Coinbase announced Wednesday that it is bringing leveraged crypto derivatives to Base App, letting eligible users trade perpetual futures with leverage of up to 50x through Hyperliquid.

The integration opens access to more than 290 perpetual futures markets, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, alongside markets tied to stocks and commodities. According to Coinbase, perps account for roughly 75% of crypto trading volume and rank as the most requested feature among Base App's power users.

"Perps are where the volume is—roughly 75% of all crypto trading today is perps, not spot," Coinbase Head of Engineering Chintan Turakhia told Decrypt, calling them "the single most requested feature from our power users."

Perpetual futures, or perps, are derivatives that let traders bet on whether an asset's price will rise or fall without owning the underlying asset. Unlike traditional futures, they do not expire. Traders can use leverage to control larger positions with less capital, which magnifies both potential gains and losses.

"Our most active users have been telling us clearly that leverage is what would get them to stay; perps are the single most requested feature from our power users," Turakhia added. "This launch brings them the advanced trading tools they've been asking for, without giving up self-custody." Unlike Coinbase's main exchange, where the company holds customer funds, Base App users trade from their own wallets.

At launch, users can trade more than 290 perpetual futures pairs around the clock, ranging from Bitcoin and Ethereum to tokenized stocks and commodities, with leverage of up to 50x depending on the asset. If losses exceed certain thresholds, the position can be liquidated.

While the trades take place inside Base App, Hyperliquid handles their execution. Hyperliquid operates a decentralized exchange on its own Layer 1 blockchain and has grown into one of the largest on-chain venues for perpetual futures, a market that has long been dominated by offshore exchanges such as Binance and Bybit.

"[Hyperliquid] is one of the highest-performance onchain perps protocols, and because we support multiple chains and ecosystems, this integration lets our users tap into its deep liquidity and speed without ever leaving their existing wallet," Turakhia said.

According to Coinbase, the perpetual futures product is not available in the U.S., UK, Canada, or other jurisdictions that restrict leveraged crypto derivatives. In the United States, leveraged crypto futures can only be offered through exchanges regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The move adds to a growing list of trading products inside Base App and comes a year after Coinbase rebranded its wallet as Base App—a wallet tied to Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network it launched in 2023—pitching it as an "everything app" that combined crypto trading with social features, messaging, AI tools, and creator monetization.

That strategy has since shifted. In July, Base creator Jesse Pollak stepped back from leading the app after acknowledging that its push into social features and creator coins had failed to drive the adoption he expected. Pollak said prediction markets, perpetuals, and stablecoins had instead emerged as stronger drivers of adoption, with Base refocusing on trading, payments, and AI agents.

"[In my opinion] we made the right bet on builders, but obviously the wrong bet on social," he wrote on X.