Base Says Its Distribution Edge Can Outlast Robinhood Chain's Early Surge

Coinbase’s Base network is defending its position as an onchain distribution leader after Robinhood Chain confirmed a lead over Base in daily active users last week, a challenge the latter argues its 187.8 million agentic payments and imminent tokenized-stock launch can outlast.

Within just four weeks of its launch, Robinhood Chain has logged roughly 230,000 daily active users, enough to pass Base’s count cleanly. Cumulative DEX volumes too have jumped past $9 billion, including a 24-hour peak of $877.6 million on July 12 that briefly made Robinhood Chain the second-largest chain globally, behind only Solana. However, more than 80% of this volume has come from memecoin trading, not the tokenized equities Robinhood marketed as its signature feature, with the latter only accounting for 4% of its chain activity.

Base co-founder Jesse Pollak admitted that the network’s bet on onchain social products had “disintegrated completely,” leaving the project behind in key areas like perpetuals and prediction markets. He also conceded that tokenized equities in an EVM environment were something “Robinhood Chain has done right,” though a fix was close.

Base’s response has leaned on distribution built over its nearly three years of being live. Xen Baynham-Herd, Base’s head of global growth, highlighted that the network’s x402 payment protocol has already processed 187.8 million agentic payments worth $42.4 million across more than 5,000 merchants. He also pointed to Visa adding Base to its stablecoin settlement pilot alongside Polygon, Arc and six other chains, and to the project’s May “Azul” upgrade, which cut withdrawal finality to about a day.

Base holds roughly $3.9 billion in stablecoins (about 90% of it USDC), putting it neck-and-neck with Arbitrum atop the L2 stablecoin rankings. Moreover, Shopify processes USDC payments on Base, and JPMorgan settles its tokenized deposit product there too—luxuries not available to a four-week-old chain.

Coinbase has announced tokenized stocks on its centralized exchange, but the onchain, Base-native version has no confirmed launch date. Landing that product would close Robinhood’s clearest remaining edge. Combined with Base’s institutional and agentic-payments push, this is the bet underlying Coinbase’s case: that Robinhood’s early memecoin-driven lead is easier to overtake than the distribution network Base has spent years building.

Source: https://news.bitcoin.com/featured/base-robinhood-chain-distribution-edge-pollak-armstrong/