The rebrand closes the book on a 14-month experiment that attempted to turn a crypto wallet into a social network and creator economy platform.
Coinbase is reverting its Base App back to its original name, Coinbase Wallet, shelving the social-first identity it adopted just over a year ago in favor of a multichain trading focus.
According to Ryan Kass, head of product for Coinbase Wallet, the name change is a natural extension of what the app has become rather than a retreat.
“The rebrand back to Coinbase Wallet is a representation that you can access any asset, regardless of what chain it’s on, regardless of the brand of asset on crypto,” Kass told Decrypt.
The pivot is a direct response to where users have been spending their time and money. The wallet now supports more than 10 networks, including Robinhood Chain and Monad, alongside perpetual futures, prediction markets, and tokenized stocks. Kass said the expansion , including the launch of perpetual futures on Hyperliquid and support for tokenized stocks across multiple chains, marks a return to the wallet’s roots as a place to trade almost anything, quickly.
“We don’t want to put limits on what people trade, and we see that our users are asking to trade all these sorts of assets,” Kass added.
A Brief Social Detour
Coinbase unveiled Base App at its “A New Day One” event in Los Angeles in July 2025, repositioning Coinbase Wallet as an “everything app” that combined a social feed powered by the Farcaster protocol, creator monetization tools through Zora, payments, and in-feed trading. The ambition was to compete not just with other crypto wallets, but with consumer social platforms.
The social features—the part of the product meant to differentiate Base App from every other wallet—never quite clicked with users though, with the reception ranging from lukewarm to openly skeptical.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in March that the social experiment “didn’t quite work” and added that the app was already shifting toward trading and becoming a self-custodial version of Coinbase’s main app.
The reckoning came publicly in July, when Base creator Jesse Pollak stepped back from leading the app to refocus on the Base blockchain itself. Back then, Pollak acknowledged that the network’s strategy around on-chain social and creator coins had failed to drive the adoption he expected, writing that his bet on “new onchain-native social experiences” was “obviously the wrong bet.” Leadership of the app passed to Jordan Fish, widely known in crypto circles as “Cobie,” whose on-chain fundraising platform Echo was acquired by Coinbase last year.
Pollak posted an update on X oalongside the rebrand announcement, noting that Base’s focus on trading, financing, and payments in 2026 is paying off, with DeFi total value locked reaching an all-time high of $5.7 billion and Base leading on-chain spot trading for BTC and ETH.
“Going forward, the name Base will represent the chain and its ecosystem. The name Coinbase Wallet will represent the self-custodial version of the Coinbase app,” Pollak wrote. “It will continue to be a top place to discover Base assets, markets, and apps. And we’ll keep driving a ton of value together to the ecosystem.”
A quick update on Base, decentralization, and Coinbase Wallet.
First of all, Base is growing. Our focus on trading, financing, and payments in 2026 is paying off.
Base is leading onchain spot trading for BTC and ETH. DeFi TVL is at an all-time high of $5.7B. And Base is the #1… https://t.co/tw4sir2Eaf
— jesse.base.eth (@jessepollak) September 10, 2026
The “Test Kitchen” Model
With the social chapter closed, Coinbase is repositioning the wallet as what Kass calls a “test kitchen”—a place where new assets and products can be introduced before, or instead of, appearing on Coinbase’s main centralized exchange.
“On Coinbase Wallet, you can usually find things very quickly,” Kass said. “We offer the Robinhood chain, we offer Hyperliquid perps, and a lot of the time, things that land on Coinbase Wallet will find their way to Coinbase retail.”
The wallet remains self-custodial, meaning users hold their own private keys rather than entrusting them to Coinbase. Assets are available by default once minted on a supported chain, with the wallet automatically detecting and hiding scam or malicious tokens. New market categories, such as prediction markets or tokenized stocks, go through what Kass described as “vigorous product and compliance reviews” before appearing in the app.
Coinbase is pitching the wallet around “no KYC, no waiting, and no borders,” with users able to download the app and start trading within minutes. KYC, or “know your customer,” refers to identity verification checks that centralized exchanges typically require before allowing trading. However, some features remain subject to geographic restrictions, according to the Coinbase Wallet website.
Robinhood Rivalry, Base Loyalty
The rebrand also reflects Coinbase’s increasingly direct competition with Robinhood, which has been building its own blockchain infrastructure. Kass argued that neither company can afford to close the door on the other’s ecosystem.
“Right now, Robinhood Chain is very hot, but Base Chain is really fast and offers super cheap fees,” he said. “We believe that this stuff is cyclical, and when the rotation is back to Base Chain, Coinbase Wallet will be ready.”
Despite dropping the Base App name, Kass was clear that Coinbase has not walked away from Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network it launched in 2023. The wallet will continue to surface Base assets, communities, and features alongside those from competing networks.
“So Coinbase Wallet is the name getting back to our roots, and represents that it’s your place to trade anything anywhere very quickly,” Kass said.
While the “test kitchen” pitch is appealing in theory, the Base App experiment, however, showed how quickly a broad product vision can stall when users are not ready to follow. Promising access to every asset on every chain is a significant operational and compliance undertaking, and Coinbase’s own website already acknowledges that some features will not be available in all regions. Whether a name change is enough to sharpen the product’s identity, or whether it simply papers over a strategy that has yet to find firm footing, remains an open question.
Coinbase confirmed that the rebrand does not affect users’ funds, and instructed users to update the Base App on iOS or Android to access the Coinbase Wallet interface.