Coinbase says Base is processing more stablecoin volume than any other blockchain — and the company is earning less from the network each quarter.
In its second-quarter earnings presentation filed Thursday, the exchange said “other” transaction revenue fell 11% quarter-over-quarter to $47.4 million, “largely driven by lower Base revenue,” even as stablecoin transaction volume on Base grew seven times year-over-year.
The disclosure lands in the middle of the question hanging over every Ethereum L2: whether networks that compete on sub-cent fees can turn scale into revenue. Coinbase is engineering the trade-off deliberately, touting sub-cent, sub-one-second settlement as a product goal in the same deck.
Scale Without Fees
The bucket that contains Base sequencer fees has shrunk from $68 million in Q3 2025 to $47.4 million last quarter. Over the same stretch, CEO Brian Armstrong said on Thursday’s earnings call, Base processed “about … 32 trillion in the last 12 months of stablecoin transfer volume,” making it “number 1 now in terms of stablecoin volume” among all chains.
Coinbase also said more than 90% of agentic stablecoin transactions — payments initiated by AI agents, largely via its x402 protocol — settle on Base.
For Coinbase, the trade-off is deliberate: Base drives users toward $USDC, where the economics are far larger. The company said it has captured roughly 50% of all $USDC economics over the past year, and stablecoin revenue of $292.1 million was nearly half the size of its entire transaction revenue line in Q2.
But even stablecoin revenue couldn’t lift results above analyst expectations. Revenue of $1.22 billion missed estimates, the company posted a $359.5 million net loss — its third straight — and COIN fell about 5% in after-hours trading. Coinbase also stopped disclosing trading volume as a key metric this quarter, pointing instead to a record 10.3% share of global crypto trading volume.
No Base Token
The results gave no comfort to anyone waiting on a Base token: the word appears nowhere in the earnings deck, the 10-Q, or the call. Armstrong instead repeated that there is “a path to decentralize it over time … through the different stages of decentralization,” and claimed a “2-year head start” over newer entrants such as Robinhood’s and Stripe’s L2s.
He also floated a novel idea about where the L2 race ends: consolidation. “The question is, how and when will that consolidation phase happen? And how might there be sort of an M&A-type process in the world of blockchains?” Armstrong said. “We might have to become a bit of a specialist in that area.”
Armstrong confirmed that Jordan Fish, the crypto-native investor and podcaster known as Cobie, has joined to run the Base app — “he comes from that community, which is really good.”
DeFi-Powered Borrow/Lend
The quarter’s other under-the-radar DeFi number: average borrow and lend balances in the Coinbase app hit a record $1.49 billion, up from $199 million a year ago. Those balances, the company notes, are “powered by onchain DeFi protocols” accessible in the app, chiefly Morpho on Base.
Coinbase also reported more than $5 billion in cb-wrapped assets, including cbBTC and cbETH, and its product roadmap lists a retail DEX, expanded DeFi borrowing and lending, and crypto-backed mortgages.
Coinbase’s own $ETH position was flat at 150,279 $ETH held for investment, per the 10-Q, carried at $235.7 million against a $340.6 million cost basis. Meanwhile, it added roughly 1,900 BTC in the f
Staking revenue fell 42% year-over-year to $83.3 million, the lowest quarterly figure in the more than three years of data Coinbase disclosed, on lower Solana and Ethereum prices and reward rates.
