Toshi ($TOSHI) Thesis

$TOSHI is the unofficial mascot of Base.

Its story started with Brian Armstrong's cat, Toshi, which was named after Coinbase's first mobile wallet.

When Base launched in 2023, an anonymous team turned that cat into a memecoin with a blue cartoon mascot.

No official endorsement or marketing campaign from Coinbase. Just a bunch of degens deciding this cat represented their chain.

And somehow, it stuck.

But the road to becoming Base's blue-chip meme wasn't smooth.

$TOSHI launched with a 3% tax on buys and sells. The plan was to fund exchange listings, team operations, a treasury, marketing, and the broader ecosystem.

Then an exploit at Leet DEX broke the original tax code, forcing the team to migrate to a new contract. Holders received the new tokens on a 1:1 basis.

Five months later, Meow DAO voted to remove the 3% tax entirely, with nearly 90% of voters choosing to give up the treasury funding rather than keep taxing every trade.

Then January 2025 happened.

Coinbase added $TOSHI to its listing roadmap, and the token surged 133% in hours, reaching an all-time high market cap of $129.8M.

This made it a blue-chip memecoin and one of the first major runners on the new chain.

But the more interesting part is what happened beyond the chart.

The team built Toshi Mart, a launchpad that let creators launch tokens paired against $TOSHI.

So, instead of being just another coin people traded, $TOSHI became the asset people needed to trade newly launched tokens.

Every launch created another potential use for the token, and every new project brought another reason for traders to interact with $TOSHI and contribute to its volume.

And that was the flywheel.

Toshi Mart later expanded its launchpad infrastructure and, in September 2026, merged into Flap on Base. New launches on Toshi Mart were disabled, but $TOSHI-paired launches remained available through Flap.

And so, a memecoin that started as an unofficial mascot built a launchpad around its liquidity, then watched that launchpad move under a bigger brand while its token remained part of the ecosystem.