Key Takeaways
Robinhood Chain’s each day energetic customers surpassed Base’s on July 21, an edge it has maintained since.Robinhood Chain’s cumulative DEX quantity topped $9 billion just lately, pushed 80% by memecoins.Base says 187.8 million x402 funds and an imminent tokenized-stock launch can defend its lead.
A Quick Begin, With Caveats
Inside simply 4 weeks of its launch, Robinhood Chain has logged roughly 230,000 each day energetic customers, sufficient to move Base’s rely cleanly. Cumulative DEX volumes too have jumped previous $9 billion, together with a 24-hour peak of $877.6 million on July 12 that briefly made Robinhood Chain the second-largest chain globally, behind solely Solana.
That mentioned, greater than 80% of this quantity has come from memecoin buying and selling, not the tokenized equities Robinhood marketed as its signature characteristic, with the latter solely accounting for 4% of its chain exercise. Actually, by July 25 that metric had surged roughly fivefold, however even after that, tokenized equities remained a mere fraction of the chain’s each day DEX turnover (with stablecoins nonetheless being the one largest class).
Base Owns the Miss
The timing of those numbers appeared to have put Base on the again foot and thru two prolonged X posts, co-founder Jesse Pollak admitted that the community’s guess on onchain social merchandise (i.e. Farcaster, Zora, miniapps and creator cash) had “disintegrated fully,” leaving the venture behind in key areas that “have been now more and more essential,” together with perpetuals and prediction markets.
He additionally conceded that tokenized equities in an EVM setting have been one thing “Robinhood Chain has accomplished proper,” and that Base had been “behind on this,” regardless that a repair was shut. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong made an identical concession earlier this month, noting that Base’s content-coin technique didn’t work, noting:
Base has been centered on buying and selling, funds, and brokers (in that order). I feel all three are inextricably intertwined. Many of the assets are going to buying and selling proper now fwiw. Possibly it doesn’t translate externally proper now, however that’s the case.
The Case Put Forth
Base’s response has leaned on distribution constructed over its practically three years of being reside, not a one-for-one reply to Robinhood’s DAU or DEX-volume numbers. Xen Baynham-Herd, Base’s head of world development, instructed Bitcoin.com Information that the community’s x402 cost protocol has already processed 187.8 million agentic funds price $42.4 million throughout greater than 5,000 retailers.
He additionally pointed to Visa including Base to its stablecoin settlement pilot alongside Polygon, Arc and 6 different chains, and to the venture’s Could “Azul” improve, which mixed trusted execution environments with zero-knowledge multiproofs to chop withdrawal finality to a few day.
Conventional card processors carry mounted charges as excessive as 30 cents per transaction, a ground that makes web micropayments impractical, Baynham-Herd mentioned; x402 pushes protocol charges to zero and fuel prices to roughly a hundredth of a cent, posturing Visa’s pilot as a recognition that legacy rails merely price extra, not a advertising and marketing favor.
Base’s distribution case extends past agentic funds to traditional stablecoin liquidity additionally provided that the community holds roughly $3.9 billion in stablecoins (about 90% of it USDC), placing it neck-and-neck with Arbitrum atop the L2 stablecoin rankings. Furthermore, Shopify processes USDC funds on Base, and JPMorgan settles its tokenized deposit product there too, luxuries Baynham-Herd identified are usually not obtainable to a four-week-old chain.
Lastly, he signalled that the aforementioned figures measure a layer of exercise fully completely different from Robinhood Chain’s retail buying and selling numbers, significantly machine-to-machine funds and enterprise settlement somewhat than DAU or DEX quantity, including:
Builders go the place customers are. Customers go the place the apps work and add worth. That flywheel is the moat. The one headline I watch is whether or not apps have customers who come again with out being paid to. In the event that they don’t, no quantity of TVL or DAU means something.
What’s Subsequent
Coinbase has introduced tokenized shares on its centralized trade, so the hole Pollak appears to be alluding to is particularly the onchain, Base-native model, constructed on a 1:1 share-backed mannequin with no confirmed launch date of its personal.
Robinhood’s tokens, in contrast, are structured as tokenized debt securities (i.e. holders get no voting or shareholder rights and might’t declare the underlying shares straight, solely money redemption). Touchdown Base’s onchain product would shut Robinhood’s clearest remaining edge.
That, plus Base’s institutional and agentic-payments push, is the guess underlying Coinbase’s case: that Robinhood’s early lead, nonetheless greater than 80% memecoin-driven, is less complicated to overhaul than the distribution community Base has spent practically three years constructing. Whether or not that holds will present up in whether or not the latter’s tokenized-equities quantity retains compounding as soon as its launch numbers begin to fade.
