Base Says Its Distribution Edge Can Outlast Robinhood Chain’s Early Surge

Coinbase’s Base network is defending its position as an onchain distribution leader after Robinhood Chain confirmed a lead over Base in daily active users last week, a challenge the latter argues its 187.8 million agentic payments and imminent tokenized-stock launch can outlast.

That said, more than 80% of this volume has come from memecoin trading, not the tokenized equities Robinhood marketed as its signature feature, with the latter only accounting for 4% of its chain activity. In fact, by July 25 that metric had surged roughly fivefold, but even after that, tokenized equities remained a mere fraction of the chain’s daily DEX turnover (with stablecoins still being the single largest category).

Base has been focused on trading, payments, and agents (in that order). I think all three are inextricably intertwined. Most of the resources are going to trading right now fwiw. Maybe it doesn’t translate externally right now, but that’s the case.

Base’s response has leaned on distribution built over its nearly three years of being live, not a one-for-one answer to Robinhood’s DAU or DEX-volume numbers. Xen Baynham-Herd, Base’s head of global growth, told Bitcoin.com News that the network’s x402 payment protocol has already processed 187.8 million agentic payments worth $42.4 million across more than 5,000 merchants.

He also pointed to Visa adding Base to its stablecoin settlement pilot alongside Polygon, Arc and six other chains, and to the project’s May “Azul” upgrade, which combined trusted execution environments with zero-knowledge multiproofs to cut withdrawal finality to about a day.

Traditional card processors carry fixed fees as high as 30 cents per transaction, a floor that makes internet micropayments impractical, Baynham-Herd said; x402 pushes protocol fees to zero and gas costs to roughly a hundredth of a cent, posturing Visa’s pilot as a recognition that legacy rails simply cost more, not a marketing favor.

Base’s distribution case extends beyond agentic payments to conventional stablecoin liquidity also given that the network holds roughly $3.9 billion in stablecoins (about 90% of it USDC), putting it neck-and-neck with Arbitrum atop the L2 stablecoin rankings. Moreover, Shopify processes USDC payments on Base, and JPMorgan settles its tokenized deposit product there too, luxuries Baynham-Herd pointed out are not available to a four-week-old chain.

Lastly, he signalled that the aforementioned figures measure a layer of activity completely different from Robinhood Chain’s retail trading numbers, particularly machine-to-machine payments and enterprise settlement rather than DAU or DEX volume, adding:

Builders go where users are. Users go where the apps work and add value. That flywheel is the moat. The single headline I watch is whether apps have users who come back without being paid to. If they don’t, no amount of TVL or DAU means anything.

Coinbase has announced tokenized stocks on its centralized exchange, so the gap Pollak seems to be alluding to is specifically the onchain, Base-native version, built on a 1:1 share-backed model with no confirmed launch date of its own.

Robinhood’s tokens, by contrast, are structured as tokenized debt securities (i.e. holders get no voting or shareholder rights and can’t claim the underlying shares directly, only cash redemption). Landing Base’s onchain product would close Robinhood’s clearest remaining edge.

That, plus Base’s institutional and agentic-payments push, is the bet underlying Coinbase’s case: that Robinhood’s early lead, still more than 80% memecoin-driven, is easier to overtake than the distribution network Base has spent nearly three years building. Whether that holds will show up in whether the latter’s tokenized-equities volume keeps compounding once its launch numbers start to fade.