Perpetual futures are where Coinbase wants Base App to live now. The exchange announced Wednesday that eligible users can trade more than 290 perpetual futures markets inside Base App, with leverage up to 50x, through an integration with Hyperliquid. The case for the feature is that perps account for roughly 75% of all crypto trading today, per Coinbase Head of Engineering Chintan Turakhia. The read-through is harder in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, where the product is not available at launch.
Hyperliquid handles execution. Base App is the interface. Turakhia told Decrypt that active users had been telling Coinbase clearly that leverage was what would get them to stay. He described Hyperliquid as one of the highest-performance onchain perps protocols and said the integration lets users access its liquidity without leaving their existing wallet. Markets span Bitcoin, Ethereum, tokenized stocks, and commodities, with leverage varying by asset and trading running around the clock. Positions can be liquidated if losses exceed certain thresholds.
The counterargument is the geographic fence. Any jurisdiction that restricts leveraged crypto derivatives is excluded, and that list starts with the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. For a company whose core customer base is concentrated in those markets, the addressable audience for this product is structurally smaller than 290 listed pairs might suggest.
What's changed at Base
About a year ago, Coinbase rebranded its wallet as Base App and pitched it as an everything app combining crypto trading with social features, messaging, AI tools, and creator monetization. That pitch did not hold. In July, Base creator Jesse Pollak stepped back from leading the app, writing on X that its push into social and creator coins had failed to drive the adoption he expected. Prediction markets, perpetuals, and stablecoins had emerged as the actual drivers instead. Pollak's summary was direct: the right bet on builders, the wrong bet on social.
On balance, the Hyperliquid integration fits the narrowed thesis. Coinbase is routing users to Hyperliquid's execution layer rather than building its own. The line to watch is whether eligible users outside the excluded jurisdictions generate enough volume to validate the pivot Pollak already announced in July, after social adoption failed to arrive.