Morning Minute: Coinbase Teases a Community Token – Decrypt

Morning Minute is a day by day e-newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The evaluation and opinions expressed are his personal and don’t essentially replicate these of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.

GM!

In the present day’s prime information:

• Crypto majors flat whereas shares and gold hit new ATHs; BTC at $115,300
• Coinbase teases a community token in exploration
• Polymarket’s newest filings trace at potential token drop
• Saylor & others to satisfy with Sen. Lummis at this time to debate Strategic BTC Reserve
• MetaMask debuts its mUSD stablecoin

🔥 Coinbase Teases a Community Token

After years of ready, Base maxis are about to be rewarded.

A Base token is lastly within the works.

📌 What Occurred

Coinbase’s L2, Base, is formally “exploring a community token.”

Jesse Pollak revealed it on stage at BaseCamp, with Coinbase reiterating the plan on X.

There is no such thing as a timeline or design but, however they emphasised doing it within the open and with U.S. regulators.

Base already posts heavyweight utilization:

• ~13M day by day transactions
• ~865k lively addresses
• ~$5B TVL
• ~$1.28B 24h DEX quantity

These metrics would make a Base token catapult to the highest of any L2 token record upon its debut.

🗣️ What They’re Saying

• “We’re going to be exploring a community token… I might be up entrance with y’all, it’s early.” – Jesse Pollak at BaseCamp
• “We’re exploring a Base community token. It may very well be an awesome device for accelerating decentralization and increasing creator and developer development within the ecosystem. To be clear, there aren’t any definitive plans. We’re simply updating our philosophy. As of now, we’re exploring it.” – Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, on X

🧠 Why It Issues

If Coinbase really drops a community token, the market will instantly attain for comps.

Listed below are the cleanest comparables and quick-and-dirty valuation ranges utilizing at this time’s on-chain and market information

Utilization + TVL snapshot (at this time):

• Base (fdv TBD): ~$5.0B TVL; DEX quantity (24h): ~$1.28B
• Arbitrum (fdv of $5B): ~$3.45B TVL; DEX quantity (24h): ~$521M
• Optimism (fdv of $3.2B): Bridged TVL: ~$2.27B; DEX quantity (24h): ~$29M
• BNB Chain (fdv of $128B): DEX quantity (24h): ~$2.48B

Utilizing these numbers (ignoring BNB for now), a back-of-the-napkin state of affairs for a Base token’s market cap would put it at $6B-$7B honest worth out of the gate.

However with COIN inventory buying and selling at $84B, it will in all probability additionally get a little bit of a “Coinbase premium,” like BNB will get with Binance.

That probably pushes it to the $8B-$10B vary (after all, pending tokenomics).

So sure, it is a huge deal. A brand new 10-figure token is likely to be incoming.

Now the important thing questions grow to be – When token? And when airdrop?

Sadly, probably not quickly in any respect.

I’d guess This autumn 2026 for a Base token based mostly on the workforce’s “exploratory” feedback.l

As for the airdrop, I’d wager on the group being rewarded. Launching a token with out an airdrop can be a deathblow to Coinbase sentiment.

So in case you haven’t already, perhaps use the Base community. Rewards are probably coming to those that wait…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Memes

Just a few Crypto and Web3 headlines that caught my eye:

In Company Treasuries

• Ahead Industries accomplished a $1.6B SOL purchase turning into the most important SOL TreasuryCo
• BMNR disclosed holdings of two.151M ETH ($9.73B) and $569M in money
• Helius raised $500M to construct a Solana TreasuryCo
• Technique purchased simply 525 BTC for about $60.2M final week, lifting holdings to 638,985 BTC
• David Bailey’s NAKA inventory plunged ~55% after PIPE shares registration and writing a letter to shareholders encouraging them to promote in the event that they wished

In Memes

• Memecoin leaders are principally flat; DOGE even, Shiba -1%, PEPE -1%, PENGU -1%, BONK +1%, TRUMP -1%, SPX -1%, and FARTCOIN even
• Alex Becker’s StrSzn streamer coin did over $69M in quantity and generated $300k+ in charges (mc at $5M), as most streamer cash fell considerably
• RUNNER (+465%) and GoProCat (+200%) had been prime movers
• ZORA jumped 22% on the again of the Base token information

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

This is a rundown of main token, protocol and airdrop information from the day:

🤖 AI x Crypto

Part devoted to headlines within the AI sector of crypto:

• Total market cap even at $13.6B, leaders had been blended
• FARTCOIN (even), VIRTUAL (+1%), TIBBIR (+2%), aixbt (-1%) & ai16z (+1%)
• CLANKER (+12%), YNE (+10%) and Nuit (+6%) led prime movers

🚚 What is occurring in NFTs?

Right here is the record of different notable headlines from the day in NFTs:

• ETH NFT leaders had been blended; Punks +1% at 48.9 ETH, Pudgy -1% at 10.1, BAYC +1% at 8.95 ETH
• Shrimpers (+18%) and Gemesis (+11%) had been prime movers
• Summary NFTs had been very inexperienced led by Gigaverse ROMs and Noah’s Ark
• Seedphrase acquired Wolf Recreation and might be shifting it to Summary