Coinbase brings back Coinbase Wallet as Robinhood Chain raises the stakes

Coinbase is bringing the Coinbase Wallet name back, dropping "Base App" less than 15 months after adopting it, as the company refocuses its self-custodial product on trading and access to assets across multiple networks.

The timing puts Coinbase Wallet directly against the growing self-custodial activity around Robinhood Chain, which launched on July 1 and has quickly built a significant trading ecosystem.

Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum Orbit layer-2 that settles to Ethereum and uses Ethereum blobs for data availability, launched with 100-millisecond block times and ETH as its gas token. It crossed $47 billion in cumulative DEX volume within roughly two months of going live. On September 2, the chain recorded $4.01 million in revenue on $4.45 million in fees, ahead of Solana, Ethereum and Tron on the same DeFiLlama leaderboard.

The Coinbase Wallet relaunch is built around a "test kitchen" thesis. Ryan Kass, head of Coinbase Wallet product, said the wallet will host products and assets that may not be available through Coinbase's centralized exchange. The Coinbase Wallet name, he said, better captures its role as Coinbase's self-custodial front door to an "everything exchange" spanning onchain finance.

Coinbase Wallet expands beyond Base

The expanded network list underlines the shift.

Coinbase Wallet now supports Base, Robinhood Chain, Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Monad, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon and Avalanche. Robinhood Chain and Monad are new compared with the Base App era.

The move makes Coinbase Wallet less dependent on its own Base network and more focused on becoming a multichain trading interface.

That strategy mirrors the direction Coinbase has already signaled for the product. Base creator Jesse Pollak previously said the app would become "less Base-centric" as it expanded toward an all-encompassing trading platform. Jordan "Cobie" Fish took over leadership of the Base app team as the product moved further toward trading.

Robinhood built distribution directly into its chain

What Robinhood built into its own chain helps explain why Coinbase is racing to broaden its wallet.

For the first 90 days after mainnet launch, Robinhood covered all gas fees for eligible users transacting through Robinhood Wallet, including swaps, bridging and perpetual futures trades.

The subsidy expires around September 29, 2026, and applies only inside Robinhood's wallet, leaving users of third-party wallets such as MetaMask and Rabby to pay standard fees.

The strategy effectively removes one of the biggest barriers for users moving into onchain trading: transaction costs.

TVL and activity have moved with the chain

Robinhood Chain's liquidity has grown alongside its trading activity.

TVL moved from roughly $4 million in June to around $1.4 billion by late August, a trajectory no Ethereum layer-2 has matched at the same stage of its life.

On July 21, the chain briefly surpassed Base with 324,000 daily active wallets versus Base's 275,000, while processing 7.6 million daily transactions against Base's 9.2 million.

The growth is particularly notable because Robinhood's own users still represent only a small share of the chain's activity.

Robinhood Chain's distribution moat found that its existing metrics have largely been built before Robinhood's retail distribution has been fully switched on. That makes the wallet strategy particularly important as the company prepares to turn its existing user base into a larger source of onchain activity.

Related: Robinhood Chain DEX volume jumps 61% to $1.6B

Coinbase is turning Wallet into an everything app

Coinbase is pitching the wallet around "no KYC, no waiting, and no borders," allowing users to download the product and begin trading within minutes, although some features remain subject to geographic restrictions.

The company declined to share the wallet's fee structure and declined to disclose whether the shift toward trading has changed user numbers.

The multichain approach also gives Coinbase a way to compete for users without requiring them to stay exclusively on Base.

That is an important change from the earlier Base App strategy, which attempted to combine social features, payments, trading and onchain applications under the Base brand.

Base remains central to Coinbase's strategy

The Base blockchain itself remains Coinbase's central onchain infrastructure.

But the company has not disclosed how much revenue from the new wallet will ultimately flow through Base versus other networks. Its own sequencer revenue and the share that flows back to Coinbase are also not disclosed in the sources surrounding the rebrand.

That makes the multichain strategy particularly important. Coinbase can use its wallet as the consumer-facing layer while allowing users to trade assets across competing networks, including Robinhood Chain.

The competition therefore is no longer simply between Base and Robinhood Chain.

It is increasingly between Coinbase's wallet as a multichain distribution layer and Robinhood's chain as a vertically integrated trading ecosystem.