In just four weeks since launch, Robinhood Chain has attracted around 230,000 daily active users, enough to solidly overtake Base in this metric. Its total DEX trading volume also surpassed $9 billion, including a 24-hour peak of $877.6 million on July 12, which briefly made Robinhood Chain the second-largest chain in the world, trailing only Solana.
However, more than 80% of this volume came from meme coin trading, not the tokenized stocks that Robinhood had positioned as its key feature; the latter accounted for just 4% of network activity. In fact, by July 25th, that figure had grown roughly five-fold, but even then, tokenized stocks still made up only a small fraction of the network's daily DEX turnover (with stablecoins remaining the largest category).
Base Missed the Mark
The timing of these figures seemed to put Base at a disadvantage, and in two lengthy X posts, co-founder Jesse Pollak acknowledged that the network's bet on social blockchain products (i.e., Farcaster, Zora, mini-apps, and creator coins) "completely missed the mark," leaving it behind in key areas that "are now becoming more important," including perpetual contracts and prediction markets.
He also admitted that tokenized stocks in the EVM environment were something "Robinhood Chain got right," and that Base "lagged behind on that," though a solution was imminent. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong made a similar admission earlier this month, noting Base's "creator coin" strategy hadn't worked, adding:
Base is focused on trading, payments, and agents (in that order). I think all three are inextricably linked. The majority of resources are going to trading right now, for what it's worth. It may not be obvious to the outside world yet, but that's what's happening.
The Case Presented
Base's response leaned on distribution built over nearly three years, rather than a direct rebuttal of Robinhood's DAU or DEX trading volume metrics. Céline Beinhamm-Herd, Head of Global Development at Base, told Bitcoin.com News that the network's x402 payment protocol has already processed 187.8 million agent-mediated payments worth $42.4 million with over 5,000 merchants.
She also noted that Visa included Base in its stablecoin settlement pilot alongside Polygon, Arc, and six other chains, and mentioned the project's May update dubbed "Azul," which merged trusted execution environments with zero-knowledge multi-proofs, reducing final settlement times for withdrawals to roughly one day.
Traditional payment processors charge fixed fees of up to 30 cents per transaction, making online micropayments unfeasible, Beinhamm-Herd pointed out; x402 reduces protocol fees to zero and gas costs to about one-hundredth of a cent, positioning the Visa pilot as recognition that legacy rails are simply more expensive, not a marketing concession.
Base's scope extends beyond agent payments to traditional stablecoin liquidity, with roughly $3.9 billion in stablecoins held on the network (about 90% of which is $USDC), putting it on par with Arbitrum at the top of the L2 stablecoin rankings. Furthermore, Shopify processes $USDC payments on Base, and JPMorgan also settles its tokenized deposit product there – capabilities, as Beinhamm-Herd noted, unavailable to a chain only four weeks old.
Finally, she pointed out that the aforementioned figures represent a completely different level of activity than Robinhood Chain's retail metrics, specifically system-to-system payments and corporate settlements, not DAU or DEX volumes, adding:
Developers go where the users are. Users go where the applications work and provide utility. This flywheel is the moat. The only metric I pay attention to is whether applications have users returning without being rewarded for it. If they don't, no TVL or DAU metric matters.
What Comes Next
Coinbase has announced the launch of tokenized stocks on its centralized exchange, so the gap Pollak seemed to hint at pertains specifically to the on-chain version, native to the Landing Base, built on a 1:1 stock-backed model, which doesn't yet have a confirmed launch date.
Robinhood's tokens, by contrast, are structured as tokenized debt securities (i.e., holders don't get voting rights or shareholder privileges and can't claim the underlying shares directly, only a cash redemption). The launch of Base's on-chain product would erase the most obvious remaining advantage for Robinhood.
This, coupled with Base's push into institutional and agent payments, underpins Coinbase's strategy: Robinhood's early lead, still over 80% fueled by meme coins, is easier to surpass than the distribution network Base has been building for nearly three years. Whether this bet pays off will be seen in whether Base's tokenized stock volume continues to grow exponentially after the initial launch metrics start to fade.
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