Coinbase Drops the Social Experiment and Puts Robinhood Chain in Its Wallet

Coinbase has renamed the Base App back to Coinbase Wallet, ending a rebrand that lasted a little over a year, The Block reported. The self-custody app, meaning one where the user holds the private keys rather than the exchange, now supports more than ten networks, among them Robinhood Chain and Monad, and carries perpetual futures, prediction markets and tokenized stocks.

The original rename pushed the app towards social features built on Base, Coinbase's own Ethereum layer 2. That experiment fell short of what the company wanted from it, according to The Block. Ryan Kass, head of product, told Decrypt that the return to the Coinbase Wallet name reflects a broader trading strategy, with the self-custody app used as a testing ground for new assets and formats.

A wallet that is not about one chain

The detail that matters for this beat is the network list. A wallet tied to a single layer 2 is a distribution channel for that layer 2. A wallet that supports more than ten networks, including a competitor's, is a trading front end that happens to be non-custodial. Adding Robinhood Chain puts the venue where a large share of tokenized equity volume already settles inside an app distributed by the largest listed US crypto exchange.

That is a meaningful piece of plumbing. Tokenized stock trading has largely been reached through the issuer's own app or through a handful of decentralised exchanges. A general-purpose wallet that lists the chain natively removes a step for anyone who wants to hold or move those tokens without going back through the venue that minted them.

What sits behind the listing

Robinhood Chain's own figures explain the interest. DefiLlama records $2.72bn of decentralised exchange volume on the chain over the past 24 hours, up 45.57 percent on the day, with Uniswap V4 at $1.16bn and Uniswap V3 at $1.04bn. Total value locked stands at $920.2m, an all-time high set today and up 7.0 percent on the week, against stablecoin supply of $1.04bn.

Perpetual futures, prediction markets and tokenized stocks are three product lines that have historically lived on separate venues with separate regulatory postures. Bundling them into one self-custody app is a statement about where Coinbase expects retail trading to happen, and it puts the company in the same product territory as the firm whose chain it just added.

The social bet, closed

Consumer crypto apps have repeatedly tried to attach a feed to a wallet on the theory that trading is social. The reversal here is an admission that the feature set did not carry the app. What replaced it is straightforwardly a trading surface, which is the thing users of the original Coinbase Wallet came for.

What to watch

Whether a native listing translates into flow is an empirical question with a visible answer. Robinhood Chain's volume and fee data are public, and so is the mix of venues on it. If wallet-routed activity shows up anywhere, it shows up as a change in that mix rather than in a press release.