This article was compiled and organized by BlockWeeks
Coinbase Wallet's trading business is undergoing a clear round of acceleration. Ox Bid, who is responsible for the wallet's trading business, revealed in a recent in-depth interview that over the past three months, Solana trading volume within the wallet grew 12-fold, and this round of growth did not rely on any Solana-specific incentives or subsidy campaigns.
The growth engine is execution experience, not subsidies
In public chain ecosystems, short-term surges in trading volume are usually attributed to liquidity mining, token rewards, or fee subsidies. But the explanation Ox Bid gave is completely different: what truly drove the growth was improvement in the swap execution process. Currently, Coinbase Wallet's swap success rate has reached 99%, including cross-chain swaps—that is, the probability of users failing, retrying, or getting stuck when exchanging assets has been pushed to an extremely low level.
For wallet-type products, the swap success rate directly determines retention. A failed transaction not only brings fee losses, but also makes users abandon the entire wallet entry point. When the success rate approaches full value, the wallet effectively transforms from an "asset custody tool" into a usable trading terminal, and trading frequency rises accordingly.
Discover redesign and Live Coins: new coins tradable within seconds of listing
In addition to the execution layer, the product-side redesign is equally critical. Coinbase Wallet restructured the Discover tab and introduced the Live Coins feature, enabling users to complete trades within seconds after new tokens are listed on-chain. At the same time, a new launchpad filter was added to Discover to help users screen targets among the massive number of new assets.
Ox Bid mentioned a key observation: most traders actually choose the token first, and then care about which chain it is on. The concept of the chain carries far less weight in user decision-making than the asset itself, which also explains why the wallet does not need to design incentives specifically for a certain chain—as long as users can buy the coins they want in the fastest and most stable way, trading will naturally happen.
From Base App back to Coinbase Wallet, the roadmap remains unchanged
At the product naming level, Coinbase Wallet previously appeared under the identity of Base App, and now it has returned to the name Coinbase Wallet. Ox Bid said that this brand return did not change the established roadmap, and product capabilities and development priorities remain continuous. Since July, spot trading volume within the wallet has risen 2.5-fold.
Three types of trader profiles, and why perps have not cannibalized spot
From the perspective of data and user behavior, Ox Bid roughly divides traders within the wallet into three categories: long-term holders, active spot traders, and perps traders. The three groups differ clearly in risk preference, holding period, and operating frequency, but they share the same underlying execution and asset entry point.
It is worth noting that perps trading launched through the Hyperliquid integration did not cannibalize the spot business as some views worried, but instead brought in new traders. This shows that perps and spot are more of a complementary relationship at the current stage: perps serve the high-leverage demand group that would not otherwise conduct spot operations within the wallet, rather than shifting spot users over.
By comparison, the prediction market supported by Polymarket still ranks behind spot and perps in activity, and is at a relatively earlier stage of exploration.
Next step: Coinbase Terminal and AI Agent
When discussing subsequent plans, Ox Bid gave two main lines. The first is Coinbase Terminal for professional traders, which will cover both web and mobile, with the aim of serving users who have higher requirements for order speed, order book depth, and toolchains; the second is AI Agent-related features, with a target time point set for the end of this year.
From the overall path, Coinbase Wallet is evolving from a single self-custody wallet into a combination of "wallet + trading terminal + intelligent tools": at the bottom, it builds the foundation with execution success rate and cross-chain capabilities; in the middle, it uses Discover and Live Coins to solve asset discovery; at the top, it uses perps, prediction markets, and a professional terminal to cover trading needs at different levels.
