Base captures revenue from the agentic economy

Base captures sequencer fees from transactions that settle on its infrastructure. In Q1 2026, over 90% of on-chain agentic stablecoin transactions used USDC on Base. By Q2 2026, this figure for agentic stablecoin transaction volume on Base remained above 90%. Coinbase’s x402 protocol processed over 97% of on-chain agentic transactions in Q2 2026. Stablecoin transaction volume on the Base chain grew sevenfold year-over-year. This growth follows the launch of the Cobalt upgrade, which improves transaction control and privacy for tokenized finance. Coinbase also uses Base to drive its "win onchain" priority. Coinbase’s average USDC held in products reached $20 billion in Q2 2026, which is more than 30% of all USDC in circulation. In Q1 2026, Coinbase reported $1.4B in revenue, and that figure fell to $1.22B in Q2 2026. Despite this, Coinbase reached a crypto trading volume market share of 10.3% in Q2 2026. Coinbase’s prediction markets contracts and revenue grew 106% quarter-over-quarter, surpassing $100 million in annualized revenue. Coinbase’s subscription and services revenue reached $555 million in Q2 2026, which was 48% of net revenue.

Arbitrum Orbit and the Superchain

Arbitrum Orbit provides a way for projects to create layers with minimal time. The Arbitrum DAO currently votes to add more projects as Orbit Chains. More than 50 active projects now use Orbit Layer 3 chains. Tria abstraction chain integration allows asset movement into Arbitrum Orbit from across EVM, Solana, Cosmos, and Bitcoin. Optimism also provides features for its Superchain L3 networks. These networks use custom gas tokens to tailor transaction fees or use plasma mode to select a data availability layer. Custom gas tokens allow these networks to use existing L2 tokens for gas fees, which simplifies the onboarding process. You might find the transition to Orbit chains easier than the Optimism Superchain. Arbitrum’s Total Value Locked reached $3.85 billion in October. Arbitrum’s daily transaction volume in October averaged 3.4 million, and its cumulative cross-chain inflows exceeded $2.3 billion. The generation of new wallets for Arbitrum started in March and went vertical in the last two weeks of May. Daily active users exceeded 520,000 in October, and the network handles significant volume.

The reality of ZK proof costs

Scroll operates as a general-purpose ZK rollup that uses the EVM for off-chain computations. The Euclid upgrade migrates Scroll to a new proving system using OpenVM, which is a general-purpose RISC-V zkVM developed by Axiom that reduces proving costs and latency while removing circuit capacity constraints. This architecture uses chunk proofs and batch proofs, plus bundle proofs for final aggregation.

Scroll’s transaction costs remain higher than its competitors. The median DEX swap on Scroll cost $0.27, while Linea and zkSync Era saw costs of $0.18 and $0.21 respectively. Median USDC transfers on Scroll cost $0.06, which is higher than the $0.04 on Linea and $0.05 on zkSync Era.

Scroll’s L1 finality time reaches approximately 90 minutes. This is much slower than the ~30 minutes for zkSync Era and ~75 minutes for Linea. Do the cost benefits of the OpenVM upgrade outweigh the slower finality times?