Coinbase has officially rebranded its Coinbase Wallet as the "Base App," positioning it as an "everything app" designed to integrate social networking, mini-applications, chat, payments, and trading within its Base Layer 2 ecosystem. This significant strategic shift, announced during the company's "A New Day One" event in Los Angeles on July 10, 2025, aims to simplify onchain activity and onboard a projected one billion users to the decentralized web. The move underscores Coinbase's ambition to make crypto interaction as seamless and intuitive as using conventional mobile applications, directly addressing previous user confusion between its core exchange and wallet offerings.
Central to the Base App's functionality are "smart wallets," which revolutionize user onboarding by eliminating the need for complex recovery phrases and significantly reducing network fees through gasless transactions. This innovation also ensures cross-app portability, allowing users to seamlessly navigate various decentralized applications. Complementing this, Coinbase introduced Base Account for a universal cross-chain identity and Base Pay, a new checkout service enabling near-instant USDC transactions. Shopify merchants have already begun integrating Base Pay, with U.S. consumers anticipated to receive a 1% cash back incentive later this year.
This strategic evolution transforms Coinbase's Base ecosystem from solely a blockchain network into a comprehensive, consumer-facing hub for Web3 engagement. The company's overarching objective is to democratize access to decentralized applications (dApps), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized finance (DeFi) services, thereby accelerating mass adoption of the onchain world. Furthermore, the rebrand includes substantial performance upgrades to the underlying Base Chain, reducing block times from two seconds to a mere 200 milliseconds, which is expected to significantly enhance overall user experience and transaction efficiency.
The transformation, encapsulated by the tweet from Coinbase stating:
"More than just a wallet."
This reflects the company's commitment to building a more integrated and user-friendly Web3 future. While the Base App is currently in a beta phase with a gradual rollout planned, its comprehensive feature set and focus on user experience aim to set a new standard for onchain interaction. This initiative is poised to reshape how individuals engage with the decentralized economy, potentially leading to broader mainstream adoption of blockchain technology.