When I think about trading and I think about building a trading product, there's no better than him to do that. And that's where the focus of the Base app has shifted over the last six months. You know, we made that pivot six months ago, but I think that he's the right person to carry it forward and really deliver that world-class trading product that I think crypto Twitter wants to see and I think will deliver a huge amount of value for the customers who use it. And so that I think to both of us felt just like this natural partnership where I could double down on this blockchain for global finance, on continuing to work towards decentralization, on continuing to be the best place for developers and enterprises and scaled adopters to come onchain, and then he could focus in on that trading problem alongside kind of a new scope that he also took on across the Coinbase products for trading to make sure that they're building the best possible products there. And so I'm fired up about it. I don't think I would be feeling as fired up if I didn't trust Jordan to be such a good shepherd of this product that we've built, and I think we're going to see a lot of good things on both sides for the next year.
Hey everyone, welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host Laura Shin. Thanks for joining us live stream. Before we dive in, we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible. This episode is brought to you by Cape, America's privacy-first mobile carrier. Same premium service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed so your number, your location, and your data actually stay yours. Get 33% off six months at cape.co/chained.
Today's guest is Jesse Pollak, creator of Base. Welcome, Jesse.
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Yeah, excited to chat with you. You had a lot of big news this week and it must have been challenging for you to share. You wrote a long tweet about how you felt a lot of what the Base app in particular had aimed to do in the social arena had failed and that spending resources on that had resulted in Base falling behind in key areas such as perps, prediction markets, even tokenization and payments. So, you announced you would be returning to focus primarily on Base and would hand the reins of the Base app over to Jordan Fish, aka Kobe. So first of all, I just want to say I have a lot of respect for you for always being so transparent and putting yourself out there, and especially because you know that can be tough when what you're attempting doesn't succeed. But I also detected a note of optimism and joy when you talked about putting your head down, building, writing code. So tell us how you're feeling right now.
Yeah. I think I'm mostly feeling excited. I mean, as an entrepreneur, I feel like it's always a little scary to take big bets and some of those bets won't work out, but when you have a bet that doesn't work out, putting it behind you and saying, 'Okay, let's double down on what is working and lean into that and get fired up about that,' I think is just like a huge opportunity. And so that's exactly what I'm doing. And I think, you know, one of the things that maybe has gotten a little bit lost in the conversation about Base app is that Base chain has been kind of behind the scenes cooking for the last two years. It's now the biggest spot market in the world for crypto trading onchain. So Bitcoin, Ethereum, other assets trade more on Base than any other chain. It is one of the world's most important stablecoin settlement rails. It's leading in agentic finance and agentic payments. And so that for me is this like energizing signal that crypto is starting to hit real product-market fit, and me taking my energy and saying, hey, the bet on the app that we made last year didn't quite work out. Let's refocus on the chain and growing that while handing the app to Jordan, who's just a killer and I think is going to absolutely crush the mandate of building an onchain trading product. That just feels like a win-win-win and I'm fired up to get back to work on it.
And I'm sure you've done so much reflecting on this, but I'm curious. So, obviously the numbers were showing that the social bet wasn't panning out, but why do you think it didn't work out?
You know, I think some of it, you know, was just like the timing of it. If you look at kind of where crypto is getting product-market fit today, it's really in finance. Stablecoins, tokenization, prediction markets, perps โ these categories are growing incredibly quickly. I think one of the theses that I have and I've always had is that the whole world is going to be consumed by crypto. We're basically going to go from the kind of barebones crypto of Bitcoin up to having smart contracts, to building finance, to every single part of our society leveraging this new technology to make it more efficient, more fair, more free, and more global. And that of course includes social. But I think the thing that we missed, or maybe not missed, but the thing that maybe went wrong there was there's so much work to do just on the finance side. And when you look at where the product-market fit is today, it's really in upgrading finance. And so for me going in there and saying, 'Hey, let's focus there. Let's make progress there. Let's build that kind of foundation.' And then as time goes on, of course, the rest of the world will continue to upgrade as well. I think that's the big learning and lesson. And you know, this is I think one of my opportunities as a leader is I always want to do everything, and one of the things that I think I can do better is focus on the small concrete things that we can do every single day to push forward where the product is right now.
All right. So in a moment we'll talk more about the pivots coming at Coinbase, but first we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible. If you hold crypto on your phone, your biggest vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your carrier. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have been breached again and again, and SIM swaps are still one of the easiest ways for attackers to drain accounts. That's where Cape comes in. America's privacy-first mobile carrier. Same premium service, but Cape rotates the identifier on your SIM every 24 hours, deletes your call and text metadata after a day, and protects against SIM swaps with a 24-word recovery phrase that only you control. You also get two end-to-end encrypted secondary numbers for banking and signups, so you stop handing your real number to every app that asks. Go to cape.co/chained and use code unchained for 33% off your first six months.
Back to my conversation with Jesse. So, the day after your announcement in which you said Brian wouldn't post bull-post memes on the timeline due to his age, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, did end up in a minor controversy around a Brian memecoin that he wasn't actually directly affiliated with. He changed his X profile pic to an image of Coinbase Man, and its affiliated coin, Brian, had actually just been launched a couple days prior. It ended up doing like 37x up to about a $37 million market cap, but then a couple days later he swapped it for a CryptoPunk and then the token crashed about 90%. And he ended up having to tweet, 'Please don't follow my personal X account for investment advice or signals around individual coins. My posting profile pics are also not endorsements. If you're treating my X account as alpha, you are doing so at your own risk against my wishes.' So people were obviously unhappy about what happened there. And I wondered, you know, if you had insight into like why he did this or if there was even any like lack of awareness about what might possibly happen.
Yeah. I mean, Brian's someone who always like says what he means and means what he says. And I feel like I'm the same way. When I posted that Brian's not going to bull-post memes, I actually feel like that's exactly like what happened. Brian's not bull-posting memes with changing his PFP. He's changing his PFP because he's, you know, excited about CryptoPunks, excited about Coinbase, and just kind of continuing to figure out how to be a human on the internet. And so I look at this and I'm like, there's consistency in his messaging. You shouldn't be trading Brian's PFP as a core piece of financial advice. And I think what we're focused on with Base and with Coinbase is figuring out how do we just make more use cases, more real-world impact. And if people want to trade memes, if they want to trade stocks, if they want to trade basically anything, we want them to do it on Base. But we're not going to play the kind of short-term game where we say, 'Hey, you know, listen to Brian as a key spokesperson of what things you should trade.'
Yeah. I mean, watching that incident, it sort of felt to me like there's a gap between how you expect or you want memecoins or creator coins to work and then how they actually work in the real world. And I wondered if you, you know, had thoughts about like why that gap exists or what needs to happen in order for that gap to not exist or for memecoins and creator coins to work the way that you had envisioned.
Well, I think a lot of it is like kind of changing the culture and changing the structures from an economic perspective to be more long-term. You know, when I think about what a successful asset or project or kind of anything that we contribute to the world is, it's something that makes positive impact on, you know, our economy or on our society over a long-term horizon. And you can trade the ups and downs of that. I think that that's like a really important part of the market. It helps with price discovery. It gives people a way to make money. But in terms of the underlying assets, the thing that you want is you want things that are oriented towards the long term, that have the right incentives to be set up for the long term and kind of drive that change through their being. And so when I look at the kind of like Brian coin, you know, that wasn't a coin that Brian launched. It wasn't something that he endorsed explicitly. It wasn't something that was set up in a way that was geared towards the long term. And so it's kind of unsurprising to me that there was then a bunch of drama about it in a kind of short-term way. And so I think what we want to be orienting people towards is that long-term perspective of how do we get to a world of crypto culture and a world of crypto technology where we are setting up the systems, the culture, and the products to be making that long-term impact.
All right. So now let's talk about some other recent news because Robinhood chain launched just a few weeks ago and according to Artemis data it's actually already surpassed Base in terms of the number of daily active users twice. I also noticed 24-hour fees on Robinhood chain have already like roughly 4x'd the same on Base. So I would love to hear your thoughts on how you intend to compete with the likes of Robinhood.
Yeah, I mean when you look at Base today, we've been building now for three years. We have the largest onchain spot markets in crypto. We have a ton of stablecoin volume moving through Base and just an incredibly dense network of builders that have made Base their home. And so, you know, I think there's always going to be oscillation in activity and oscillation in prices. And I think particularly when you have new ecosystems cropping up and these kind of meadows emerging, there's that kind of frenzy or activity that shows up in a big way. And I think what we're focused on again, which is probably not going to be surprising given the rest of our conversation, is the long term. It's how do we continue to make sure that Base is fast, trusted, easy to use, that it's a place where developers and builders are coming to build new protocols, that we're launching quality assets like stocks, which are coming very soon, that we're expanding the sorts of market types that are available to make it so that people can trade spot, they can trade perps, they can trade predictions, they can borrow and lend and do financing, and they can do it all in one place on Base. And so when we look at, you know, folks coming into the ecosystem, we look at that as a really positive validation of our strategy. You know, this is the world starting to come onchain. You literally have the largest financial companies in the world starting to say, hey, let's bring our products onchain, let's bring our customers onchain, and that's just growing the pie. And so I think that we're very early in the overall adoption of crypto. You know, less than 1% of the world is using this technology and we're just going to keep taking the learnings and then keep making sure that Base is the place where people are coming and building finance, whether it's trading or payments or agents or anything else.
So, you know, looking at these potential competitors, Stripe's, Tempo, Robinhood, it does seem that they have an advantage in distribution that maybe Base doesn't. But I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that take and how you think about that kind of like hurdle or obstacle.
Yeah. Well, I mean, first off, I think it's worth saying that Base comes from Coinbase and Coinbase has one of the largest user bases for crypto in the United States and around the world. You know, it's the biggest place in the world in terms of assets stored. There's tens of millions of users with funded accounts. They have millions and millions of users with activity. And so I think that's a really strong starting point.
