Base crumbled under pressure, Infected game flees to Solana

Viral game “Infected” rage-quitted Ethereum’s Base and is packing its bags for Solana. The pandemic simulation game that spread like wildfire announced it is ditching Base for Solana after its launch turned into a gas fee horror show.

Infected’s team says that Base couldn’t handle the transaction volume, causing gas fees to spike and players to quit mid-outbreak. Base architect Jesse Pollak has claimed that Base never crashed. Meanwhile, Base’s total value locked (TVL) has recorded a decline of around 4% over the last 7 days.

Base gas fees killed Infected hype?

In an X post, Infected declared that after building solely on Ethereum for the past 4 years they are migrating all of their upcoming games to Solana. It mentioned that Base wasn’t able to handle their demand but it is not solely the chain’s problem. It added that it’s a fundamental scaling issue for all EVM chains.

It highlighted that their team experimented with various consumer apps but then they narrowed it down to one concept i.e. speculative simulation games. Their team believes that speculation has huge potential beyond just meme coins as it will evolve into a bigger industry over the next 2 years.

Infected went mega-viral, it received 130K signups in 48 hours, and 50K Twitter followers in two months. But when they launched on Base, things fell apart. Gas spiked and most of the people couldn’t make transactions for the first 30 min. Since it is a momentum-based game, the first 30 minutes were make or break.

We crashed Base and now we’re moving to Solana

After building solely on Eth for the past 4 years, we’ve decided to migrate @Infecteddotfun and all of our upcoming games to Solana. There is only one reason that led us to this decision:

Base couldn’t handle @Infecteddotfun‘s…

— Infected (@infecteddotfun) April 3, 2025

As per the data shared, daily gas spent on Base pre-Infected (23 Feb) was 43.515 ETH and on Infected day 1 it was 145.850 ETH.

The team believed in L2 scaling for ETH, but after this, they think EVM chains have a fundamental scaling issue that won’t be solved anytime soon. They anticipate that Solana is winning this race in terms of culture and user base.

Base didn’t crash, but it still lost

Infected praised the ETH community for being visionary, long-term oriented, and highly technical, however, it lacks in focusing on today’s users. It pointed out that there is a huge divide between builders and users on EVM.

It stated that on one hand, most builders on Ethereum have no idea who the users are and what they want. On the other hand, Solana builders focus on real-world products and actual users. It named most of the popular consumer apps on Solana like pumpfun, vectorfun, daosfun and more.

The viral game added that they have doubted Solana for long but now they got it why  they’ve dominated the space over the past year. It added “If our users were on XRP, we’d build on XRP. If they were on the Bitcoin mainnet, we’d go there. But today, they’re on Solana.”

Jesse Pollak responded to the claims and stated that Base’s team reached out to the Infected directly immediately after the post and they haven’t responded yet. He asserted that Base did not crash and the chain hummed along, just as it should.

DefiLlama data shows that Base has managed to grew its TVL by 8.3% over the last one month. It now stands at $3.05 billion. Meanwhile, Solana’s TVL has taken a hit of almost 15% at the same time to hover around $6.33 billion.

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