I’ve covered Coinbase since it was a tiny startup but have never seen anything quite like what the crypto giant rolled out this Wednesday. At a carefully produced stage event in Los Angeles, the company unveiled an app called Base, which is named for Coinbase’s own blockchain, and is billed as a “super app” that offers everything from payments to AI agents to a social network.
All of this isn’t exactly new. For years, Coinbase and other crypto firms have been fiddling with blockchain-based alternatives to services like Facebook and Apple’s App Store. But these offerings came wrapped in a clunky interface that forced users to jump through a variety of crypto hoops, meaning they had little appeal to anyone who was not a blockchain die-hard.
