In brief
- Coinbase is adding perpetual futures to Base App through Hyperliquid, offering eligible users leverage of up to 50x.
- Coinbase says perps account for roughly 75% of crypto trading volume and are the most requested feature among Base App’s power users.
- The launch follows a shift away from Base’s earlier focus on social features toward trading, payments, and AI agents.
Coinbase announced Wednesday that it is bringing leveraged crypto derivatives to the Base App, allowing eligible users to trade perpetual futures with leverage of up to 50x through Hyperliquid.
The integration gives users access to more than 290 perpetual futures markets, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, along with markets tied to stocks and commodities.
“Perps are where the volume is—roughly 75% of all crypto trading today is perps, not spot,” Coinbase Head of Engineering Chintan Turakhia told Decrypt, calling them “the single most requested feature from our power users.”
Perpetual futures, or perps, are derivatives that let traders bet on whether an asset’s price will rise or fall without owning it. Unlike traditional futures, they don’t expire. Traders can use leverage to control larger positions with less capital, increasing potential gains and losses.
“Our most active users have been telling us clearly that leverage is what would get them to stay; perps are the single most requested feature from our power users,” Turakhia added. “This launch brings them the advanced trading tools they’ve been asking for, without giving up self-custody.
At launch, users can trade more than 290 perpetual futures pairs around the clock, ranging from Bitcoin and Ethereum to tokenized stocks and commodities, with leverage of up to 50x depending on the asset. If losses exceed certain thresholds, the position can be liquidated.
The integration puts those trades inside Base App, but Hyperliquid handles their execution.
“[Hyperliquid] is one of the highest-performance onchain perps protocols, and because we support multiple chains and ecosystems, this integration lets our users tap into its deep liquidity and speed without ever leaving their existing wallet,” Turakhia said.
According to Coinbase, the perpetual futures product is not available in the U.S., UK, Canada, or other jurisdictions that restrict leveraged crypto derivatives.
The move adds to a growing list of trading products inside Base App and comes a year after Coinbase rebranded its wallet as Base App, pitching it as an “everything app” combining crypto trading with social features, messaging, AI tools, and creator monetization.
However, a year later, that strategy has since shifted. In July, Base creator Jesse Pollak stepped back from leading the app after acknowledging its push into social and creator coins had failed to drive the adoption he expected. Pollak said prediction markets, perpetuals, and stablecoins had instead emerged as stronger drivers of adoption, with Base refocusing on trading, payments, and AI agents.
“[In my opinion] we made the right bet on builders, but obviously the wrong bet on social,” he wrote on X.
