Robinhood Chain surged past Base in daily active user numbers last week, hitting about 230,000, a milestone that secured its lead since July 21. It didn't stop there Robinhood Chain's cumulative decentralized exchange volume topped $9 billion with a peak day pushing $877.6 million, positioning it briefly as the second-largest blockchain after Solana.
But much of Robinhood Chain’s trading volume has been from memecoins, making up over 80%, while tokenized equities the feature Robinhood heavily promoted account for just a minor slice, around 4%. Although tokenized equities trading saw a fivefold increase by July 25, they still remain a small part of daily turnover, with stablecoins dominating.
Base Acknowledges Challenges but Eyes Growth
Base's co-founder Jesse Pollak admitted their social product strategy involving Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and creator coins didn’t pan out, setting the project behind in emerging areas like perpetual contracts and prediction markets. He recognized Robinhood Chain’s success with tokenized equities in an EVM environment, conceding Base lagged but is close to rolling out improvements.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong echoed this, revealing that Base’s content-coin approach failed to gain traction. Instead, Base has doubled down on trading, payments, and agents, with trading currently receiving most of the focus. The network is also preparing for an upcoming tokenized-stock launch and has processed 187.8 million agentic payments, which it believes will help maintain its competitive edge despite Robinhood Chain’s early head start.
Prediction markets’ growth is one of the areas where Base hopes to catch up, signaling a shift in the blockchain race beyond mere user counts and volume figures.
This material is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
