Coinbase’s new Base ‘super app’ puts trading, payments, social and AI under one roof

The post Coinbase’s new Base ‘super app’ puts trading, payments, social and AI under one roof appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

For years, crypto advocates have insisted that blockchains would one day power everything from messaging to micro‑payments. Coinbase now claims that the future is arriving, inside a single icon on your phone. On 16 July, the exchange quietly began rolling out “Base App,” a rebuilt version of its mobile wallet that mashes trading, payments, social media, and on‑device AI agents. The limited beta, open only to wait‑listed users for now, marks the boldest consumer pivot in Coinbase’s 12‑year history and turns its in‑house layer‑2 network, Base, into the backbone of the experience. “Every post in the app is a coin,” the product blog teased, framing the redesign as a way for creators to mint and monetise content on the fly. From exchange fees to platform flywheels Coinbase still earns the bulk of its revenue from trading spreads, a line item that regulators, rivals, and bear markets have all threatened to compress. CEO Brian Armstrong has therefore spent the past two years sketching a broader ambition: an American counterpart to China’s WeChat, where money, chat, and e‑commerce co‑exist. At the State of Crypto Summit in June 2023, Armstrong argued that a “super‑app” anchored to open protocols, rather than Apple’s or Google’s walled gardens, could unlock radically lower fees and novel business models. The building blocks fell into place quickly. Coinbase launched Base as an Ethereum roll‑up in 2023, cut average block times to 200 ms this spring with a “Flashblocks” upgrade, and now counts 32 million active monthly users holding $4 billion in bridged assets on the network. Inside the Base App Open the new app, and the first screen is no longer an asset list but a TikTok‑style feed pulling from Farcaster, a decentralised social graph. Instead of hearts, each post is minted via Zora, meaning it can be tipped with USDC or flipped on secondary…