Base: Payments and tokenized stocks can outlast Robinhood Chain

Robinhood Chain passed Base in daily active users on July 21 and maintained that lead into late July. Within four weeks of launch Robinhood Chain reached about 230,000 daily active users. Its cumulative decentralized exchange volume exceeded $9 billion, including a 24-hour peak of $877.6 million on July 12.

Trading on Robinhood Chain has been concentrated in memecoins, which account for more than 80% of the chain’s DEX turnover. Tokenized equities represented about 4% of activity early on and rose roughly fivefold by July 25, but remained a small share of total volume. Stablecoins were the largest single category by volume.

Base executives acknowledged earlier product bets had underperformed. Co-founder Jesse Pollak wrote that onchain social experiments had “disintegrated completely” and conceded Base had fallen behind on tokenized equities. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that the content-coin strategy did not work and described the project’s focus as “trading, payments, and agents (in that order).” He added that most resources are going to trading.

Base officials highlighted other measures of usage on the network. Xen Baynham-Herd, head of global growth at Base, reported the x402 payment protocol processed 187.8 million agentic payments worth $42.4 million across more than 5,000 merchants. He added that x402 reduces protocol fees to zero and cuts gas costs to roughly a hundredth of a cent per transaction.

Baynham-Herd noted that Visa included Base in a stablecoin settlement pilot. He described Base’s May “Azul” upgrade as combining trusted execution environments with zero-knowledge multiproofs to shorten withdrawal finality to about a day. The network holds roughly $3.9 billion in stablecoins, about 90% of it USDC.

Baynham-Herd also pointed to commercial integrations: Shopify accepts USDC payments on Base and JPMorgan settles a tokenized deposit product on the network. He described machine-to-machine payments and enterprise settlement as types of activity that do not appear in daily active user or DEX-volume comparisons. Baynham-Herd added, “The single headline I watch is whether apps have users who come back without being paid to.”

Coinbase has launched tokenized shares on its centralized exchange. A Base-native onchain tokenized-stock product is planned as a 1:1 share-backed model but does not have a confirmed launch date. Robinhood’s tokenized assets are structured as tokenized debt securities; holders do not receive voting rights and can redeem only for cash.

Base officials stated that upcoming onchain tokenized-stock offerings and continued merchant payments will affect onchain activity in the coming weeks and months, and that those metrics will show how usage evolves after initial launch figures.