Base App fully open, how is the user experience?

Is Base App a consumer revolution for Web3, or a lavish walled garden?

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

On December 18, Base App, launched by Coinbase, officially announced the end of its Beta testing phase and is now fully open to users in over 140 countries and regions worldwide. This marks a key step in Coinbase’s effort to build an on-chain ecosystem gateway and realize its vision of mainstream Web3 adoption.

Evolving from the early tool-oriented “Coinbase Wallet” to today’s “Base App,” this product is attempting to define a new form of on-chain “super app”—deeply integrating social, trading, payments, and complex on-chain interactions.

Its core vision, as stated by Base lead Jesse Pollak, is: “To make onchain interactions as simple as online ones.”

The All-in-One Blueprint of Base App

Base App is no longer limited to traditional asset management, but is a comprehensive platform integrating social, payments, and chat.

On July 2025, during Base’s official “A New Day One” event, I provided a detailed introduction to Base App in the article “Base Major Upgrade: Coinbase’s Blockchain Ambition.” Base App has the following four core features:

• Closed loop of social and creator economy: Integrated with Farcaster and Zora protocols. Every post by a user can be converted into a tradable digital asset via Zora, realizing true “post-to-monetize.” At the same time, curated trading feeds are directly integrated into social streams, making “on-chain discovery” intuitive and social.
• On-chain functionality and payment experience: Supports buying and selling cryptocurrencies, exploring built-in Mini apps (such as trading platforms, prediction markets, lending platforms, games, and tipping platforms), supports free and instant USDC transfers via NFC, and allows users to earn yield by holding USDC.
• Ecological interconnection of Mini Apps: Similar to WeChat Mini Programs, Base App comes with mini applications covering DeFi, prediction markets, gaming, and more.
• Smart wallet and fast payments: After registration, users automatically receive a Base account (supporting multi-chain smart wallet identity) and Base Pay (a fast payment method based on USDC).
• Private communication and AI collaboration: The chat function is based on the XMTP encryption protocol, ensuring privacy and security. Users can send and receive USDC directly in conversations or form communities of up to 250 people, and can also call AI Agents to assist with complex combo trades or portfolio management.

How’s the Experience? What Kind of App Is This?

In practice, Base App’s UI design is extremely minimalist, and the interactions are relatively smooth.

“Seamless” Onboarding: Goodbye to Mnemonic Anxiety

For beginners, the most convenient feature is not needing a mnemonic or backing up 12 words. Private key management is fully handled by Passkeys, allowing users to create an on-chain account in seconds. This experience is almost indistinguishable from registering a regular Web2 social account, greatly lowering the entry barrier for non-crypto users.

Seamless Integration of Social and Finance

In the main feed of the trading section, posts by creators who have enabled earnings display a real-time market button below, allowing users to jump to the trading page with one click.

The platform also highlights large trades or group purchases, making it easier for users to copy trades. There is also a convenient “hidden operation”—double-tapping an interesting post or creator token allows users to quickly buy in at a preset amount.

The discussion section focuses on pure content feeds that have not enabled earnings.

According to the official description, the feed algorithm personalizes recommendations based on user interactions (likes, comments, follows), interest test results, as well as content timeliness, relevance, and diversity. Users can also directly interact with links or Mini Apps shared in the feed.

People-Centric On-Chain Identity

When you open Base App, you no longer see a cold string of 0x... code, but Basenames. Base App is deeply integrated with the on-chain identity system, making transfers as easy as sending a red envelope to a WeChat friend. Names are no longer just symbols, but serve as a “digital ID card” across the entire ecosystem.

Trading: Gas Sponsorship

To achieve the ultimate experience, Base App adopts a “Gas Sponsorship” model in many scenarios, with network fees covered by the official team. However, it’s important to note that this convenience is not entirely free: when swapping tokens or performing cross-chain operations within the app, a fee of about 1% (on Base) still applies.

Rich Mini Apps

The “Search” section of Base App includes all integrated Mini Apps, covering trading, gaming, creator platforms, DeFi platforms, prediction markets, music, and more. The Mini Apps homepage currently features the derivatives protocol Avantis, Web3 fantasy football game Football.Fun, DeFi protocol Gauntlet, lending protocol Morpho, and Moonwell.

USDC Yield Automatically Distributed Weekly

The Base App wallet page supports one-click activation of USDC yield, currently with an APY of about 3.35% (adjusted by Coinbase). Rewards are accumulated daily and distributed weekly (U.S. users need to link their Coinbase account).

What Are the Challenges?

As an emerging platform, Base App still faces some obvious pain points or challenges in actual use:

• “Island Effect” of Social Features: For a product positioned as an “on-chain super app,” user scale is its lifeline. If Base App’s user base is insufficient, its core functions will fall into a “negative cycle.” With fewer active users, content updates in the feed slow down, and retention rates gradually decline.
• Feed Quality Needs Improvement: The current social feed algorithm is still opaque, and the content pool is filled with a lot of speculative and useless information, with a relative lack of high-quality, in-depth interactions.
• “Liquidity Trap” in On-Chain Trading: Its social trading section relies on displaying “group purchases” to guide copy trading. If the user base is too small, such trend discovery loses statistical significance, and users may only see random actions by a few people.
• Security Defense Boundaries: Convenience also brings risks. “Phishing links” disguised as attractive social posts still exist. For new users accustomed to Web2 security protections, misoperations may lead to authorization leaks, which remains a severe challenge in the on-chain world.

Of course, for Base App at this stage, its biggest challenge is not the lack of powerful features, but how to efficiently convert Coinbase’s hundreds of millions of users and maintain retention rates.

Summary

The full launch of Base App marks a shift in the focus of the Base ecosystem from “building infrastructure” to “stock competition” and “user onboarding.”

By integrating wallet, trading, social, creator economy, payments, mini-app ecosystem, and yield, it has built a powerful on-chain traffic gateway. For developers, the Mini Apps framework provides a shortcut to directly reach Coinbase’s massive user base.

Although there is still a long way to go in content governance and user acquisition, Base App has undoubtedly provided a clear template: the future of Web3 should not be an isolated wallet, but an on-chain society with warmth, interaction, and yield.