Coinbase took its own chain's name off its wallet and put a rival's chain in the pitch
Base App becomes Coinbase Wallet again after fourteen months, supporting eleven networks of which Coinbase owns one, with perpetuals routed to Hyperliquid.
Coinbase has taken its own blockchain's name off its own app, and put a competitor's chain second in the product description.
The Base App becomes Coinbase Wallet again, roughly fourteen months after the company removed the Coinbase Wallet name and replaced it with its layer-2. The relaunched app supports eleven networks: Base, Robinhood Chain, Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Monad, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon and Avalanche. Coinbase owns one of them. Perpetual futures inside the app are powered by Hyperliquid, which is not Coinbase either.
Ryan Kass, who runs product for the wallet, told Decrypt the name change means "you can access any asset, regardless of what chain it's on." Then he said this:
Right now, Robinhood Chain is very hot, but Base Chain is really fast and offers super cheap fees. We believe that this stuff is cyclical, and when the rotation is back to Base Chain, Coinbase Wallet will be ready.
That is an executive at the company that built Base describing Base as one leg of a rotation. Which raises the question nobody answered in July 2025: what is the chain for?
The rename is the third time the social bet has been unwound
Coinbase pitched the Base App in July 2025 as an everything app — social networking, mini-apps, messaging, payments, trading. Brian Armstrong said in March that the social experiment "didn't quite work". In July, Jesse Pollak handed the app to Jordan "Cobie" Fish and went back to the chain. This is probably the last move in that sequence, the one that takes the branding with it.
What replaced the everything app is a brokerage. Perps, prediction markets, tokenised stocks, long-tail assets, copy trading, and Kass's phrase for the whole thing: a "test kitchen" whose hits graduate to the main Coinbase exchange. Coinbase told The Block it monetises the wallet through trading and product fees, declined to detail the fee structure, and declined to say whether the pivot to trading has grown the user base.
A relaunch with no user number is usually a relaunch with no user number worth printing.
The asymmetry is not that Base underperformed
It is that Coinbase decided the wallet is the asset worth defending and the chain is not. A self-custody front door that routes to whichever venue is hot collects fees in every rotation. A layer-2 collects sequencer revenue only while its own assets are the ones people want, and roughly nobody is asking for Base assets this month. Faced with those two businesses, Coinbase has told you which one it will optimise, and it did so in a product description.
The same morning, Coinbase said Moov will embed its stablecoin payments API and custodial wallets into the systems of more than 1,000 community banks and credit unions. Read the two announcements together and the strategy is coherent: be the rails, be the front door, be agnostic about everything in the middle.
The case against this reading is real. Base still gets default distribution inside the app, Coinbase says Base assets will "naturally appear" as they trend, and sequencer revenue was never material to a company this size. Supporting eleven chains is also plainly better for users, which matters more than any of it. All true, and the users are probably happier. But you do not take your own brand off a product while the brand is still doing work, and Coinbase seems to have spent a year finding that out in public.
So what would settle it? Whether Coinbase Wallet adds two more chains it does not own before the end of 2026, and whether any Base-exclusive feature ships in that window. If Coinbase starts publishing a Base share of wallet volume, it will be because that share is rising, and we will have read this wrong.
