The Onchain5: These 5 Onramps Will Power Crypto's Mainstream Moment

My background is as a career crypto venture investor. At CoinFund, I helped shape its early investment strategy during crypto’s formative years. At Coinbase Ventures, I scaled the portfolio to 500+ investments and advised leadership on its onchain strategy. These essays draw on multi-stage, multi-cycle experience — from startups to corporates — and the strategy and growth patterns that repeat across cycles.

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The Onchain5: These 5 Onramps Will Power Crypto's Mainstream Moment

Crypto is entering a new phase of mainstream distribution. Here are five companies that will lead the movement.

Crypto is entering a new phase of adoption where distribution will matter the most. This means that centralized entities with strong brand loyalty will be the biggest players in bringing users onchain. Although this phase has barely started, it is already shaping up to have its own version of a Mag7, which I’ll call the Onchain5.  

These companies need to have a few key characteristics:

• Expansive distribution and market leadership in their various sectors

• A clear signal of investment into developing and adopting blockchain technology

• Excellent UX/UIs for customers that can extract blockchain mechanics from front-end customer experiences

• Clear and necessary use cases for incorporating digital assets into their businesses

The firms chosen for this initial cohort are not necessarily the five biggest players in crypto, though they are sizable. They have been selected due to their ability to meet each of these criteria and because their business models target different sections of the online, and onchain, economy.

The Onchain5 series debuts today with the release of the list’s first name. We will be announcing the rest of the names in pairs of two in the coming days.

Coinbase: Uncle Sam’s Onramp 

Coinbase’s DNA has always been the trusted onramp into crypto, holding over $245 billion of assets in custody for over 8.7 million monthly users. With a market capitalization of $77.6 billion, Coinbase is also the only pure crypto firm in the S&P 500. 

With Base, a layer 2 blockchain launched in August 2023 built on the Optimism tech stack, it flips from a reactive custodian into an origination platform, gaining new distribution leverage across listings, developers, and users for everything from trading and lending to shopping. Base is home to 200M total crypto addresses, holds $4.8B of assets onchain, and has generated almost $150M in sequencer revenue. 

Coinbase’s mission is to increase economic freedom in the world, and crypto is the technology to service that mission. If Coinbase’s products showcase crypto as investments and crypto as financial services then Base helps showcase crypto as an application platform as part of the Coinbase mission and strategy, said CEO Brian Armstrong in an earnings call last year.

Base Scales Coinbase Financial Services

Base lets Coinbase scale its financial services offerings that augment its existing centralized stack without the overhead that might stall them in a centralized framework, while tying back into Coinbase’s brand and user base. 

One example is credit. Coinbase has historically run into issues launching borrow/lend products, which are both regulatorily and operationally complex. In 2021, the SEC threatened to sue Coinbase over the USDC Lend product, which did not end up launching, claiming that it would have been tantamount to issuing an unregistered security. On the operational side, Coinbase itself would have also needed to source and balance liquidity on both the borrower and lender sides. 

Today, through Coinbase’s Crypto-Backed Loans, the firm offloads that complexity to Base’s onchain liquidity pools powered by DeFi protocol Morpho that are akin to offerings from credit protocols like Aave or Compound. Through this arrangement, Coinbase simply provides the trusted front-end for users to access the product. This offering has grown to over $1.3 billion in open loan collateral with almost $900 million in loans originated.

Payments

Another example is payments. Coinbase Smart Wallets on Base offer a gasless experience for sending USDC, cbBTC (a wrapped version of BTC), and EURC (Circle’s euro-denominated stablecoin), meaning that users will not have to pay transaction fees on Base. Coinbase sponsors the gas payments for users that onboard to Base via the Coinbase Wallets, which leads to a seamless user experience. 

Trading

Lastly, there is DEX trading. Today, every new crypto asset requires Coinbase to evaluate custody, infra costs (nodes, security, keys), and regulatory thresholds before listing. This makes token support slow, opaque, and difficult to scale – especially for small-cap tokens. While the rollout of Coinbase DEX trading is still minimal and growing, ever since the August 2025 announcement, Coinbase users have traded at least $6 million in volume across 10K+ transactions across 100+ tokens. Most notably, most of the tokens traded are not listed on Coinbase’s centralized exchange. Of the ~1,000 tokens traded so far, only 13 are Base tokens currently listed on Coinbase.*  

As a result, Coinbase can host issuance, settlement, and trading directly on Base — enabling faster listings, deeper liquidity, and revenue diversification from onchain activity.

Base Gives Coinbase a Builder Go-to-Market Funnel

Builders have long been treated as issuers, and Coinbase’s relationship with them has been mostly transactional: projects launch elsewhere and eventually list on Coinbase. Base changes that dynamic by becoming a go-to-market funnel for builders, where new projects can build directly on Coinbase’s rails.

This unlocks two major advantages. 

First, Coinbase can capture developers earlier in the lifecycle and cross-sell them into other products (like business accounts and APIs). Second, Base gives Coinbase a way to own the developer relationship, who otherwise might build on alternative ecosystems – where Coinbase would never see them until it’s time to list. According to Electric Capital’s Developer Report, Base has around 1.6K+ monthly active developers, with 8K total repos, and 2 million total commits. With Base, those same teams build inside Coinbase’s orbit, making the company stickier with developers and extending its relationship moat.

So far, Base has become a home for new projects (like Clanker, a memecoin launchpad), institutional projects (like JPM, a deposit token issued by JPMorgan), and owns the leading share for projects issued across multiple chains (like Morpho and Virtuals). For example, Morpho’s total value locked in $7.8 billion, with $4.7 billion on Ethereum L1, followed by $1.7 billion on Base. 

Base Jumping

And now, the push into Base is now about to go into overdrive. In July, the company revamped its non-custodial Coinbase Wallet product to become the new Base App (currently in Beta), which puts Base front-and-center for its users. The new “super app”, as described by a Coinbase spokesperson in an interview with Unchained, even includes messaging and gaming features. Furthermore, the wallet’s waitlist has surged to over 1 million people. 

Over time, Base will aim to continue making inroads with builders and new users, while also powering Coinbase user products. For one, we can expect Coinbase’s continued investment into expanding the financial services that rely on Base. Secondly, products like Coinbase Onramp / Pay help connect a Coinbase user’s account to the non-custodial Base App wallet. Lastly, because the wallets that power the Coinbase onchain experiences are compatible with the non-custodial Base App wallets, it results in a cohesive custody flow that blends the seamless onchain experience with the offchain on-ramp.

Can Coinbase Avoid Playing Favorites?

As Coinbase tries to build its user base on Base, it will have to navigate some potentially tricky optics. Historically, its flagship centralized exchange is not meant to play favorites and supports as many tokens and blockchains as possible in a responsible manner. But as it expands the “onchain mullet” strategy of offering a centralized front-end (Coinbase) powered by a decentralized back-end (Base), it will be interesting to see how much of their onchain efforts will exclusively support Base as the only chain. 

The tension comes from the fact that, on one hand, the strategic case makes sense because it bolsters Base’s value proposition as an attractive home for developers seeking to access Coinbase’s distribution. However, this can lead to tradeoffs in terms of Coinbase’s resources into supporting alternative ecosystems for its onchain products. For example, users have reported negative experiences when dealing with Solana token deposits, withdrawals, and USDC support on Coinbase.

Armstrong addressed this perceived inconsistency in an August roundtable by saying, “Think of Base and Coinbase as different brands. So Coinbase is neutral. We are chain-agnostic, so we’re going to support every chain that our customers want. Base is its own separate organization and has a different brand for a reason.” 

He further said that while the new iteration of the Base App will be “Base first,” it can also “plans to make Base into a hub that has interoperability to Solana and other things.”

* We queried the CoinGecko API for all unique token contract addresses from Dune’s Coinbase DEX data to identify which tokens are officially listed on Coinbase.

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• By Not Staying Chain-Agnostic With Base, Could Coinbase Make a Wrong Bet?

• Why These DeFi Builders Are Betting It All on Coinbase’s L2, Base