Key Takeaways
Robinhood Chain’s day by 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 day by day energetic customers, sufficient to move Base’s depend 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 stated, 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. In actual fact, by July 25 that metric had surged roughly fivefold, however even after that, tokenized equities remained a mere fraction of the chain’s day by day DEX turnover (with stablecoins nonetheless being the only 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 utterly,” leaving the mission behind in key areas that “had been now more and more important,” together with perpetuals and prediction markets.
He additionally conceded that tokenized equities in an EVM setting had been one thing “Robinhood Chain has completed proper,” and that Base had been “behind on this,” though a repair was shut. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong made the same 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 believe all three are inextricably intertwined. A lot of the sources are going to buying and selling proper now fwiw. Perhaps 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 almost 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 progress, informed Bitcoin.com Information that the community’s x402 fee 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 mission’s Might “Azul” improve, which mixed trusted execution environments with zero-knowledge multiproofs to chop withdrawal finality to a couple of day.
Conventional card processors carry fastened charges as excessive as 30 cents per transaction, a flooring that makes web micropayments impractical, Baynham-Herd stated; x402 pushes protocol charges to zero and gasoline prices to roughly a hundredth of a cent, posturing Visa’s pilot as a recognition that legacy rails merely value extra, not a advertising 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 will not be obtainable to a four-week-old chain.
Lastly, he signalled that the aforementioned figures measure a layer of exercise utterly completely different from Robinhood Chain’s retail buying and selling numbers, significantly machine-to-machine funds and enterprise settlement quite 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 only 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 change, 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 may’t declare the underlying shares instantly, 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 almost 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.
