The Base Tier List: Everything Coinbase Announced at Day One
The infrastructure stage is over.
Base announced so many things at “A New Day One” I’ve had to put together a tier list.
I’m most bullish on their less flashy partnership announcements, a little disappointed in the early user experience with Base App but overall see huge promise in what they are trying to do.
It’s obvious that Coinbase has one of the best onchain product teams in web3. Hopefully by the end you’ll see why.
BASE APP – B
Of course we should start with Base’s new super-app: Base App. Now that I've gotten access and coined my first post, I am qualified to talk about it?
My first experiences with WeChat were in China in 2015. I had a short consulting project in Shanghai and naturally downloaded the app. Together with the fancy metro lines and the digital displays it did leave a unique impression that super-apps could also eventually come to the West.
I can’t believe it took 10 years! And I never imagined it would happen first with crypto.
I have to give Base App an S for potential. I love how they’ve stuck with open protocols at every junction (except of course the most crucial battlegrounds of payments and identity).
But I’ll drop the launch to a B for some execution flaws. Unfortunately some of the most experimental parts (chat / mini-apps) are featured front & center and simply don’t perform well. They also don’t illustrate anything that would suggest these features will add real value in people’s lives. This makes the app feel too much like a toy and not the gateway to a new financial layer.
However, the fundamental premise of having a single wallet across to social, chat and apps definitely makes sense. In line with Coinbase’s mission of economic empowerment, it’s crazy that somebody could log into Base App, find a job posting on Farcaster, complete work communicating in chat and then get paid all from the same app.
BASE PAY / BASE ACCOUNT – S
Stripe may have come back a little late from their crypto hiatus and given Coinbase an opportunity they otherwise wouldn’t have had.
Removing payment fees using crypto is the ultimate counter-positioning strategy and could be tho way to unseat Stripe. The Shopify partnership completes the story, allowing users to take hard earned creator fees + USDC interest and buy real things.
Base Account could have the same impact. Unlike Worldcoin, it doesn’t require any biometric scanning but also doesn’t provide proof of humanity at this stage. It’s possible that Base Account will see limited success outside of crypto applications, however, I applaud Coinbase again for taking the first-mover advantage here.
MINI-APPS – D
This could be a sign of me getting too old but I wasn’t very excited by what I saw in the App Store.
Farcaster Frames don’t allow for the most high fidelity applications but beyond that there were too many examples of games and trading related applications.
I expect this to get better now that Base App is launched. The App Store eventually saw existing internet leaders like Facebook take their fair share of real estate and I think we will see a similar realignment where the most popular web3 protocols will all develop mini-apps to maintain direct contact with users and lean on Base App’s discovery.
As a consequence of not being impressed with the mini-apps I saw, the mini-app screen is probably one of the highest ROI pieces of advertising real estate in crypto right now.
BASE CHAT – A
Telegram is not going anywhere as we all seem to accept it despite its various flaws. But using AI agents as a way to demo how the chat works was clever in theory but disappointing in practice. I’m still not sure whether the long latency between my messages and responses was entirely due to inference times or represents the actual latency. The chat reminded me of friend.tech’s group chats yet I didn’t get a single coherent answer from the AI bots that were demoed. I think Coinbase should’ve builtt a really useful mini-app themselves and then used that as a demo.
The reason I still give Base Chat an A despite these flaws is the following:
This provides a valid path to agent builders to ship their agents work in crucial real world functionality such as payments;
Having a chat adjacent to social and payments will be pretty powerful and I’d expect it’ll become easier for Base to redirect users there over time.
BASE BRAND – C
I do think the new branding looks cool and was well articulated and visually ambitious.
But can you really trademark rectangles? Either way, branding is subjective so I won’t dwell on it too much. I’d be curious what good designers think about the brand.
BASE BUILD – A
While I expressed some skepticism for the initial selection of apps, I actually liked the new docs pages. It’s also clever that mini-apps are Farcaster frames but not vice versa and they could realistically become standard for distributable web3 apps especially with improved fidelity over time.
BASE CHAIN – B
It’s handy that Coinbase already owns the settlement layer for most things that will happen via Base App. However, the rebrand will be really confusing. The evolution of Base Chain as something that fades more into the background is sensible but feels a little too early. Base doesn’t have a monopoly on builders yet and this rebrand could make the message even more confusing.
BASE SOCIAL – B
While the Farcaster integration proves open protocols are not just a meme, the Zara integration also showed how they could be used to deliver a better UX.
I’m personally skeptical of creator coins unless they bring real value. So I liked them as a way to speculate on a post’s engagement (as a sort of prediction market) and think they will become more valuable if creators get tools to offer additional benefits to holders.
Looking back, these launches are quite cohesive and Coinbase must have felt they wanted a head start on multiple fronts. I have three big questions:
What happens next? If this concept works, who will Base be competing with? It’s unclear whether their biggest competitors are other crypto companies, a web2 social company like Meta or even OpenAI. It could well be all 3.
Is this the right medium? While the agent-powered chats were going in the right direction, the combination of payments, chats & social indeed combine features WeChat had 10 years ago. Do these features really represent timeless needs or will they be disrupted by AI-native interfaces in the future?
Is it defensible? Since Base App is largely built on open platforms and there wasn’t an emphasis on a social graph, it’s less obvious what will keep users coming back.
Regardless, this was a full circle moment for Coinbase. When Base first launched, friend.tech became the first major success story and drove significant activity on the chain. Base App is more of ann evolution of friend.tech than it is an evolution of Coinbase Wallet. In many ways, Base App produced a 10x improvement of every feature friend.tech pioneered.
It has an improved social experience, an effortless onboarding flow, a much broader notion of creator coins, a better integrated wallet, its own app ecosystem and so on.
The crypto infrastructure phase is over.