Armstrong: Base is top chain for trading, payments and AI agents

On April 23, 2026, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong presented three use cases where he said Base leads: trading, payments and autonomous AI agents. He cited onchain metrics and product integrations to support the claim.

Armstrong pointed to daily active wallets, decentralized exchange volumes and net inflows as measures where Base has outpaced rival rollups, including Arbitrum and Optimism, through 2025 and into 2026. He noted Base holds about 46% of total DeFi TVL across Ethereum layer-2 networks.

Coinbase has linked product work to Base’s role as a payments layer. The company launched a Solana bridge to expand connectivity and has increased the amount of corporate and customer USDC it keeps on Base. Coinbase describes those holdings as part of payment-grade infrastructure. Armstrong stated, “stablecoins are the best form of money,” and said Coinbase plans to expand regulated stablecoin payments to the United Kingdom.

On the AI agent topic, Armstrong said developers are choosing Base to deploy autonomous agents that execute onchain tasks such as portfolio execution and real-time payment routing. He cited lower transaction fees on Base and tighter integration with Coinbase’s developer tools as factors making the network attractive to agent builders.

Policy and regulation could affect adoption of Base as a payments rail. The proposed PACE Act would ask the Federal Reserve to open its payment systems to nonbank and crypto firms, which supporters say would ease regulated use of networks like Base. Separately, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission faces calls to clarify rules for decentralized finance; any guidance would shape oversight of agent and payment services on L2 networks.

Other industry actions are relevant to the payments thesis. Circle and OSL have worked to expand USDC access across parts of Asia, and Coinbase is expanding stablecoin payment efforts in the U.K., creating broader routes for fiat to stablecoin flows that can settle on layer-2 chains.

Armstrong did not provide a detailed dataset during his remarks. Publicly available onchain data, however, aligns with several of his claims about Base’s market share and activity levels.

Base launched in August 2023 on the OP Stack and was incubated by Coinbase. Since then it has grown into the largest Ethereum rollup by DeFi TVL.