Robinhood Chain surpassed Base in daily active users on July 21, just four weeks after its launch. Coinbase’s network responds by highlighting its 187.8 million agentic payments and an upcomi
Robinhood Chain surpassed Base in daily active users on July 21, just four weeks after its launch. Coinbase’s network responds by highlighting its 187.8 million agentic payments and an upcoming launch of tokenized stocks. The battle for onchain distribution has only just begun.
Coinbase’s Layer 2 network is going through turbulent times. After long dominating the Ethereum L2 landscape, Base sees Robinhood Chain challenge its leadership with a rapidity that commands respect. In four weeks of existence, Robinhood Chain has recorded about 230,000 daily active users, far surpassing Base’s counter.
Your 1st cryptos with BitpandaThis link uses an affiliate program.The cumulative volumes on its DEXs have also passed the 9 billion dollar mark, with a peak of 877.6 million in 24 hours on July 12, temporarily placing Robinhood Chain second in the world behind Solana.
This thunderous start hides a more nuanced reality. Over 80% of the recorded volumes come from memecoin trading, not from the tokenized stocks that Robinhood had presented as its signature. These account for only 4% of the platform’s onchain activity.
Even after a fivefold increase of this metric by July 25, tokenized securities remain a marginal fraction of daily volume, with stablecoins remaining the largest category.
Faced with these figures, Base co-founder Jesse Pollak made a mea culpa. In two long messages posted on X, he acknowledged that the network’s bet on onchain social products (Farcaster, Zora, miniapps and creator coins) had “completely disintegrated.” A bitter observation that leaves Base behind on segments that have become critical, notably perpetual contracts and prediction markets.
Pollak also admitted that tokenized stocks in an EVM environment represented a ground where “Robinhood Chain did things well,” acknowledging that Base was “behind on this point,” while specifying that a solution was near. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong had made similar remarks earlier in the month, recognizing the failure of the content coins strategy.
“Base focused on trading, payments, and agents, in that order. These three pillars are inextricably linked“, he clarified, adding that most resources will now go to trading.
Base’s response is not played on the grounds of daily active users or DEX volumes. Xen Baynham-Herd, head of global growth at Base, told Bitcoin.com News that the network’s x402 payment protocol had already processed 187.8 million agentic payments, worth 42.4 million dollars, with over 5,000 merchants. He also recalled Base’s integration into Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot and the « Azul » upgrade in May, which brings withdrawal finality to about one day.
The x402 protocol reduces fees to zero and gas costs to one-hundredth of a cent, whereas traditional cards charge up to 30 cents per transaction. Beyond agentic payments, Base holds about 3.9 billion dollars in stablecoins, nearly 90% in USDC, placing it shoulder to shoulder with Arbitrum at the top of the L2 rankings. Shopify processes payments in USDC on Base, and JPMorgan settles its tokenized deposit product there, assets that a four-week-old chain cannot claim.
In short, the duel between Base and Robinhood Chain illustrates two philosophies of onchain distribution: institutional depth versus retail virality. On one side, a network backed by three years of infrastructure and partnerships with Visa and JPMorgan. On the other, a chain that gained 230,000 users in one month, but with over 80% of activity still driven by memecoins. The central question is not the number of users today, but which model will hold when the novelty effect fades.
