Robinhood tackled Coinbase head-on then immediately inherited Base’s biggest problem
Coinbase is refocusing Base from social and creator-token experiments toward trading, payments, and tokenized assets after social activity faded and capital shifted to stablecoins, perpetuals, prediction markets, and other financial uses. Jesse Pollak said Base fell behind in tokenization and enterprise payments, and Coinbase is separating the Base app from the chain’s infrastructure strategy. Pollak will focus on making Base settlement infrastructure for global finance, while Jordan Fish (Cobie) will run the user-facing app. Robinhood Chain, a new Ethereum layer-2 for tokenized securities and financial apps, has quickly attracted users and liquidity through Robinhood’s built-in distribution. Monthly active addresses surged past 1 million, and trading volume and stablecoin usage rose fast. But much of the early activity appears driven by memecoins, not the stock-token products the chain was built around. Both Coinbase and Robinhood now face the same challenge: converting speculative early traction into durable demand for real financial products.
