Coinage's Crypto Project of the Year celebration is back, spotlighting the top projects in crypto, including the leading consumer-focused Ethereum Layer 2, Base, incubated by Coinbase. Base exploded in 2024 by leveraging Ethereum security with cheaper transaction fees and faster settlement times to bring millions onchain. Which nominated project deserves to be crowned crypto's project of the year? You decide. Head to Coinage Media to vote.
Okay, back on Coinage with us today, Base Builder number one, Jesse Pollak, representing Base on the show. Jesse, good to see you, man.
Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Yeah, it's been a while since we had you on, but you know, you and I were at ETH Denver earlier this year, and to think how far we've come, not just in crypto, but honestly everything that's happened on Base and with you as well, dude, it's been a wild year. And congratulations on being one of the crypto projects that we are nominating in our Crypto Project of the Year celebration. I'm curious, I just want to start with kind of how this year's been for you. What's been the thing that you're most proud of in watching Base explode in 2024? What's it been like for Jesse?
Yeah, well, I think it's been an exciting year. We came into the year having just launched, and I think had a lot of momentum, but it was still very early. We weren't quite sure where the year would go, and we're leaving the year, as you know at this point, the largest L2 in the world, I think pretty rapidly emerging as the largest chain and the best place for developers to build onchain in the world. And just so much energy, excitement globally about Base, and so that's been super exhilarating and fun. And it's really only possible because there's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people all around the world who have started believing in this vision of building a global onchain economy, and believing in a better world where we increase innovation, where we increase creativity, where we increase freedom, and where we all benefit from this next generation of the internet that we're building together onchain. And so I'm super excited, and it's definitely just still day one. We're in the very, very early days of this kind of global transformation to leverage this new technology platform and this new economy. And what we're focused on is just putting our heads back down and keeping building, and keeping on finding other awesome builders who want to build alongside us.
Yeah, honestly, it's probably one of the least controversial picks from our community this year to talk about Base, just because there are so many different metrics to dig into, Jesse, in terms of showing the runaway kind of success y'all have had this year. Whether it's TVL, which we're looking at now, whether it's, you know, users, whether it's all kinds of things. I'm just kind of curious what you're most kind of monitoring in the early days to say, look, this is kind of the traction we're excited to see, but I think that this one in particular might mean more. Is there anything that you look at that way?
I mean, I think generally the way we think about Base as an economy is that it's really like builders first. The most important thing is, are we giving tools and really enabling builders, whether those builders are developers or creators or community builders, are we giving them the tools to build whatever they want to onchain? And that can be an app, that can be creativity, that can be a community. And so as we see kind of the growth of developers, as we see the growth of creators, we believe that that's what's then going to bring in kind of all the capital, it's going to bring in the users because there's going to be really interesting things to do. And so we're really most focused on builders. And we have an internal ethos that's really like, you know, like builder first, like all of us are builders, everyone's a builder. And I think that that really grounds us in making sure that we're actually, you know, building the best experience for all of them.
Yeah, also, I mean, you personally, when we talk about not just being Base Builder number one, but also what you're up to at Coinbase, I need to congratulate you because you were also added to the executive team and also inherited what Coinbase is working on when it comes to the wallet. And I feel like the wallet is so integrated into kind of what you guys are trying to do with Base in terms of making it easier and easier for creators, users to come onchain. Obviously, we at Coinage also witnessed that with our trivia game, super huge success in terms of making it easy for people to play. But now in that role, I mean, as you're working on the wallet, how does that kind of align, I guess, everything you're trying to do with Base with making it easy for people to use it and bringing cost down? What are you most excited about in terms of pairing all of those things as you move into next year?
Yeah, so we think about the Base economy as a flywheel where we are going to enable builders. Those folks are going to build apps, they're going to build content, and then on the other side, people are going to come onchain to use those apps and to kind of engage with and experience that content. And the more great apps we have, the more users that will come and use them, the more users that come, the more people will want to build for them, and the faster we can spin that flywheel, the faster the Base economy is going to grow, and the faster the world's going to move onchain. And so historically, you know, I've really been responsible for the supply side of that, where it's like, how do we give builders great tools? How do we make it possible for them to build great apps? But now with wallet kind of coming into my remit as well, that's the demand side, right? The wallet is really all about making it incredibly easy for everyday people, for creators, for businesses to come onchain and use all these products that are being built. And so the thing that it's now enabling us to do is it's enabling us to look holistically across the kind of user journey and think about what can we do to kind of make both sides simpler so that it's easier to build apps and then it's easier to reach users with those apps. And I think that's going to actually really dramatically accelerate the rate at which we can spin this flywheel and, again, the rate at which we can bring the world onchain. And so that's been super, super exciting for me to just start to see kind of early signs of that working. The other thing that's been really exciting about this is I actually used to be responsible for the wallet. You know, prior to starting Base, I led all of the consumer businesses for Coinbase on the engineering side, Coinbase, Coinbase Wallet, Coinbase Pro, back when it was its own separate product. And so getting to kind of be responsible for Coinbase's wallet again, it's been a great opportunity to reconnect with a bunch of incredible leaders who've been building the wallet now for many years and get to be back in the trenches building with them. And I just love working with people on a really long time horizon. And then it's been exciting to see how far it came and how much further we have to go. And so, you know, I couldn't be more excited generally about just getting to spin this flywheel faster and faster and build incredible products that work for builders and work for everyday people in the new onchain economy.
Yeah, I want to talk about the big piece of that onchain economy, which, you know, in the short term, obviously heavily dominated by memecoins, and we can talk about that in a second. But I also want to highlight maybe more real-world use cases since, you know, you've been traveling a lot. I was just down in Argentina seeing kind of the use of stablecoins and how huge that has grown. And Brian Armstrong actually retweeted one of those use cases that I saw firsthand. It was cool to see him kind of also excited about stablecoin usage. I was, you know, with an Uber driver and trying to bring him onchain. It was cheapest to do on Base, so I kind of taught him about how to use stablecoins on Base. But Brian was retweeting this idea, which would be that maybe potentially Uber drivers could get paid through the app. Jeremy Allaire at USDC was talking about it with DAR. I mean, how far along are we, Jesse, from some of those things being realistic where people might actually, you know, be able to interact with this and earn in real time in stablecoins? Getting paid in stablecoins seems like the Holy Grail. I mean, how do you see that shaping up and maybe becoming more real?
Yeah, so I think that 2023 and 2024 were really about kind of locking in the final pieces of infrastructure to enable these experiences to be really seamless. And those pieces of infrastructure were low-cost block space in the form of Layer 2s like Base, which make it really, really cheap to send and to transact onchain. And so, for instance, today, even as Base, you know, throughput has grown like 10, maybe 20x this year, transaction fees are now consistently below sub-cent, so, you know, a fraction of a cent median transaction fee. And that just wasn't the case even a year ago. And so that's been a huge unlock in terms of what's possible and making these products and this economy really accessible to everyone everywhere. The second thing that I think was a piece of infrastructure we need to build was just better wallet experiences. I think we've done that with Coinbase Wallet. We've also made huge strides just in the last like six to nine months with the smart wallet, which is going to be, you know, at the center of our wallet strategy going forward, where we can have a secure, super easy-to-use wallet that doesn't require a seed phrase, doesn't require you to memorize all this crazy stuff or to store it in backup. Instead, you just use a biometric and it just works. And I'm excited to see that continue to develop from an infrastructure perspective. And then the third thing that I think was a piece of infrastructure that's, you know, been built out really materially is, you know, a lot of kind of identity and social infrastructure that started to emerge onchain. Whether you're talking about ENS and Base Names or, you know, Farcaster social graph, we now have the tools to let apps really like know who their users are and to let users share information with apps in a way that's still privacy-protecting and lets them kind of engage in a more customized experience. And so the last two years have really been about making that infrastructure exist. You know, we had to do the work to make Base, we had to build the smart wallet and make it just work, we had to, you know, launch Base Names and get Farcaster out there in the world. And I think 2025 is going to be the year where that infrastructure starts to enable these use cases. And we're seeing it happen right before our eyes. You know, stablecoin payments are growing rapidly globally on Base and across the entire onchain economy. You know, emerging social use cases are starting to crop up with things like Farcaster and Zora. We see more and more games that kind of build in these really seamless wallet experiences and these really experienced kind of social graphs to make them, you know, more engaging and really meaningful. And use cases like you're talking about with Uber are starting to become like more just a normal reality for folks where it's the fastest, cheapest, easiest way to get paid or the fastest, cheapest, easiest way to pay someone is onchain. And so I expect that to kind of proliferate and go from a small number of things that we all kind of get excited about because every single time it's like, oh man, it's actually working, to the default over the next one or two years.
Yeah, which will be that it continues to work or works in more industries and more realities. But I do think, you know, again, in the short term right now, some of this experimentation has really blown up and it seems like it's starting to blow up now too on Base when it comes to memecoins. And, you know, we saw a lot of that in terms of Solana. And I guess, you know, there's some blowback now in terms of what that space represents for crypto and for Base specifically. Now, Jesse, as you kind of look at it, is there kind of like, look, this is a short-term thing to show what's possible, it's not where we want to be, those real use cases matter? I mean, how do you look at kind of memecoins being the thing that could potentially in the short term be proving out, you know, the transactions and fees costs that you're talking about a lot, but also where Base goes after?
