Welcome, Bankless Nation, to Bankless TV. On this episode of Bankless TV, we are covering the Base ecosystem. That's right, it's Base Day on Bankless TV. And to kick off Base Day, we are bringing on the creator of Base, Jesse Pollak. Jesse, good to have you on.
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Happy Base Day.
Happy Base Day. Yeah, Fridays are Base Day, and then every other Base Day, every other day is Base Day as well. I believe that's how that works.
I think that's right. It is. It is Base era, so we like to think every day is Base Day.
I thought your guys' naming of your marketing, your announcement day of a new day one was pretty clever because it's like, okay, it's actually the next thing, but it's still day one. It's still day one.
It's the next chapter. It really felt natural for us because we were unveiling a new brand, we were kind of bringing a new product experience that let a lot more people in the world actually experience Base firsthand in a way that's understandable to market. But I think with both of those, we felt like it was still very early. Like we haven't solved any of the problems fully yet. We have, I think, a good line of sight on how we're going to, but we have so much more work to do. And so that mindset of it's still day one, we got a lot more work to do, is really important for the team.
My understanding of the Base app is it is the just consumer front end to the Base chain. And so blockchains are plumbing. Blockchains are software. They are back-end infrastructure. But we know that they can be more than just plain dumb asset ledgers. They can do more than that. And to me, when I saw the presentation of the Base app, I was like, 'Oh, this is Coinbase. This is Jesse putting a cosmetic, interactive, consumer-facing way to interact with Base.' Is that how you think about it?
I think that's roughly right. Two slight shifts, I would say. One is that we think that the Base app is going to be your front door to everything onchain. So it's not just Base chain. Base chain is like a component of the infrastructure, but we've really always thought about Base as being a bridge, not an island. We want to make it possible for everyone to come and do whatever they want onchain, whether that's on Base chain or somewhere else. And so that's the mindset we're going to be bringing towards this. And then to your broader point, I think that's actually exactly right. You know, the thing that we've seen over the last two years is that we've really clearly articulated this vision of bringing the world onchain, of building a global economy, but really the only people who it's resonated with have been builders because they could actually get in the weeds and build on Base chain and experience, 'Oh my god, this is such a better developer platform for all the things I want to do.' And then they could connect that up to this idea of the global economy and this new next generation of the internet that we're building. But when we talked to our friends and family or the random person on the street, we were like, 'We're building a global economy.' And they were like, 'What are you talking about?' And we were then like, 'Here's Coinbase Wallet and Base is in here.' And they just didn't get it. We did not have a product that matched the vision. And really the way I think about the Base app is that for the first time we have a product that matches the vision. The Base app is an everything app. You can come in, you can post, you can earn, you can chat with your friends, you can explore thousands of apps, you can trade, you can pay, and all of it works in this totally seamless, interoperable, connected app that is available to anyone in the world. And that I think is the first time where we've really had that consumer experience where I could give that to my mom, and I have given it out to my mom and my friends, and people immediately get it and they're like, 'Oh, this is awesome.' And then they resonate with this idea of we're building a new global economy, we're building the next generation of the internet because they can actually experience it themselves firsthand.
You know, in 2025, it seems to me there's a convergence of a bunch of different companies attempting to build out a new social media platform. And I know the Base app is an everything app, and so it's social plus other things, and we'll talk about other things, but I want to focus on the social side for just a moment. We have, you know, brewing rumors that Sam Altman and OpenAI want to build out a social media application that goes hand-in-hand with ChatGPT, and you can kind of squint and you can integrate like World ID, his investment with World ID, into that same whole thing, like making sure a proof-of-personhood-based social media application. And then there's been a number of attempts of just like, you know, next-generation social media apps, kind of as an understanding of like Web 2 is like kind of cooked. Like my Twitter experience is just so broken. The reply guys are terrible. You know, Reddit is, you know, indistinguishable from bots. You know, Instagram, Snapchat, these highly social Web 2 apps are pretty buffered from the penetration of AI, but there's a lot of like Web 2 social media platforms that don't really seem to be trending in the best direction. And so downstream of that, there's been a lot of investment into building out a new social media app. And now Coinbase and Base have a social media app. If you look at, if you go open up the Base app, I think that would be somebody's like first impression if they didn't know exactly what's behind the scenes here. They're downloading this app and they're like, 'Oh, this is a social media app.' I think that's probably a pretty fair, justified first impression. How do you think about that in the grand scheme of just like social media broadly?
Yeah. Well, I think over the last 20 years, we've seen that there's been so much good that come with social media and the internet, right? Like for the first time you've given, you know, hundreds of millions of people a platform where they could share their creativity, their thoughts, they could connect with people all around the world. But at the same time, while I think that provided a lot of good, the realities of the way those social media platforms worked meant that for the most part, the creators who are actually bringing their creativity to the internet have kind of gotten a raw deal in the economics of all of it. Like if you look at the economics, like creators earn less than 5% of the overall earnings of these big platforms. And I think what that's led to is basically you have this like bubbling discontent where people are feeling like, oh, there's some good stuff here, but also there's something fundamentally broken in how this is working for me as a creator because I'm the one who's bringing my creativity to these platforms and then someone else is profiting off it. And so that bubbling discontent, that's something that I think I hear and see in like every first conversation about the Base app where people intuitively and immediately get it. They understand, oh, the existing system is broken and we need to build a new system. And this is the way we think about the Base app. It's not just a new social media app. It's really the first time where I think we've started to see what a social media app and a super app can look like when it is built on open protocols. You know, Base is built on Ethereum and then it's built on XMTP and Farcaster and Zora and Aerodrome and Uniswap. We've basically stitched together all of these open protocols that work together because they're built on this shared foundation and made it so that when you post in Base, you earn because the new foundation, this decentralized foundation that we're building on, is actually structured in such a way that it's built for creators and it's built for the people who are using the app so that they benefit from their creativity. And I think that is this sea change that it's a little bit hard to see if you're new to the space because it still looks the same, but it's almost like we've swapped out the engine of the plane while we're still flying it. And now we have this new foundation that we can build on that's going to unlock a ton of value for creators and I think unlock a ton of just opportunity in terms of what we can do from a product experience perspective. I think mini apps are a great example of this. Like one of the things we get from building on this open platform is that we have these composable mini apps that just work in the feed and just work in messaging. So you can be scrolling the feed and see something cool, tap it and immediately check out. And that whole experience is built by a third-party developer where they can control their user experience there. Then you can send that to your friend in a group chat and they can do the same thing. And so I just think we're just starting to scratch the surface on this. But I do think that we've kind of started a shift that's a pretty big one to this new way of building.
I'm going to share my screen here and show some tweets and talk about some of the commentary that has come out of the announcement of the Base app. So this one is from Nquille ETH: 'Just got a special invite to the Base app. First impression would be it's the everything app. Payments, social apps, chats, crypto, you name it, everything is here.' I think that's kind of highlighting some of the maybe superpowers that I think you've integrated into the Base app. There's a lot of protocols that are integrated, like you said, the Base chain is integrated, built on Ethereum. But then there's another...
And eight other EVM chains, including Ethereum and Optimism and Arbitrum and Polygon and Avalanche. And so again, we really want to make sure it's not just Base chain. This is an app that gives you access to everything in the onchain economy. Solana and others coming soon.
Certainly. And that's just the chain side of things. There's also like the Farcaster client. There's just a bunch of protocols that you've kind of just Legos'd together to build this experience that other social media apps just don't have some of the superpowers you have because you've integrated all these protocols, mainly money, money and tokens and finance and things related to blockchains. And I thought this tweet was pretty cool. This is from a content creator who makes a bunch of clips on Twitter and he tweeted out: 'Going viral on your first Base app post and immediately getting a stream of creator earnings is an absolutely insane onboarding experience.' And this man is just scrolling down seeing like 0.01 ETH, 0.02 ETH receiving from people onboarding into the Base app. Now this is this individual...
This is really a crazy experience and this is what we're seeing really resonates with creators. And it's not just Jack. You know, Jack made a few viral posts and I think he earned a couple thousand dollars. You know, another woman, Sierra, made a viral post yesterday. She earned like $3,000 or maybe it was $8,000. I forget what. The thing that we're seeing is that that experience of even if it's just a few cents, posting something and then immediately earning, and it's not like, oh, you have to get X followers, oh, you have to live in Y country, oh, you have to wait 60 days for a payout. The immediacy of my content is valuable and I'm earning for it is really, really profound. And that's something that's when creators come in, that it's hooking them. And I think they're almost like feeling this realignment where they're feeling this discontent with the existing system and then they experience this post-and-earn moment and they're like intuitively grokking it. They're like, 'Oh, I get it.' Like now I get it and I want to keep posting here. And I think one thing that's really important about this is, you know, some people are going to say, 'Oh, but you know, only some posts are going to go viral and you're going to earn.' Or they look at my creator earnings or Brian's creator earnings. Brian earned like $150,000 over the last week of posting. I've earned like $30,000 over the last week of posting. And they're like, 'Oh, but Jesse and Brian are special.' And the truth is that, of course, you're not going to earn and go viral on every post. That's just like social media. There's going to be a small number of posts that go viral where you earn the outsized amount of your money. And then of course people with big audiences, I have 300,000 followers, Brian has, you know, however many million followers, they're going to earn more. That's because they have more distribution. And so that means it's easier for them to go viral. And so I think that, you know, people are looking for a reason why this isn't going to work. And I actually think if you start to put the hat on of like, holy crap, look at how well it's working right now when there's like so few people using this and then extrapolate that to like 100 million people or a billion people in the network all interacting with surface areas where it's all interconnected with this value layer. I think there's just so much opportunity. We haven't really seen it get started.
So we as a society have seen social media apps, enough social media apps come where we kind of understand a little bit of the science about how they grow. And there's like that rule of thumb out there that like the people that are big on Twitter aren't necessarily big on Instagram. And yes, you can like port your audience. So like a big Instagram earner can come to the Base app, sign up, and then get onboarded with a little bit of just like a bump just because they already have influence in one domain. But really, the big people on Twitter grew with Twitter and they invested in Twitter specifically and they learned to make their tweets resonate with the form factor. And so, you know, there's one strategy for growing the Base app, which is like, let's get some of the biggest influencers and get them on the Base app. But also, there's going to be the organic strategy of, well, this is a net new consumer behavior. There's going to be net new, you know, people that are successful on the social media side of the Base app that learn to build content that resonates with the form factor of the Base app. Talk about the strategy of growing that cohort of people.
Yeah, 100%. And of course, we're going to go get existing creators with scaled audiences. We're already seeing that, you know, like people are coming over. Gary Vee, for instance, he's like so fired up about the Base app. He's coming over, he's earning, he's making money, he's getting involved in that. But I do think that you're actually spot on that the biggest opportunity is for new creators. It's the people who have creativity inside of them and have been looking for where to express it. And the opportunity for them with Base is to get in early and to start building an audience from the ground floor with us because right now there's only a few thousand people in the Base app and we build on Farcaster. So there's probably, you know, another few 10,000 people kind of in the network overall who are using it daily. But if you come in right now and you start posting, you start building an audience, you have the opportunity to grow with us. And so I don't think you should be coming into the Base app and being like, 'Oh, immediately I'm just going to have massive distribution.' Instead, you should be coming to the Base app and saying, 'I'm early, and if I am good and early, there's outsized potential for me to earn in this new network that's being built right here.' And the thing that we're looking for, so if you're out there and you're a creator, the thing that I'll say to you is we are going across every single content vertical, particularly video content, fitness, food, makeup, you know, small business, like any content vertical, you name it. And we are trying to find the up-and-coming creators who don't have a big audience on the existing platforms. And then we're going to do everything we can to make you successful, make them successful, because those are the people who are going to help build this next generation of the internet. And so if that's you, if you have a content type that you're really into, but you don't have a big audience or you're not earning right now on existing social platforms, come to the Base app and we're going to help you earn. We're going to help you grow. You're going to grow with us and then you're going to benefit from this collective force that's coming into this new economy that we're building. And the really, really important thing about this is that you can be anywhere, anywhere, anywhere in the world, you can download the Base app, you can get started, and you can get started earning. And that means that the opportunity is basically open for everyone in the world and it's a level playing field for everyone in the world because you're starting at the ground floor. Doesn't matter where you're born. It doesn't matter where you live. It doesn't matter what phone you have. You can get started. You can get started earning and you can help us build this future.
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I want to kind of explore what the optimized form factor of content looks like on the Base app because I think Instagram or Snapchat or, you know, pick your Web 2 social, it aligns with a certain style of content and that style of content has been optimized to go viral on Instagram or, you know, same thing for Twitter. Certain content goes viral on Twitter and it wouldn't really necessarily go viral anywhere else. So if we're extending that same lesson to the Base app, there's going to be a certain form factor of content that is uniquely suited to go viral on the Base app and it's going to leverage some of the features of the Base app, mainly those creator earnings probably. And so the things that people are going to optimize for this, the posters, the content creators, creators are going to optimize for are going to be unique to the Base app, you know, and they're going to learn how to truly optimize their income, optimize their revenue. What do you think that looks like? What kind of content do you think you guys are emergingly optimizing for at the Base app? Because you guys are just hooked into chain features such as like creator earnings.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, the first thing I'll say is that I do think a lot of people, their head goes to like, how do we do like these economic systems with the creator earnings to like do something, you know, kind of crazy fancy there and that's going to be the thing. And I'm less convinced that that's actually going to be the thing. Like what we're seeing mostly from creators is that once they turn on the monetization, like they just stop thinking about it. Like it's not this active choice where they're like, 'Oh, now this is this new mechanic. I need to go do it.' And it's like consuming my headspace. It's like, 'Oh no, now it's on.' And it just works and then money comes in. And I actually think that that's going to fade more and more into the background as people just normalize the fact that your content's valuable and you earn from it. And so I'm sure there's going to be interesting experiments, but I wouldn't suggest that people get overly myopic on like that's the primary thing to do. The things that I think are going to go viral, two things that I think are kind of traditional and then one that's novel. The two things that are traditional and starting to go viral is one, video content. Like I just think video content like on Instagram and TikTok is going to work and you're going to be speaking to an audience. It's going to be more global. You're going to have to figure out how to dial that in. But video content is really, really important. And like I said, we're going across every content vertical right now and we're trying to figure out how do we get a handful of really good creators in each vertical so that there's actually good content for consumers to actually engage with. And so I think that that's the first thing. The second thing is, you know, crypto Twitter, you know, shitposting, whatever you want to call it, like, you know, kind of a little bit high-minded text-based posting that, you know, can kind of bootstrap off this network that's being built there. I think that that's going to work successfully as well. The content format that I'm actually most excited about that's totally novel is mini apps. And that's enabled by this kind of open platform and enabled by the chain is you can build a mini app and you can distribute that mini app through the feed or through messaging and it can go viral and then that can be an experience that someone is one tap away from where they can just get started doing the thing. And some of those are little mini games. You can imagine commerce where it's like one-tap checkout. You can imagine all these other like little mechanics where people are earning and kind of like sharing funds with friends. But that kind of ability to turn the post into this canvas that anyone can build and that anyone can make, you know, a viral hook, I think that that's probably the biggest net new form factor that will kind of open up the opportunity for people to build in a new way. And so those are the three things that I'm most excited about. It's one, video across a bunch of non-crypto surfaces and content areas. Two, kind of like traditional crypto Twitter posting. And then three, mini apps and the viral potential that's baked into those.
