Coinbase said Base is processing more activity while contributing less revenue to the company.
In its second-quarter earnings presentation filed Thursday, the exchange said "other" transaction revenue fell 11% quarter over quarter to $47.4 million, a decline it said was "largely driven by lower Base revenue." That came even as stablecoin transaction volume on Base increased sevenfold from a year earlier.
Scale grew while fee revenue shrank
The line item that includes Base sequencer fees has fallen from $68 million in Q3 2025 to $47.4 million last quarter.
On Thursday's earnings call, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said Base processed "about ... 32 trillion in the last 12 months of stablecoin transfer volume," adding that the network is now "number 1 now in terms of stablecoin volume" across all chains.
Coinbase also said more than 90% of agentic stablecoin transactions, described as payments initiated by AI agents and largely routed through its x402 protocol, settle on Base.
The company presented that trade-off as deliberate. In the same earnings materials, Coinbase highlighted sub-cent fees and sub-one-second settlement as product goals, putting Base at the center of a broader question hanging over Ethereum layer-2 networks: whether chains competing on extremely low fees can turn scale into revenue.
USDC economics remain the bigger prize
For Coinbase, Base serves a larger stablecoin strategy centered on USDC. The company said it captured roughly 50% of all USDC economics over the past year. Stablecoin revenue reached $292.1 million in the second quarter, nearly half the size of Coinbase's total transaction revenue line.
Even so, the stablecoin business was not enough to push quarterly results above analyst expectations. Coinbase reported $1.22 billion in revenue, missing estimates, and posted a net loss of $359.5 million, its third straight quarterly loss. Shares of COIN fell about 5% in after-hours trading.
The exchange also stopped disclosing trading volume as a key metric this quarter. Instead, it pointed to a record 10.3% share of global crypto trading volume.
No sign of a Base token
The quarter's results offered nothing new for anyone expecting a Base token. The term did not appear in the earnings deck, the 10-Q filing, or the earnings call.
Armstrong repeated that there is "a path to decentralize it over time ... through the different stages of decentralization." He also said Base has a "2-year head start" over newer entrants including layer-2 efforts from Robinhood and Stripe.
Armstrong also raised the possibility that the layer-2 market could end in 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?" he said. "We might have to become a bit of a specialist in that area."
He also confirmed that Jordan Fish, the crypto-native investor and podcaster known as Cobie, has joined to run the Base app, saying, "he comes from that community, which is really good."
DeFi lending inside the Coinbase app
Another figure in the quarter drew less attention: average borrow and lend balances in the Coinbase app reached a record $1.49 billion, up from $199 million a year earlier.
Coinbase said those balances are powered by onchain DeFi protocols available through the app, primarily Morpho on Base.
The company also reported more than $5 billion in cb-wrapped assets, including cbBTC and cbETH. Its product roadmap includes a retail DEX, expanded DeFi borrowing and lending, and crypto-backed mortgages.
ETH holdings were flat and staking revenue dropped
According to the 10-Q, Coinbase's ETH position held for investment was unchanged at 150,279 ETH. The filing listed a carrying value of $235.7 million against a $340.6 million cost basis.
The company also said it added roughly 1,900 BTC, though the sentence in the provided source text was cut off before giving the full context.
Staking revenue fell 42% year over year to $83.3 million, the lowest quarterly figure in more than three years of data disclosed by Coinbase. The company attributed the drop to lower Solana and Ethereum prices and lower reward rates.