Base Seeks to Outlast Robinhood Chain's Early Surge with Tokenized Stock Launch

Robinhood Chain's rapid growth has put pressure on Base, Coinbase's onchain distribution network. In just four weeks, Robinhood Chain logged over 230,000 daily active users, surpassing Base's count and becoming the second-largest chain globally after Solana.

Roughly 80% of Robinhood Chain's cumulative DEX volume came from memecoin trading, with tokenized equities only accounting for 4%. However, even after a significant surge in tokenized equity activity, they remained a small fraction of the chain's daily turnover.

Base co-founder Jesse Pollak acknowledged that their bet on onchain social products had 'disintegrated completely,' leaving them behind in key areas like perpetuals and prediction markets. He also conceded that Base was behind Robinhood Chain in tokenized equities, an EVM environment where it excelled.

Despite this, Base remains confident in its position as a distribution leader. Xen Baynham-Herd, Head of Global Growth at Base, pointed to the network's x402 payment protocol, which has processed 187.8 million agentic payments worth $42.4 million across over 5,000 merchants.

Baynham-Herd also highlighted Visa's addition of Base to its stablecoin settlement pilot and the project's 'Azul' upgrade, which combined trusted execution environments with zero-knowledge multiproofs to significantly reduce withdrawal finality.