On June 29, Base co-founder Jesse Pollak announced on the X platform that he would make a major announcement on July 16, and based on market and community discussions, Coinbase may announce updates related to wallet products next week. BlockBeats has been qualified for the closed beta of the new version of the Coinbase wallet, and in this article, we will give readers a sneak peek at how the new version of the wallet attempts to build a platform that converges social discovery, transaction flow, and the creator economy.

Unlike traditional wallets, which only serve asset deposits and withdrawals and transaction execution, the new version of Coinbase Wallet has been given a larger mission: it seeks to become a distribution platform for on-chain content, a channel for developers to promote their products, and even a new social square for traders and creators. Behind this wallet-led distribution logic is Coinbase/Base's deep reflection on the bottleneck of on-chain user growth - when users stagnate after completing their first transaction, it is difficult for the flywheel of on-chain economy to turn. In order to let users "stay" and let the product "go out of the circle", they chose to rewrite the wallet as an open system that is "socially driven, transaction-incentive, and creative and sustainable".

The evolution of the Coinbase wallet

Previous versions of Coinbase Wallet have the same basic features as other crypto wallets.

Older version of Coinbase Wallet interface

The new version of the wallet is mainly divided into homepage, social, trading, chat, notifications, and wallet balance.

On the main interface, there are AI Agent dialogues, app collections, and Mini App compilations.

Apps are popular projects in the crypto ecosystem, such as Noice, Fantasy, Morpho, etc., and users can directly open the Mini App to operate.

The biggest change in this wallet update is the integration with Farcaster, which is similar to WeChat's Moments, which brings together information streams, videos, Farcaster user systems, notifications, etc. within the wallet.

There is no social networking in blockchain, only consumer socialization

Coinbase Wallet, which connects to Farcaster to watch tweets and watch short videos, chat directly with your friends or even AI, order takeout, and play games with multiple social apps, has become a super integration. Lens, Mastodon, and nostr have started with DID or social sovereignty concept products that have fallen one after another, and no one seems to be willing to pay for "social" that can't make money in this market that is highly related to "money".

After the market gradually reacted, the project party began to integrate "money" into social networking, and the track of Consumer Social was born, among which the first to break the circle was the once phenomenal community App Friend.Tech, and the most successful track should be PumpFun, which is about to "issue coins" in the near future, and the founder of AllianceDao, which invested in PumpFun, wangqiao "QwQiao", has also said in interviews or public many times, AllianceDAO regards the application of consumer social networking as one of the blockchain tracks for major investments, and said that "social trading products are in the stage of mass adoption at the edge."

The number of social tracks invested by VCs, which peaked around 2022 and continues to increase today, source: Cryptorank

In fact, there are many top VCs who are optimistic about the social trading track. Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital, said from the perspective of the creator ecosystem, "Web3 social platforms provide new ways for users to interact with creators and influencers. For example, the "embeddable Frames" feature launched by Farcaster, a decentralized social protocol, quickly gained market attention, and Blinks that can be embedded on X have also been derived on Solana. Such projects are not unique, such as the Focus app launched on the DeSo ecosystem, a decentralized social protocol, which allows users to pay for content subscriptions with cryptocurrency, and introduces a tokenized creator economic cycle, or Zora, a social app that tokenizes creator content, and so on.

Andreessen Horowitz, one of the founders of a16z, is more interested in the "copying" social media that trading brings, and young investors are returning to active trading and are willing to follow the strategies of successful traders. In its Fintech report, it is pointed out that in the future, retail investors will increasingly "follow" individuals who are good at investing, equivalent to star fund managers in the digital age, such as eToro's crypto copy function is a typical practice of retail follow-the-trading strategies. The report also highlights the rise of "underprivileged communities", with communities such as Stocktwits, WSB, and Commonstock combining trading behavior and social media through transparent transaction data and collaboration tools. This means that a new generation of investors tends to share information and discover alpha together on social platforms.

Mainstream blockchain venture capital favors the social trading track, mainly because it can integrate community consensus and creator economy, lower the investment threshold, and enhance user stickiness. They believe that the new trend of open trading ideas and community co-creation investment strategies (e.g., copy trading, multi-layer incentive communities) on decentralized social networks will not only educate and motivate users, but also potentially create new community-driven alphas. On the other hand, if the vitality of this model can drive the creator economy and bring about a virtuous internal cycle, it can change the existing "social landscape".

At present, the logic of social sovereignty may change from driving users to participate in social networking, integrating traders into social circles - using the huge trader circle to drive the creator economy - forming a closed-loop wealth spillover (traders get alpha, creators get subsidies, etc.) to obtain a wider area of traffic.

The rise and fall of the social track does not match the market cycle, showing an independent market, source: SoSoValue (yellow: BTC, blue: ETH, red: green: social track indicators)

Which projects Coinbase invests in can be 1+1>2 after "cramming" into Coinbase Wallet

Among all the institutions, Coinbase/Base should be the most effective in promoting the concept of social finance, and it is also one of the VCs that has invested the most in this field.

From creator finance to trading social, from stablecoin payments to physical social spending, Coinbase's investment landscape is now enough to support a complete super app closed loop, in addition to the existing features, what other applications can make Coinbase Wallet more "versatile"?

The number of VCs investing in "social tracks" is not completely counted, and the actual Coinbase invests in "similar social applications" is more, source: Cryptorank

Towns

Towns is a group chat protocol and application designed for online communities, the whole is more like a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted version of the community DAO organization centralized, if added to the app, in addition to the existing in-app conversational chat, the overall gameplay will be on a higher level, in terms of product features, the programmable group embedded in the wallet, compared with the existing large number of industry TG subscription transactions, news groups can have more functions (such as setting up CA in the automatic copy group, news).

ZAR

ZAR allows users to find stablecoin merchants near them and exchange cash for digital currencies safely and conveniently. ZAR debit cards can be used anywhere Visa is accepted. If this feature is embedded in the Coinbase wallet, the reuse rate of stores and buyers will be greatly increased in many regions where stablecoins are widely used.

limitless

Limitless is a social prediction protocol that, similar to Polymarket, allows creators to easily configure the market and share it with the community. Its modular UI is also great for embedding on mobile, while its feed stream shows purchases made by other people or friends on the chain.

Blackbird

Blackbird is a company focused on leveraging loyalty and payments between restaurants and guests, similar to the membership-based Dianping, to provide restaurants with fully customizable loyalty models and consumer apps. Blackbird can be a user's wallet or a membership to a restaurant. If the existing food delivery function of Coinbase Wallet is integrated with the same user, it will greatly enhance the user's rights and interests.

From a single crypto asset management tool, it has become an "on-chain super entrance" that integrates social connections, transaction execution, content distribution and offline consumption. Its deep integration with Farcaster enables the wallet to not only carry assets and DApps, but also embed modules such as social time streams, short videos, chats, and information pushes, reconstructing the user's interaction mode and stay. At the same time, the MiniApp and application recommendation system embedded in the wallet allow it to assume the function of discovering and cold-starting the base ecological project, and at the same time make Coinbase close the loop of its ecological projects of "payment, socialization, transaction and consumption".

Blockchain wallet is no longer just the "entrance to the blockchain", the path chosen by Coinbase Wallet is to become the operating system and social hub of the Crypto world, it is a social map on the chain, and it is also a distributed machine that constantly generates active transactions and content, and the encrypted version of "WeChat" may be on the way.