Author: Nancy, PANews
Backed by Coinbase's traffic entry, Base once became the fastest-growing dark horse in the L2 track. However, the highly anticipated social strategy has yet to create a growth flywheel, causing Base to miss the crucial window to capture the crypto-financial market. Now, with Robinhood Chain aggressively entering the L2 track, competition has intensified.
In response to the changing landscape, Base has begun to actively adjust its strategic focus, re-focusing on the financial mainline and attempting to restart its growth engine with on-chain finance.
Publicly acknowledges the failure of the social strategy, Base bets on three battlefields: trading, payments, and AI
The once highly anticipated on-chain social experiment has now officially announced its exit, marking a new strategic shift for Base.
On July 13, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong publicly admitted for the first time, in response to community criticism, that the creator token experiment promoted by Base had failed. He bluntly stated, "We messed up, it's time to turn the page," and revealed that the team had completed a strategic adjustment earlier this year.
Subsequently, Base founder Jesse Pollak published a lengthy post reviewing and reflecting on the past two years' strategy and clarified Base's future development positioning.
Jesse admitted that for the past two years, Base always believed that on-chain social would be a key breakthrough for driving mass adoption in the crypto industry. Therefore, the team invested significant resources around the creator economy, content distribution, and social applications, hoping products like Farcaster, Zora, and Miniapps could replicate the viral growth of the internet era. However, the first quarter of 2026 dealt a heavy blow, as these social products almost completely failed, and related social tokens plummeted, while prediction markets, perpetual contracts, and stablecoins surged instead.
He acknowledged that over-relying on the social strategy left Base lagging behind competitors in key tracks like trading depth, payment experience, and asset tokenization, which also caused a decline in market confidence.
Jesse stated that while betting on the developer ecosystem was correct, the failure of the social experiment led him to profound reflection. The rapid development of stablecoins, perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and asset tokenization has proven that better financial products alone can drive mass adoption.
As a result, he decided to hand the Base App back to Coinbase and let well-known crypto KOL Cobie take charge of product development, while he focused all his energy on building the underlying blockchain, hoping to establish Base as "the global financial blockchain."
According to the latest strategic positioning, Base will focus on three core directions: first, building a trading platform covering all asset classes such as tokenized stocks, meme coins, and application tokens; second, promoting stablecoins to efficiently serve individual users and businesses globally; third, accelerating the development of AI agents, as cryptocurrency is inherently suitable as the native currency for AI and computers, which will generate a vast number of economic entities in the future.
Notably, in response to traditional financial giants like Robinhood and Stripe entering the competition, Jesse believes that the future competition for global financial infrastructure will become increasingly fierce, but open competition will help drive industry innovation, and Base will continue to adhere to an open ecosystem strategy, investing more resources into developer ecosystem construction.
Robinhood Chain's strong expansion, L2's dark horse outpaces Base
It is worth noting that Base chose to publicly announce its strategic transformation at the very time Robinhood Chain was rapidly rising and continuously capturing Layer 2 market share.
As Base's most direct new competitor, Robinhood Chain quickly demonstrated an astonishing growth rate after its mainnet launch, surpassing several core metrics in a short time.
Token Terminal data shows that just over a week after Robinhood Chain launched its mainnet, its daily active users exceeded those of Base, even widening the gap at one point. As of July 15, Robinhood Chain's daily active addresses reached 308,000, while Base had about 300,000; in terms of trading activity, Robinhood Chain also outperformed, with daily transaction counts reaching 10.5 million, higher than Base's 8.4 million. Meanwhile, DeFiLlama data shows that since Robinhood Chain's launch, its DEX daily trading volume has continued to rise and has exceeded Base for several consecutive trading days.
The data indicates that users, funds, and trading activity are rapidly gathering towards Robinhood Chain.
In fact, compared to other Layer 2 networks, Robinhood Chain's core competitive barrier lies in the traditional financial resources and large user base accumulated by Robinhood over the long term.
On one hand, Robinhood has tens of millions of retail users and a mature securities trading platform that can directly funnel traditional financial users into the on-chain ecosystem, possessing natural advantages in customer acquisition and traffic distribution, and is better positioned to attract top crypto protocols to settle in. In contrast, most L2 user growth still relies primarily on crypto-native communities and eco-projects, which are susceptible to market cycle fluctuations.
On the other hand, Robinhood's long-term accumulated compliance system, brand reputation, and communication experience with regulators give it advantages when planning financial businesses such as tokenized stocks and stablecoin payments, greatly lowering the barriers for institutions and mainstream investors to enter the blockchain. This ability, blending traditional financial resources with on-chain infrastructure, is becoming a moat for Robinhood Chain that is hard to replicate.
From another perspective, Robinhood Chain's rapid rise also reveals that the competitive logic in Layer 2 is changing. Now, as crypto rapidly merges with mainstream finance, the focus of public chain competition is on who can first bridge the connection between traditional finance and the on-chain world, as this will provide greater opportunities to attract incremental funds and new users. For Base, this strategic transformation is, to some extent, a proactive adjustment in line with industry trends.
Showing goodwill to meme culture, Base welcomes a key change in leadership
The reason Robinhood Chain became the dark horse in the L2 market in a short period of time is largely due to the new round of meme frenzy it has sparked. This has made the market realize again that, beyond financial infrastructure, community culture remains an important entry point for acquiring users and activating ecosystems.
In his lengthy article, Jesse Pollak specifically discussed this point. He stated, "In a large publicly traded company, developing a truly decentralized network is an extremely difficult task. Base (and I) do indeed like memes, but Brian Armstrong will probably never go crazy posting memes on the timeline; after all, posting memes every day after turning 40 would likely be illegal."
This statement reveals the real contradictions Base currently faces. As an L2 network under Coinbase, Base hopes to embrace the crypto-native community, open experiments, and meme culture, but at the same time, it has to consider Coinbase's brand image, compliance requirements, and regulatory responsibilities as a public company.
As Base initiates its strategic transformation, Brian Armstrong seems to have started to take actions to proactively engage with the community. On July 17, Brian Armstrong changed his X profile picture to a superhero comic character created by the Base community. Since this character is identical to Base's ecological meme coin BRIAN, the move quickly ignited community sentiment, pushing the market value of the BRIAN token to briefly exceed 30 million USD.
Compared to Brian's supportive signals, the person truly shouldering the "firefighting" responsibility for the Base ecosystem is crypto veteran Cobie. Compared to Jesse's developer and infrastructure perspective, Cobie has been actively involved in trading markets and the crypto community for a long time, possessing a deeper understanding of retail culture, trading needs, and meme ecology, as well as practical experience with multiple crypto products, which is the crucial capability Base currently hopes to fill.
In fact, the collaboration between Coinbase and Cobie has already begun. In October 2025, Coinbase invested 25 million USD to acquire the NFT of Cobie’s podcast "Up Only" and restarted the program; soon after, it acquired the on-chain financing platform Echo, founded by Cobie, for 375 million USD.
Regarding joining Coinbase, Cobie responded by saying, "I decided that instead of relaxing and doing nothing, I might as well make my life super tense and busy, so now I'm in charge of Coinbase's trading-related products (including Coinbase App, Coinbase Pro, and Base App, etc.)." He admitted that it is difficult to explain why he accepted this job; he just values the opportunity to create truly excellent products more than pass time.
He also set a flag for the community, "If you want me to fix something (referring to taking over Base APP), just tell me what is broken. If I haven't fixed it within a month, then you can scold me."
In summary, Base's strategic shift indicates that competition in L2 is entering a new phase. However, as traditional financial players like Robinhood and Stripe accelerate their entry into the on-chain world with user, traffic, and compliance advantages, how much time is left for Base to prove itself again, and how large its chances are, ultimately can only be answered by the market and time.
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