Fireside: Base's Jesse Pollak | Austin Griffith - BuidlGuidl & Jesse Pollak Base

Thank you. And I'm joined by Austin Griffith.

Yeah. Well, hey everyone. I'm Jesse. If you don't know me, I've been working on Base since it started four years ago, three and a half years ago. And from the beginning, we've said a pretty consistent line about Base, which is that our vision is to build a global economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom. And you know what makes up a global economy? Well, it's all kinds of people doing all kinds of different things. Whether they're building or they're creating or they're trading, it's people producing things and consuming things all around the world. As we think about our work and the Base core team's work, we break that economy down into three things. First is the chain, which we kind of think about as the home of that global economy. It's the underlying platform where people can build apps, they can write software, they can issue new assets, they can trade those assets. That is this incredibly diverse ecosystem. Everyone from all different backgrounds are building on the chain, and they're all participating in the kind of economic marketplace that is the chain.

The second part of what we do is on the consumption side. So if you think about the chain as being this way of kind of creating all this energy in the economy, we then need people to actually engage with that. We need them to trade the content or trade the assets. We need them to use the apps. We need them to deploy their capital. And that's where the app comes in. That's the Base app. You can kind of think of it as a front door to this economy and really to the entire crypto economy because it doesn't support just Base. It also supports Ethereum and every other L2 and Solana too. Our goal is to bring as many people into this economy as humanly possible. And then all of that fuses together with this lens that we have of growth, where it's about how do we take the chain and how do we take the app and then how do we take all of these people who are using those two things in different ways and accelerate them in a repeatable and scalable way so that we can move from the world being 99% offchain and 1% onchain to 99% onchain and 1% offchain over the next decade. And so it's now been three years of pushing that forward. In 2025, we learned a lot, and we're fired up for 2026 because it feels like it's never been closer that we could actually accomplish that.

Yeah, well, I feel like as an industry we've kind of been circling this intersection of crypto and AI for a while. And last year at about this time or a little bit before, there was kind of a lot of hype around it. But I think at the time it felt like AI wasn't quite there, where like there was this idea, oh, we would have autonomous agents and they'll have wallets and they'll start to do things, but the reality on the ground was like the software is not good enough. I think the thing that feels different this time, and really this feels like it changed in December with the release of Opus 4.5 and Sonnet 4.5, is it feels like the models have kind of crossed the chasm, you know. And I'd say it's not that these models are now operating entirely independently. Like I think that that is probably a step too far for where we are today, but what's shifted is maybe before it was like 80% human with a little bit of model like helping you go faster. Now it's like 80% model with a little bit of human curating the model and helping the model get smarter and helping the agent get smarter. I think what that's unlocked is it's basically unlocked this kind of almost new class of builder who are saying, hey, what if we create agents and give those agents capabilities to like build products or to create content and then let those agents monetize and let them tokenize as a way of generating revenue for themselves. And just in a few weeks, I think we've seen that that's really started to take off. And it's not just, you know, Ethereum natives like you who are doing that. I think one of the things that's been most exciting for me is that we've actually started to see people kind of outside of crypto come in, right? You have people like, you know, Austin and Nalison who have built agents like Kelly and are actually like building little businesses. Like the agent is a business. The agent is tokenizing upfront to get funding for its own compute and to operate its business, and then it's generating revenue which is then getting reinvested back into the agent, being reinvested into this capital structure that's being created there. And so I think that that is a new thing, and it's happening on Base and it's happening on Ethereum. And I think one of the reasons why it's happening on Base and happening on Ethereum is because of the investment in the infrastructure that we spent the last couple years building. When you look at things like, you know, ERC-8004, you look at the EVM, like these are some of the battle-tested pieces of software where when agents are thinking where do we want to deploy, they're like, well, we want to deploy on a fast, cheap EVM chain that has every stablecoin in the world, is connected to every exchange, and that every user has assets on because that's what's going to be the best place for us as an agent. And so I think what we've started to see in the last three weeks is that we've crossed that chasm. The agents are starting to come, the technology is ready, and there's a network effect starting to be built of 8004, x402, EVM, where agents are proliferating, and that's leading to more builders seeing, oh, I can build an agent here. Then those agents are collaborating. They're finding ways to sell services to each other. And that's starting to build this little core of real economic value and creation. And I think that that's going to balloon in a big way over the next couple years.

Yeah. Well, you know, honestly, I think one of the biggest, you know, misses of Ethereum's ecosystem over the last few years, I think that there has been an almost kind of like cultural negativity towards trading and traders. And I think one of the places that comes from is Ethereum has always had a very long-term perspective. And at times when people are trading, things can feel short-term and there's almost this feeling of like a value tension there. And I think what that's led to is when you look at where most of the kind of fast high velocity capital is, it's been off Ethereum, right? It's been on Solana. Base has done, I think, a pretty good job building some of that. But I think that we've honestly been slowed down by that cultural bias in Ethereum. And candidly, I'll be the first to admit that I actually started with a similar bias. Like, I've never been a trader. And I think that that caused me to almost like lack some empathy of, you know, what do traders want? What are they seeing? And then not just what do they want and what are they seeing, but also what value are they bringing to the economy. And I think when you take a step back and you look objectively, the most important innovation of crypto's entire life cycle is tokenization. You know, it started with Bitcoin, which was like tokenizing a pure proof-of-work blockchain that can be digital gold. It's progressed to tokenizing Ethereum, which allowed Ethereum to fundraise and become what it is through the ICO phase, through NFTs. Like at every single phase of crypto where you had a boom of excitement and resources investment, it was always around tokenization. And I think what we're seeing with this fast trader capital is that when you have high velocity capital and you combine that with tokenization, it leads to economic output. And so the prime example of this is agents, right? What's happening right now on Base is that agents are tokenizing and then traders are trading the agents and that's spinning off fees and then those fees are being used by the agents for compute. The fees are kind of this economic like offflow that is funding innovation. And my intuition is that the thing that gets a billion people on chain is at that intersection. It's at the intersection of builders creating value and traders and investors allocating capital into that and that creating this flywheel that leads to really, really aggressive growth. And I think on both sides you can make a case. You know, I hear from traders they're like, oh, we need better builders who are bringing better speculative assets so that we don't be short-term. And I hear from builders, oh, we need better traders who are going to hold longer term. You know, there's kind of like both sides of the aisle where you can point fingers and say it's the other person's fault. And then I think there's also cultural differences where, you know, like what I described on Ethereum, you can almost have cultural bias against one of those groups. I think my perspective is we need to solve that. We need to bridge the gap and this is the focus for Base in 2026. I think we underfocused on traders in 2025. I think that builders have always been our focus. It's been the P0. We've always had Base is for builders and builders remain a P0. But I think the opportunity for us is to elevate the traders to bring in more capital and to really get into the substance of how do we solve this? How do we actually make that flywheel work really well so tokenization can work for both the capital side and the labor side and create this new generative, emergent, like almost innovative soup that all of the innovation that ultimately is going to bring billions of people on chain is going to come from. And so this is what my talk was about, like doing the uncomfortable thing of journeying into the gray area between these two. And there are some gnarly things in my DMs, right? Like I have people like, 'Bro, put the CA in your bio.' And worse. And it kind of, there are these parts that are just like weird for me. Same as you, like when the Dogecoins, the dog coins came along, you know, a few years ago, I didn't know what was going on, right? And now I feel like I understand a little bit more. But there are hard parts as a builder to deal with the trenches and this flywheel is important and you've been getting kind of beat up in particular about like trading and focusing on trading,

Yeah. Well, I think the first place I approach it from is like we don't have it figured out and no one has it figured out. And so like starting from a place of trying to be curious about what's going on and trying to be curious about, you know, if someone's in your DMs or replying, like where are they coming from? And not just where are they coming from individually, but like what are the structural failures right now that are leading to this behavior? Like that's the first thing for me is like just be curious. I think the second thing is always just like empathy and like trying to understand and I think that's connected to curiosity. But the thing for me is I think that in figuring out this builder-creator relationship, there's a part of it that's like cultural where it's we need to like both like reform a little bit around what to expect. Like if you're a trader, what can you expect from builders? If you're a builder, what do you expect from traders? And I think it's pretty clear that like the expectations may be a little bit out of whack on both sides. And we need to like gradually culturally norm expectations that are more realistic. Like maybe if you start something, it isn't going to go from zero to everything overnight. Like it's going to take weeks or it's going to take months. I think that's one part of it. I think the other part of it, and I think this is the thing that's frustrating both sides and honestly is the backdrop for so much negative sentiment right now, is that we just still have a lot of work to do to get from the speculation into the products that are like repeating value, like creating value in a repeatable way, making money in a repeatable way, and then having that money and value flow back into the token and the tokenization. And I think those three things, like if we can start from a place of curiosity and empathy and try and understand each other, and then we can work together to reform on both sides about acceptance and figuring out like how do we make this relationship between builders and traders work, and then we can both push towards building products that have longevity, that generate real value for customers, and that generate real revenue that's going to converge into this place where I think over the next couple years what we'll see is that traders will actually start to evolve into investors because they're going to kind of move up that Maslow hierarchy of needs where it's like, oh, now that I'm seeing more and more of these projects that have, you know, repeated skin in the game and repeated track records that are good long-term investments, I want to allocate my capital more slowly and I want to be holding for longer periods. And so I do think that it's not just going to be one side or the other. It's going to be about understanding. It's going to be about kind of culturally norming, and then it's going to be about focusing on building substance so we can both benefit from this flywheel on both the trader and the builder side.

Oh, I was going to say, and I think like the backdrop to all of it is just be patient. I mean, and try and keep our cool. I mean, man, it can be hard on crypto Twitter. Like it can feel painful and