Jesse Pollak, head of Base. It's a great pleasure to have you here. I think the last time we saw each other was in person at Token 2049 last year. A lot has happened since. First things first, how are you?
Not sure if Jesse can hear me. Oh, Jesse.
I'm doing great. Sorry about that. Doing great. Happy Thursday. How are you doing?
Yeah, very, very good. First things first, I want to apologize to you because a few weeks ago you put out your big tweet saying that there was some changes afoot at Base and I misread that and I was like, oh, Jesse's handing Base over to Jordan. And then the hordes of X trolls were going at you and I almost had to mute the notifications there. So I'm sorry about the misunderstanding, but you are still the head of Base. You've handed over the app to Jordan, and I think it's a good place to start the show and perhaps just talk a little bit about that. First things first, the thinking that went into that and how long that had been brewing.
Yeah, you know, I'd say it's been something that me and Jordan have been talking about for a few months, and really the focus shift for me was we're just seeing so much growth on tokenization, on trading, on payments, on financing, on Base the chain. And so leaning in on that and making sure I'm focused on that was kind of my top priority. And Jordan is an incredible builder, an incredible trader, and as we shifted the Base app to really focus on trading, it felt like a natural opportunity for him to take on more and to kind of accelerate that product with me focusing back on the chain. And I'd say just a few weeks in, we're seeing like pretty good results from it. The app is shipping super fast. I think they're building on a lot of the momentum we built up the first half of this year. And then on the chain side, we're just seeing more and more demand from kind of more established businesses that are looking to use Base to trade crypto and soon stocks and pretty much any asset, to do payments globally with dollar stablecoins like USDC, but also increasingly this whole cohort of 20-plus currencies we have with other stablecoins in Mexico and Argentina and Nigeria where folks are using their native currency on Base, and then also with financing where folks are lending out capital, building consumer experiences around that to earn yield. You see this in the Coinbase app and a bunch of other neobanks, neobrokerages, as well as enabling borrow products like borrowing against your Bitcoin and soon borrowing against stocks. And so that demand, I think, has just been incredible to see and it's growing really quickly month over month. And so I'm focused on growing that.
When it comes to, you know, Base the app, have you guys been doing a lot of sort of market research and looking at other players in the space and perhaps what other people are doing well and then looking to emulate that? Because I think, I mean, even in the media landscape, when we designed the show, we sat there looking at all the other shows that are out there and like, damn, that looks good, that doesn't look so good. Maybe we should try and like get a blend of all these things together. Can you talk a little bit about the process of redesigning or reapproaching what Base the app is and how it should look and feel?
Yeah, I'd say this is kind of product, which is always a mix of talking to customers, seeing what other folks are doing, and then having your own intuitions and kind of long-term perspectives that shape what you actually build. You know, I'd say at the beginning of this year, we saw that where the most demand was was really on the trading front. And so that was a shift in focus for us. We spent the last six months investing there. Today, you can trade any asset across pretty much any crypto ecosystem on the Base app. We've always said that Base is for everyone and it's a bridge, not an island. And so that's been important. We're rolling out new features like predictions and perps so that you can trade those. And we're really focused on making it so that it's the easiest place for folks to just get started. And so you can sign up in any country around the world with just an email and within seconds can be trading, saving, earning rewards on your USDC, and pretty much doing anything you want to with money, all powered by crypto behind the scenes. And so I think that's the direction that we're really leaning towards, is making a simple experience that anyone can get started with basically instantly, that gives you access to every product from a financial services perspective and is available globally.
When it comes to the competitive landscape, obviously there's been a huge focus on Robinhood Chain coming out, and I saw plenty of people in the Ethereum ecosystem sharing screenshots of the revenue that Robinhood Chain was earning in the first couple of weeks after it had gone live, and a bit of a pump in sort of meme coins there, and obviously tokenized stocks trading. But it's very clear to see that an L2 or a much, much faster infrastructure is what people want. But obviously that puts a stake in the ground. From the outside looking in, it's very much a direct competitor to Base. What are your general thoughts on that coming to market, and has that kind of lit a fire under your bum, preferably to get cracking?
Yeah. Well, I'd say we see kind of folks entering the market as validation of what we've been doing. We've been working on building Base now for three years. We've built an incredible economy. You know, there's almost $5 billion of assets that are in the DeFi ecosystem on Base. We're seeing, you know, a billion plus of trading volume on a daily basis. You know, trillions of dollars of stablecoins moving on our payment rails. And so I'd say we're excited about where we're at, and I think we feel like we're at the very beginning of a long journey to upgrade the global financial system, maybe 1% of the way there. And seeing folks like Robinhood, Stripe, and others come in and say, 'Hey, we want to follow a similar strategy. We want to kind of take a part of this technology stack that we have and bring it on chain.' And I think that's just like an awesome thing for the world. The more folks we have that are working to upgrade the system, the faster we're going to be able to do it. And the pie is so big that I'm not worried about, you know, feeling like boxed out or competitive as the primary dynamic. I will say like it's fun to compete with folks. I've always been an athlete, and that means that I like showing up and working my hardest and learning and seeing what people are doing and then just trying to get better. And so that's, I think, been energizing. But again, I feel like we're in a really good position. We've been building, but we're going to keep building, and we're excited to have a lot of other folks building alongside us.
I watched your appearance on Ansem's show, The Market Bubble, and obviously you guys had a lot of fun in that show and thought it was a really great kind of candid conversation. I wanted to get your thoughts just on memecoins because, you know, I think you tried to coin it differently, was it content coins? Is that the term that you like to go for? Do you still see like a fundamental difference between that and meme coins? And what are your general thoughts on Ansem's approach to memecoins and how he kind of revived what a lot of us were thinking was kind of just a dead narrative in this industry?
Yeah, I think like memes, what is dead will never die. Like I think people have called for the death of memes for many, many years and they aren't dead yet and I don't think they're going to die. In general, my take on memes is both memes and content coins and creator coins, they're all forms of what I would call attention assets, where they're basically trying to take the attention that all of us give to our screens, our devices, our scrolling, and translate that into kind of like financial value. And I'd say memes are doing that in the form of taking kind of memetic attention value. Creator coins are doing that in the form of kind of taking the attention that a single creator attracts and directing that into value. Content, our thesis there was that you can even do that with like a single piece of content, which maybe could turn into a meme, maybe is connected to the creator. And I think that this is one of the most novel kind of experimental, like primordial soup areas of crypto. And it's also like something that I think we're going to keep seeing a lot of experimentation around. And so I'm excited. I love what Ansem's doing. I think we've seen a ton of meme energy on Base over the last three years. And I think that seeing folks continue to experiment around how do we take the attention that all of us give to the internet and turn it into the financial value that crypto kind of enables through tokenization, and then redistribute that financial value to the communities and the creators and the folks who create all the memes and the creativity that drives that attention, I think it's a totally worthy and exciting experiment. And I'm excited to see it keep happening. And so I'd say broadly, yeah, I'm fired up about what Ansem's doing, fired up to see more of it on Base, and I think we're very early in that journey.
I wanted to talk a little bit about agentic finance because I think it's kind of brewing, but it's going to hit us like a train when it finally properly unlocks. And I think that's the infrastructure that Base, Robinhood Chain, a lot of L2s, Solana, a lot of other competing L1s are really looking at unlocking because we all know that AI agents would be far better suited to using blockchain rails and not having to have KYC, etc. We're already seeing like x402, I think it was in April, had like $48 million and 85% flowing through Base. So it looks like that's already happening. Can you talk a little bit about your thesis on agentic trading and what that's going to look like in the next six months to a year? Because AI is moving so quickly that it's very difficult to predict what's going to happen or even know what's going to happen in a year's time.
Yeah, it is moving really quickly and it's been awesome to see that kind of get started and then grow quickly on Base. And like you said, I think that something like 90% of agentic x402 transactions are happening on Base today. That's a mix of payments and trading. And I think it's only going to grow from here. I'd say my general thesis is that agents are kind of software-defined beings, and that means that the native form of money that they're going to, you know, choose when they go to reach for value is going to also be software. And that's what crypto is. You know, crypto is money as software that's running on these global decentralized rails that let anyone access it without having to sign up or KYC or do any of the kind of laborious things we've gotten used to in the legacy financial system. And so that means that agents can get a wallet, can get started, can transact, can buy content with x402 or pay other agents all instantly and in a language that they natively understand. And so I think starting with that kind of base assumption, this is the toolkit that agents are going to reach for, you then have to just think, okay, well, how big is that going to get? And it's like, I think there's going to be billions, trillions of agents that are working both on behalf of humans and in more sovereign ways where they're actually setting their own goals and figuring out how to coordinate together, and they're going to be choosing crypto as the platform that they do that on. And so over the next few years, I think we'll see a pretty big explosion of different use cases of folks paying each other, of them trading, and of them, you know, inventing new financial primitives that I think enable them to do things more quickly, more efficiently, in a way that folks can capture more value. One thing that I'm super excited about that's kind of growing really quickly on Base right now is this whole kind of space of tokenized inference. I don't know if you've seen this, but this was invented by the Venice team with DM, where they basically took inference, which is the thing that you use to run an agent, and tokenized it so that anyone could then trade and kind of find the fair market value of that inference, and then agents could actually have sovereign access to it, where they could hold the inference and use it over time in a way that they could have kind of a guarantee that they'd be able to continue to operate. What that's then enabled is a whole market around the tokenized inference where people are buying and selling it at a discount, where that's enabling agents to then come in and get access to inference more cheaply, and then folks are building tons of demand sources around it where it's now like flowing in in terms of demand to get access to that cheaper inference. And so I think that kind of financial experimentation is kind of uniquely possible on chain. You can't have a kind of free market for inference that anyone can plug into, that anyone can build financial primitives on top of, and that anyone globally can kind of plug into from a demand perspective on any other platform in the world. And so seeing that happen on Base, I think, is a really good indicator of where we're going. I think it's just going to get more and more complex and more and more powerful.
