Catenaa, Friday, September 18, 2026-Coinbase is rebranding its Base App back to Coinbase Wallet, reversing a change made just over a year ago as the company moves the self-custodial product toward trading, multichain access and new onchain financial products.
Coinbase renamed Coinbase Wallet as the Base App in July 2025, presenting it as an all-in-one product combining social networking, messaging, mini-apps, payments and trading.
The company has since acknowledged that the social component failed to gain the traction it expected.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in March that the social experiment had not worked as planned and that the app was shifting toward trading.
Ryan Kass, head of Coinbase Wallet product, told The Block that the restored name better reflects the app’s role as Coinbase’s self-custodial gateway to onchain finance.
Coinbase Wallet will increasingly serve as a testing ground for assets and products that may not initially be available through Coinbase’s centralized exchange.
One of the first examples is perpetual futures trading powered by Hyperliquid.
The wallet also supports prediction markets, tokenized stocks and a wider range of smaller digital assets.
Coinbase plans to continue adding blockchain networks as they launch.
Trading through the wallet takes place onchain, allowing users to retain control of their private keys.
Coinbase is also developing features that allow users to follow other traders and observe their activity.
The company is promoting the wallet as a faster route into onchain markets without the account-opening process associated with centralized exchanges.
Some services, however, remain restricted in certain jurisdictions.
Coinbase said assets minted on supported networks generally become visible automatically, although the wallet attempts to identify and hide malicious or scam tokens.
New product categories, including prediction markets and tokenized equities, undergo separate product and compliance reviews before becoming available.
Coinbase earns revenue from trading and other product fees within the wallet but has not disclosed detailed fee structures.
The company also declined to say whether the recent shift toward trading has increased user numbers.
The return to the Coinbase Wallet brand follows broader changes to the Base App project.
Base creator Jesse Pollak handed leadership of the app to Jordan “Cobie” Fish in July after acknowledging that some social and creator features had fallen short.
Pollak also said the product would become less focused on Base as it evolved into a broader trading platform.
Coinbase Wallet now supports Base, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, Monad and Robinhood Chain.
Monad and Robinhood Chain are among the additions made as the product expands beyond the networks previously supported by the Base App.
Base will nevertheless remain an important part of the wallet.
Coinbase said assets from the network will continue to appear prominently when they gain market attention, while users will also be able to discover assets across competing chains.
The reversal reflects Coinbase’s willingness to abandon its attempt to turn the wallet into a social platform and concentrate instead on financial activity.
The strategy also places Coinbase Wallet more directly against other multichain wallets competing to become the primary interface for decentralized trading.
For Coinbase, the product now has a clearer role: a self-custodial counterpart to its centralized exchange that can offer access to markets and assets outside the main Coinbase platform.
