And then it's also happening directly on Base. I said at the beginning, but I think something like 90% of X402, which are kind of agentic HTTP transactions, are happening and being processed on Base today. The things people and agents are buying are inference, they're buying data, they're buying consumer goods and services, and that's growing pretty consistently.
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Jesse, man, it's good to see you again. Thanks for coming on.
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Happy Thursday.
Sensational, indeed. It's a pleasure to have you. I mean, Base has been in the limelight, as always. It ebbs and it flows, and no surprise here. You look like you're somewhere sunny, blue sky. So, I hope everything is good in your world, and maybe you can just give us a little bit of a sense of how you're feeling in reaction to everything that has evolved on Base.
Yeah, I'm feeling fired up. I mean, I think what we've seen in the first half of this year is just that crypto is starting to kind of go vertical in terms of its adoption on stablecoins, on tokenization, on trading, on financing. And so, I'm heads down basically trying to figure out how to serve all of these customers that are coming online. I spent all day yesterday in San Francisco with a bunch of customers, just kind of hearing what they're solving with Base, and it was pretty inspiring. You know, one in particular customer that I talked to is integrating financing on Base, our kind of borrow and lend markets, where they're doing crypto-backed loans for their customers, and also giving yield to other customers. And they were saying, 'Hey, we tried to do this with CeFi, and it was too expensive and too... We tried to do it with our own internal systems and it was too expensive and too much balance sheet capital, and then we found Base. And now we're rolling out a financing product that has lower rates than anywhere else in the world and that is an incredibly seamless consumer experience.' And so that to me gets me so fired up, and I think it's indicative of crypto really crossing the chasm, where we now have it powering these use cases behind the scenes in a way that's going vertical.
I absolutely love it. I mean, we are fired up here too, and people are, you know, they're dropping like flies out there. They're going to AI, they're going here, they're going there, but we're not going anywhere, Jesse. We've been live every day for the last like four years, and so we're not going anywhere. We're going to stick around. But there's a ton that has been happening despite market conditions. One thing I want to ask you about is Robinhood and Robinhood chain, because I'm curious. We've talked so much about Ethereum at large, and when you see a new chain come on, do you think like, 'All right, we got to toughen up, you know, here's more competition,' or do you think this is more on-chain activity? There are more people that are going to come on-chain. That ultimately means user activity, more user activity for Base. What is your reaction to what's happening over there, and how do you think it could complement or compete with what's happening on Base?
Yeah, I mean, the pie is just growing. We're upgrading the whole global financial system, and seeing other folks come in and say, 'Hey, wow, what Base has been doing for two and a half years, and you know, the billions of dollars of assets and billions of dollars of volume on Base, that looks pretty good. Let's figure out how to contribute to that effort as well.' That gets me excited. I'm also someone who always loves a little bit of competition. I grew up playing sports, played all the way through college as a soccer player, and you know, my attitude was always like, I just want to be pushed to be the best I possibly can be. And I think Base is the same, and the builders on Base are the same. And so, yeah, I think it's a sign of the times. Every single financial institution in the world is going to bring their business to be powered by crypto rails because it's going to offer cheaper, faster, more global financial services that let them just offer better customer experiences to their customers all around the world. And so we want Base to be at the center of it. Base is at the center of it today. It's the place where 90% of agentic finance transactions on 402 or X402 are happening. It's the second largest financing market in the world for borrow and lend, and growing quicker than any other ecosystem. You know, every other ecosystem is actually down in terms of TVL since 2025. Base is up 35%. And then the core of our trading business is live and well, where Bitcoin, Ethereum, they trade more on Base than any other chain in the world from a spot perspective. And so those three products, trading, financing, and payments, are growing incredibly fast, and that's what we're going to keep doubling down on.
And so with that in mind, and I mean, first off, kudos because, you know, TVL is up, activity is up, haters can say what they want, but you can't argue with the facts and the numbers. And so, you know, there is real live activity happening on Base today, whereas there's a lot of theoretical things happening across the rest of the space. But I want to get a sense of how you're thinking about this as Base moves forward, because we've seen how there's kind of this barbell approach. We've seen RWAs on one side, meme coins on the other side, these two wolves inside of us. You know, we've also seen on Base specifically sort of the iterations through social tokens and creator coins and all kinds of things like this. And you know, the old adage is if you're everything to everyone, you're going to be nothing. So where is Base positioned? What is the unique differentiation? Where are you guys hyper-focusing? What is the facet of the industry that Base wants to dominate?
Yeah, I think the way we think about success for Base is becoming the internet exchange, basically, where every asset, whether it's stocks or crypto majors or commodities or anything else that you can imagine, including these long-tail attention assets, is traded. Where you can trade and exchange those assets in every form, whether it's spot or perps or lending or borrowing, you have the right market structure for you, and it's serving as the back end to power financial services products from Coinbase to new-age wallets like Phantom and FOMO to brokerages that are starting to leverage this technology like eToro and tons of others that are starting to come on-chain. And so that is the vision, and I think that's what we're heading towards. Now, I think the thing that's exciting to me about open blockchains is that you have space for the long tail of builders and innovators to explore new markets, including attention markets, which are kind of like my catch-all for meme coins, creator coins, content coins, that are all basically taking the attention that we spend on culture and on creativity and on feeds and turning it into tokenized value that can then be redistributed through the different constituents who created it, who consume it, and who distribute it. And so you have the space for that, and then on the other side, you have the space for literally every asset in the world that's off-chain today to come on-chain to benefit from 24/7 settlement, global access, and deeper liquidity, and better technology primitives that can then be built on top of it to offer different kinds of financial services. And so Base is going to be the exchange where all of that happens, and we're actually going to be a programmable exchange where then other people can layer on a bunch of pieces as well. And so I think it's all going to happen on Base.
And is the infrastructure and user experience, is it generalizable enough, is it flexible enough where you can build one piece of infrastructure, you can build Base, and it can appeal to the most suited-up institutional of RWA folks, and it can appeal to the, you know, degenerate attention traders?
I think so. I do think that it is a little bit of the two wolves. Like, you need culture and you need seriousness. And that's the kind of spectrum of conversation that we see on Crypto Twitter today. That said, I will say where Base is focused is on delivering long-term value. And so I think attention assets can be long-term valuable for the ecosystem. You know, I think you have memes on Base that have been contributing and growing and onboarding people. I think you're seeing that creator coins, you know, with Ansem and others, I think are going to make a resurgence and be something that also happens. But I think one thing where we're a lot less interested is people who are just here to kind of short-term, you know, make a quick buck and then leave. And so where we're most focused is how do we build systems and products and build the infrastructure that can support trillions of dollars coming into this new economy and give access to billions of people all around to that value, so that they can have more economic freedom. And I think a big part of that is backing long-term builders who are, you know, coming through the ups and downs of the market and saying we're going to stay focused on delivering those products. And then also working with kind of upmarket customers that are, you know, neo-brokerages and neo-banks and centralized exchanges who are upgrading their systems in order to offer better experiences to their customers. And so that long-term value and the long-term builders, whether they're big companies or small companies, that's Base's primary focus. And I think it comes through in the quality of different teams that you see on Base. You know, Aerodrome is now one of the largest exchanges in the world. Virtuals and Bankr originated on Base, and of course they're going elsewhere, but it's been awesome to see them kind of thrive and grow and explore there. Venice is, you know, probably one of the biggest consumer apps in crypto today. You know, they just announced that they're doing something like $90 million in annualized run rate. They've invented this thing called tokenized inference that now has all of these markets that people are pricing and then consuming inference, all happening on Base with a ton of programmable primitives that are being built on top of it. And so that kind of innovation coming from builders who have been here and are going to keep being here through ups and downs, that's the thing that we care the most about and are going to be supporting the most.
Yeah, there are some Base lifers in the chat. Big shout out to One Arm Bandit, who's a big Base fan here. And then we've got a question from the chat from, let's see, from Greg who's asking if, or excuse me, from Edward, that is asking if Base is considering integrating a perps exchange like Lighter.
Yeah, so we think one of the places where there's definitely the most opportunity for growth on Base is around perps. We have perps venues like Avantis that have been growing really nicely on Base, but we think there's a lot more that we can do to kind of get that ecosystem growing even more quickly. And as we talk to traders, and also as we talk to other kind of financial app builders, the lack of a scaled perps venue that is, you know, bringing billions of dollars of volume is a missing piece that would let them offer a better product to their customers, let them do a bunch more kind of hedging and financial engineering on Base directly rather than having to go elsewhere. And so as we're working through the second half of this year, that's a big priority to make sure that we have perps alongside spot as a really liquid marketplace on Base that can then kind of fill out that full financial services offering.
