Base Says Its Six-Week-Old Stock Tokens Are Doing $70m to $100m a Day

Coinbase's tokenized stocks on Base are turning over roughly $70m to $100m a day about six weeks after launch, according to Jesse Pollak, the Coinbase executive who created the network, speaking to The Block. Base is an Ethereum layer 2, a separate chain that batches its transactions back to Ethereum for settlement, and it is where Coinbase chose to put share-tracking tokens for its users.

A daily range rather than a figure is what it is, and it comes from the party with the most interest in the number being good. Taken at face value, though, it puts Base's equity tokens among the more active venues for the product. Tokenized stocks have spent most of their short life being measured in single-digit millions a day, with occasional spikes around launches and listings.

What Pollak argued

His broader claim is that the next stage of tokenisation will be led by equities and by stablecoins denominated in currencies other than the dollar. The second half is the less obvious one. Almost the entire stablecoin market is dollar-denominated, which means a user in Brazil, Nigeria or Indonesia holding stablecoins is making a currency bet whether or not they intended to. Tokens pegged to a euro, a yen or a real would let onchain payments stay in the user's own unit of account.

Equities are the easier case to argue because the demand is visible. Trading hours are the recurring complaint: a listed share trades for six and a half hours on weekdays, while a token representing it can in principle trade continuously. That gap is what every tokenized stock product sells, and it is also where the problems live, because the market makers quoting the token overnight have no underlying market to hedge in.

The caveat on the number

Volume figures for tokenized stocks need reading carefully. Trading between a handful of professional market makers, or routing that passes a single trade through several pools, inflates a turnover number without representing new participation. A clean read would separate end-user flow from the plumbing, and that breakdown has not been published.

It is also worth separating volume from assets. A product can turn over large sums daily while very little capital sits in it, if the same inventory changes hands repeatedly. The amount of value actually held in tokenized equities has consistently been small relative to the headlines about how fast the category is growing.

Where this fits

The pitch from Base is a platform one: build the equities and the local-currency stablecoins on a chain Coinbase controls the on-ramp to, and the distribution comes with it. Competing chains have made versions of the same argument, and the issuers of the tokens themselves are spread across several of them.

What would make the Base figure more than a talking point is persistence. A six-week-old product doing $70m to $100m a day has not yet been through a quiet month, an earnings season or a sharp drawdown in the underlying shares. The number to come back to is the same one, measured in January.

Non-dollar stablecoins are the part of the forecast most easily checked. Either euro, yen and emerging-market pegged tokens show up in the supply tables over the next year or they do not, and that is a matter of public record rather than opinion.