to construct the place customers are,” the creators defined, saying that many customers had expressed a choice for the sport to be on Solana to keep away from bridging.
Push again
Jesse Pollak, the architect behind Base, disputed Contaminated’s claims, including: “Base didn’t crash—the chain hummed alongside, simply because it ought to.”
Pollak defined that Base had reached out to the Contaminated staff to assist handle frontend points, detailing how the chain has thousands and thousands of customers and the staff had labored to help the sport’s development.
Base’s whole worth locked (TVL) is $3.05 billion, with 1.2 million lively addresses, DeFiLlama knowledge exhibits.
Nonetheless, Contaminated stood by their place, clarifying that whereas frontend points might have performed a job, the foundation trigger was nonetheless the fuel spike, indicating that Base’s limitations had been in charge for the person points they encountered.
The fallout has led to a flurry of commentary from the crypto neighborhood.
Some have rallied behind Contaminated, with others questioning the sport’s dealing with of the launch and allegations over a scarcity of knowledge they offered to again their claims.
Within the midst of the battle, Base developer Saedeh critiqued Contaminated’s actions, saying, “Actually, the way in which you guys launched and communicated exhibits how inexperienced your staff is.”
The developer identified purple flags of the sport, reminiscent of launching a number of tokens without delay and making overly formidable claims about market cap earlier than launch, as indicators of a scarcity of expertise.
Contaminated and Jesse Pollak haven’t but responded to Decrypt’s requests for remark.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair