BASE Creator Jesse Pollak: Why Most Crypto Traders Lose (And What to Do Instead) | E93

I couldn't do anything other than just like lie there and try and sleep so I didn't feel what I was feeling at that point in time. There was definitely parts of me where I was like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. I had to get talked off the ledge of quitting. I just don't know if I can do this, like I don't know how long I can do this.

Well, the mission right now is to build a global onchain economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom. That's Base. We're literally trying to take these economic systems that in many cases are 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years old and we're trying to build a new system. We're trying to upgrade the system. I played a lot of sports growing up. I started playing competitive soccer when I was like four years old. I like really wanted to be all-time. It definitely put something in my head.

I think in crypto we can sometimes just get confused by the economic incentives and the tokens and the game theory and we can lose sight of the fact that like we have to build something people want, where creators can put their content onchain and they make the money, and where anyone anywhere, regardless of who they are, regardless of where they're born, regardless of what phone they have, has access to the same apps.

It was a good day. Yeah, I went down to Mountain View, California, which is right down in South Bay yesterday, last night, because all of the product managers at Coinbase were coming together for a conference, like a PM con. It's like a summit basically for all of them. A big part of my job is influencing Coinbase and trying to get Coinbase to come onchain, and a lot of that is influencing people. And so I drove down last night, did dinner with everyone, and then this morning was there for breakfast, and then I did like an hour-long talk where I was like 20 minutes of, you know, here's how I'm thinking about Base, here's the progress we made in the first year, and then 40 minutes of just Q&A and kind of like answering people's questions and hopefully helping shift the company more onchain.

It's going good. We've come a long way. You know, like a year ago Base didn't exist. You know, just launched, no one really knew what to make of it. Two years ago the idea of Base didn't exist and the idea of bringing Coinbase onchain was something that I had in my head and something that I talked about with people, but no one really knew what it meant. And I think everyone kind of thought that's just like Jesse being a little bit crazy and too far in the future. And today, you know, there are teams across every single part of the company that are building onchain, that are writing smart contracts, that are deploying them on Base, that are figuring out how to integrate them into our consumer experiences, our institutional experiences. And every single day it feels like it's accelerating.

You know, just an anecdote on that. Right before I gave my talk, Brian Armstrong, CEO, gave a talk and he got asked, you know, like what is kind of like, you know, what's kind of keeping you, what's making you nervous, or what's the thing that you think we're going to look back on a year on and wish we'd moved faster on or made a change on faster? And he said the thing that keeps me up is that we're still too offchain and we have to figure out how do we move onchain faster. Because if we can't figure out how to move onchain faster, we're going to miss the opportunity to use this technology shift to transform our business for the better and to reach more customers and to increase economic freedom globally. And so I think that that for me and for him and for so many people at the company is this kind of, you know, existential moment where we're seeing the technology platform evolve in front of us. We're seeing how failed these systems are that have been powering our global economy for the last 50 years. But we're also fighting against the inertia of the systems being entrenched and Coinbase being a big company, and we're trying to figure out how do we avoid the innovator's dilemma, right? And how do we make this transition to be fully onchain?

Right, yeah. I mean, I think we're going to find out, but I think it's possible. I do think that it is uniquely possible when you have a founder CEO like Brian who so deeply understands crypto and is willing to make bets and back people like me who are kind of pushing the edge and say like, I don't, maybe he doesn't even understand it all the time, although increasingly he understands it better than anyone, but he's still willing to be like, I believe in the principle and I'm willing to fight for that principle. I'm willing to do things that no one else would do if they were a traditional public company CEO. And so I think that that means that we have a good shot. And then the thing for me that's like kind of the defining part of that question is if we can't do it, no one can. And I think everyone, I think people will be able to, but I really think we need to like pave the way. We need to figure out what is the path to transform a business from offchain to onchain and how do you make that path good for the business, good for customers, good for employees, good for the people who are building. And I think once we define that, as we've already started defining it with the whole Base effort and all the work we're doing to bring things onchain, I think that's going to clarify it for many, many other companies and they're going to say, oh, this is how you do it. And then a lot of them are going to try and run that playbook. Now, how many of them make it through? I don't know. I mean, look at the internet. How many companies made it to the other side of the internet? A lot, but a lot also didn't make it. And if you look at the businesses that rose and are the most successful today, almost all of them are new. And with this technology platform shift, I do think we're going to see a lot of new players emerge as winners and emerge as having a massive impact. I also think we're going to see existing platforms who are...

Who am I? I'm Jesse. I'm Jesse. I was born and raised in Washington, D.C., which is the capital of the United States for those who don't know. I grew up going to Quaker school. Quakerism is like a sect of Christianity, but the whole idea with Quakerism is there's no religious leader, like there's no priest or pastor or anything like that. Instead, the kind of like core principle is the idea that there's that of God in everyone. And so it's like all of us are holy in a way. And I'm not a religious person. I didn't grow up like being religious, but I grew up in this kind of like culture of Quakerism, which was really like, you know, the values are simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship. It's all about like how do we make the world the best it can be and then how do we work together to accomplish that and work together to make our lives and, you know, the communities that we live in better. And that was my first, you know, 18 years of existence. My mom was a midwife, once called the LeBron James of midwifery. So she's delivered like thousands of babies, brought thousands of babies into the world. My dad was a labor lawyer. He worked with labor unions and represented them, you know, all across the country. And they raised me to, you know, think I could accomplish anything. And I always knew from a young age I wanted to do something that would change the world. And I think I'm starting to make some progress.

What's my mission? Well, the mission right now is to build a global onchain economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom. That's Base, right? Like we're literally trying to take these systems, these economic systems that in many cases are state by state or country by country or, you know, large bank by large bank, and in all cases are 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years old, and in all cases are failing the people who are trying to leverage those systems because they're too expensive, because they're too slow, because they're too frustrating, because they're too discriminatory, because depending on where you're born or where you live or what phone you have, you're going to have different access. And we're trying to build a new system. We're trying to upgrade the system and create a new global onchain economy. So global is globalness, onchain is a new technology platform, economy is what we're building. And then we're going to use that to increase innovation by supporting entrepreneurs and helping them build new businesses in this open platform, increase creativity by making it so creators who right now are bringing their creativity onto centralized platforms and earning not nothing, but essentially nothing compared to the billions and trillions of dollars that those platforms are taking in terms of profits, and we're going to bring them into a new internet that actually works for them, that helps them earn from their creativity. And then we're going to increase freedom by putting everyone on a level playing field and making it so regardless of where you're born, regardless of where you live, regardless of what phone you have, you have the same opportunity and you can have the same tools to start your business, you can have the same tools to build your wealth and grow your family, and you can have the same access and opportunity that anyone else in the world has. And I think if we can accomplish that, you know, taking back to like what I always thought I would do is like make the world a better place. Like that's a better world, a world where we have a global economy that anyone can participate in that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom. I think it's going to be a much better place for everyone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess there's always 50% of truth in every joke, right?

I mean, I've never been diagnosed with autism, but I would say, I mean, I've talked about it at various points in my life with my therapist and coach, I definitely have, you know, I have traits that are, I think, mostly around like perfection and some level of control and focus that, you know, like define a lot of my character, like a lot of who I am. You know, it's like I am willing, like I'm able, you put me, you give me something that I'm interested in and you sit me down in an airplane and I'll like lock in for like eight hours. You know, I'll just open up my computer and I'll just focus on that thing for eight straight hours. And my wife will be sitting next to me. She's like, what is going on? Like I'll close my laptop at the end of eight hours and she's like, how did you just do that? And so there's like a focus component of it. Yeah, so I think there's something there. And then on the chip on my shoulder, I don't think, I mean, look, I had a very blessed childhood, happy family, like, yeah, happy family, really grateful for my parents and my siblings and, you know, all of the great privileges I had in going to school. And so I don't know if I had a lot of trauma in my childhood. The thing that I will say, though, that I do think gave me a chip on my shoulder is I played a lot of sports growing up. So I started playing competitive soccer when I was like four years old, you know, played all the way through college. And I will say that I was like a B-plus at best soccer player.

Okay, yeah. I like really wanted to be all-time and I worked really hard. Like I would spend summers and just work all summer, like run all summer. Yeah, it's, you know, that's now paying dividends. My VO2 max, I just did a VO2 max test and my VO2 max is like through the roof. It's awesome. But I worked really, really hard and I was always like a B, B-plus player. And it meant that I spent a lot of time like getting benched or sitting on the bench and like watching other people play. And I think that that experience of just like working really freaking hard and still not being able to be the best at the sport that I wanted to be the best at, it definitely like put something in my head where it was just like, I need to work really, really hard. And even then I don't know if I'll ever be the best, but like that's the only path through. So yeah, maybe that has a little bit of it.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I, yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, it's one of the characteristics I've seen, like naturally I gravitate to other people who've, you know, played team sports or really done anything that's like not just pure work where it involves like team leadership. I find that especially for people who had the opportunity to do that growing up, you find some of the best leaders who are hardest working and, you know, like just really committed to doing the right thing, working hard, being optimistic, like pushing through challenges. A lot of values we really, a lot of characteristics we really value in the Base world.

Yeah.

Individual contributor.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've always loved, I didn't, I've always loved technology. I didn't really realize that there was like code under the technology. Like I always watched the Apple keynotes. I jailbroke phones. I fixed screens. I didn't realize there was code until my senior year of high school. And then I learned and I was like, oh, well, this is awesome. I can build. And I started building. I always loved building, like trying to figure out how do I create something that other people want to use. And that kind of put me on the first, you know, while of my career where I did write a lot of code and I was very technical, but all of it was always in pursuit of an end goal, which was like create a valuable company or create a valuable product that people actually wanted to use. And what I found was I spiked very naturally on like product intuition and instincts and like technical architecture, like high-level thinking about the systems that we are building. But a lot of the, like the thing that really got me excited was like shipping and like getting things out the door, like learning from them. And I found that a lot of other people were just much better like raw engineers than me. They were more detail-oriented. They were able to kind of like see things at certain times that I didn't see. And I think I found a number of people who now I still work with, you know, this guy Michael who is kind of like the CTO of Base, who spiked much more on that. They spike on these really deep technical insights. And what that's kind of allowed me to do is lean into the stuff that I think I'm also really strong at, which is people. And it's like, I love people. That's another thing that has come naturally to me always. You know, a lot of it I think through like the trial and fire of figuring out like, how do I be a leader even as a B player on the soccer? It's like took a lot of figuring out to do that. But I think that that's given me the space to really lean into that kind of like people orientation and figuring out how to build healthy teams and build this healthy ecosystem while still having really strong technical people around me who I can then kind of like work with and have them bring the ideas and like help me think about it while still having me remain involved but not maybe always in the details. And so like if you look at a lot of the things that, you know, Base has done, you know, whether it's smart wallets or, you know, our L2 like platform strategy with the OP Stack, I was, I've been involved, I'm involved in everything. Like any major technical thing we're doing, I'm involved. I have an opinion. And I often find that my intuitions are right. But I also find that like the place I work best is at a high level where it's like thinking kind of strategically, thinking about where do we want to go over the next one to two years, figuring out how to like push people's boundaries and get them thinking outside of the box. But then I also find that the people who are like the best engineers, and we have an incredible group of them on Base, are so much better like carrying it out. And that gives me the space to go and do what I think I'm great at, which is like bring people together and coaching people, helping them be their best selves and helping them do incredible things.

Yeah, I'm a CryptoPunk, that's right.

Why do I own a CryptoPunk? I mean, I minted my CryptoPunk. So like, you know, they went open mint in 2017. I've tried, you know, I actually don't have a vivid memory of doing it, but I've traced my time back and I minted it while I was on a flight to Chicago from San Francisco. I was going somewhere in Chicago and I minted it and then I didn't actually look at it for like maybe three years. So like, and then in 2020, I was starting to get a little bit more visible. You know, at that point, I was leading the consumer business at Coinbase on the engineering side and I was starting to get a little bit more visible. And I decided that just like for my own safety, I want to start not showing my face on the internet. I didn't want to go non, but I wanted to reduce the visibility of like what I look like so that I would just be less at risk for whatever. And I went through a bunch of different ideas and then I kind of had this like inkling back in my head. I was like, oh, I remember that I had a CryptoPunk, but I don't think it looked like me. And so like I had that in my head for a while, like that I had a CryptoPunk, but it didn't look like me. And so I was never going to use it. And then I was like, oh, I should go look at it just to make sure. And I looked at it, I was like, oh no, like literally, like at the time I had long hair, like I had a little vape that was a blue vape, you know, like I was a little crazy. And I was like, oh, this is actually, I looked at it, I was like, this is me. And then I switched out to my profile photo and now it's, you know, now it's been my, and I say it like that more than any other thing that I own that is more part of who I am. Like I have like dysmorphia when I look at other pictures of myself. I'm like, that's not my, that's not me. Like that punk is me, you know, particularly online. And I do think it's had a, you know, about the time I started Base, maybe a little bit before I started Base, up until that point, from like when I decided to use the punk to that point, I had been really strict. I didn't do any video and I didn't do any new photos. And I actually like proactively took all the photos of me offline. And then once I realized I was going to do Base and I realized that so much of this was going to be connecting with people, I realized I couldn't hide my face. Like it's just so hard to connect with people when you do that. And so I started doing more video. I mean, here doing this video, but I still keep the punk. And what I found is that even though there is video of me and even though people can find it, because the thing that people look at every single day is the punk, my overall like recognizability and visibility is still much lower. People don't always recognize me when I come up to them and say, hey, I'm Jesse, because people are used to looking at the punk. So it's kind of like a mix of like a pseudonymity and also just like wanting to show and wanting to be onchain. I mean, it's like this is who I am onchain. It's just a little funny pixelated dude.

That was January of this year. I had long hair for almost 15 years.

It was, you know, it varied. Like I almost always wore it in like a bun that went up here. But it was like a little, like at times like shoulder length, a little bit longer than shoulder length. And then I did like an undercut where I shaved it off like two and a half years ago because I knew I was like getting ready to have short hair. And then the beginning of this year, I pulled the trigger. Feels great. I love it. I'm so glad I have short hair now. It was a long time of long hair and I'm glad I had that time, but it's nice. It's so much easier to maintain and I just, I like the way it looks. And, you know, it's kind of like this is a new, I also got glasses and it's kind of a new, I don't know, it feels like it's the next chapter for me.

All right, this is great. I do not smoke nicotine, but I do consume weed. So that's the vaping that I have done and I still do. And I don't drink. I actually gave up drinking two and a half years ago. And I never found drinking was like particularly, it just like didn't make me feel very much. But I find that consuming weed, cannabis, whatever you want to call it, is an incredibly generative experience for me. Like it shifts my thinking in a really fundamental way. Can like basically like open up new pathways in the way I think. And so I find that like, you know, every once in a while doing that and going on a run or something like that where I can basically get endorphins and get my brain working in a different way. If I do that, I will open up like completely new ideas and be like, oh, like maybe this is how this thing could be solved that I missed for the last like month of thinking. And so that's been a really useful tool for me at various points of times. There's a lot of stigma about weed, even in the United States where it's not legal in the United States, but it is legal in California. I still think there's a lot of stigma, but it is a part of who I am. And it's funny because I have a blue vape that's like my little CryptoPunk that, you know, is the thing that when I do consume weed, that's what I do.

Go to run or do like a Peloton, you know, and just like get into zone two heart rate. And, you know, I think naturally like that, not always, right? Like sometimes I'll just go on a run, you know, or like, I work out six to seven times a week as well. And, you know, I go on a walk. There's a lot of different things I do to get ideas, but it's definitely a tool in the toolkit. And I find that does open up my ways, open up my mind in new ways, which is really powerful.

And it's not like the thing for me is like, I think for a lot of people, weed is this thing where it's like, oh, I'm just going to like smoke weed and like, you know, hang out on the couch or do nothing. I'm like, I can't, like that's not how it works for me. Like I smoke weed and it's like, oh my God, my brain is exploding with ideas. Like I would need to like write them all down. It's like a very generative experience.

Yeah, what are the other tools? Other tools, I mean, just like pure physical exercise, like zone two heart rate exercise, either a long run or a like Peloton or even like a walk if I'm like have like a weight pack or something like that, rocking. Like a walk with my wife or my close friends, like we'll go on a walk and we'll talk about something. I find I have a lot easier time talking about things when I'm moving, particularly. Yeah, a lot easier time when I'm talking about things moving and just being like comfortable in my body. And then I mean, I think just like finding, yeah, I think it's like finding time with like people who I work with really closely. I have a bunch of very close work relationships, people at Coinbase, outside of Coinbase, and just like finding a dedicated like hour plus long period of time with them to just like be generative and like talk about different ideas and like see what comes up and what emerges. I think that's a big one. Yeah, those are the ones that come to mind.

All right, here we go.

How did I get so fascinated by crypto? So I found out about crypto like my first year of college. So it was the spring of 2012 and I sat down at a table that was like, this was a big circular table at my college lunchroom, you know, sitting outside. And I sat down from this guy who was, you know, with a bunch of my friends and he started telling me about how he was visiting and driving across the country and how he'd just written this white, like his thesis in college about this thing called Bitcoin. I'd never heard about Bitcoin before and I got to know him and learned about Bitcoin and I was just like instantly pretty fascinated. That guy was Olaf Carlson-Wee and he was on his way to join Coinbase as the first employee. And we talked about that and he was actually like hanging out on campus for a week and we got to know each other and he was friends with friends of mine. And so I kind of saw him go up and join Coinbase. So that was my first introduction to Bitcoin. I read that white paper and I went home and bought Bitcoin on Coinbase. Like that was the beginning. It was 2012.

Yeah, yeah. It made sense to me. Yeah, it made sense. It was like, this is going to be a big deal. I don't know exactly what it will be. It'll be a big deal. And then I started a company and we built kind of like a security software, like login software for businesses. And we were trying to figure out what our target customer was. And one of our thesis was, you know, crypto businesses are a place that have a high usability need because the technology is complex, but they also have a really high security need. Like, can we fit in that niche? And so in 2013, 2014, we predominantly sold to crypto companies. We actually, as a result of selling to crypto companies, built some like pretty cool crypto systems that weren't like currency related, but they kind of look like Passkeys, but if a team of five people built them instead of Apple. So they were a lot less sophisticated, but still did a lot of the same kind of overall technical architecture. And then we worked with folks like Bitfinex and BitMEX were customers of ours in 2013, 2014, 2015. And they basically bought our login product, it was called Clef, and they installed it on their website and they let people log in with it. And so that was this time when I got like a much closer look into like, oh, here are our customers. I need to start going to crypto conferences. I need to start learning about like Ethereum, that's the thing that's coming out, like all of that, just kind of exploratory work. And that over kind of like a four-year period from 2013 to kind of like late 2016 was like just gradual incubation of my excitement about crypto. And then, you know, I started buying Bitcoin every week. I started buying Ethereum every week when Ethereum came out. And then when that business ultimately like didn't work, we kind of had line of sight, it wasn't working. We did one pivot, it didn't work. We then realized, oh, we have six months left. Like, let's go through an acqui-hire process. I called Olaf and I said, hey, Olaf, like, I'm really excited about crypto. You know, we have a great team that's been doing identity stuff. We've been selling crypto companies. I tried to sell Brian. I have this whole like crazy email exchange from 2012 where it's like me trying to convince Brian to use our technology. But I was like, we should talk about us joining Coinbase. And we went interviewed at Coinbase and did a whole process and at a bunch of other places. And ultimately, three companies made an offer to acquire us: Twilio, Okta, and Coinbase. My whole team was really excited about continuing to work on identity and two-factor authentication, so they sold to Twilio. I was doing that, but I was so excited about crypto and I kind of said, I don't want to go do that. Like, I want to work on crypto. And so I originally thought the Coinbase offer was all or nothing. And so I spent a week trying to convince my team. I was like, you guys, like, we should go work on the crypto thing, not the Twilio thing. And we got to the end of the week. It was Friday. I'll never forget. They were like, we're not, we want to go to Twilio. I was devastated. I was like crying, being like, this is my dream. Like, I want to go do this. And then our CEO at the time, my co-founder, he called Coinbase, Sam Rosenblum, who now is a partner at a16z, and said, hey, like, we're going to Twilio, but Jesse is still really excited about Coinbase. I'd love to find a way we can make that work. And Sam was like, tell him to just like sign and he can start. And so we ended up doing a little bit more negotiation, but I signed and I started. Then over the next two years, I actually recruited back three of the people from my team. So a bunch of people came back to Coinbase and worked with us. And that was when I started working full-time on crypto. And I joined as an engineer. And pretty much like the moment I joined, I took my bonus. I got like a signing bonus. I put it all into Ethereum. And from the moment I joined, I was like, this is it. Like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life, or at least until we change the world.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the simplest way to think about Base is that all of us use phones and on our phones we have these apps, you know, iPhone, Android. But the problem with those apps is that you're going to have a really different and potentially negative experience depending on what kind of person you are. So if you're a developer and you're building one of those apps, you're going to be building in a walled garden where, you know, 30% of all the revenue you make goes to a corporation. If you're a creator and you're using those apps, you're going to be putting your content onto those platforms and you're going to make less than 1% of the total revenue that those platforms make. And so your creativity goes to enrich those large corporations. And then if you're a user, you're depending on where you're born or where you're going to have different access to apps. If you have an Android phone, you can't access the iOS apps. If you have an iOS phone, you can't access the Android apps. If you aren't a United States citizen, you're not going to be able to access the United States financial products. And depending on where you're born or you live, that's going to lead to massive disparities in what you actually have access to, the apps you have access to. And so what we're building with Base is a new global app store that is built so that developers can build and operate on an open platform where they make the money, where creators can put their content onchain and they make the money, and where anyone anywhere, regardless of who they are, regardless of where they're born, regardless of what phone they have, has access to the same apps. And we're still in the very early days of that app store, just like in the early 2000s, it was the early days of the iOS app store. But the potential for us building a global app store and a global economy that brings everyone in and that puts everyone on a level playing field and gives them tools that let them do things with money and let them do things with their creativity and let them do things with the way they're building businesses that make it 10 times faster, easier, and more accessible to build and to create and to use, that is what Base is. And that is the platform of onchain and crypto and what the thing that Base is a part of.

Yeah, I mean, we went through four different ideas before we launched Base.

Yeah, yeah, four. The first one I pitched to our exec team in late 2021 was, give me a billion dollars and 60 employees and I'll turn Coinbase into a DAO. That was the first one. They were like, no, like, that's, get out of here, try again. Then the second one was kind of derivative of that, but a little different. The third one was we built a kind of like an app marketplace. It's kind of similar to what Base, I mean, you'll see there's commonality, but we built this idea of like labeling different apps so that you could have kind of like an onchain registry of all the different apps that existed. So then you could do other things with that. Then we kind of realized, oh, in order to have an app store, we need identity. So we built a bunch of stuff around identity, which now actually just has kind of like reemerged as Base Names. And then the third thing that we did was like, oh, maybe we can do like advertising on top of this identity and marketplace stuff to help apps get more reach, which kind of looks like the onchain content network. And I'd say the aha moment for Base was we tried all of those things. And every single time we started building one of those things, we ran into the same problems, which we like, oh, we want to build this identity product onchain. How do we make it work at the scale of Coinbase, like to reach 100 million users? How do we make it work really easily and intuitively with the Coinbase product suite? And at the time, like it couldn't even, today the products, you know, we're just getting to the point where everything works really well together. But after seeing that kind of happen again and again and again and be the biggest blocker for us actually being able to move on these product things, we kind of had this aha moment after we launched an internal testnet where we were like, okay, we're going to make it easier for developers at Coinbase to build onchain by giving them a toolkit and giving them a place. We called it Base Network originally, it was called CoinNet, then we changed it to Base. And I think once we like connected that dot of like, oh, maybe we need a platform in order to enable these products, then it was like, boom, let's build a platform to make it easy for Coinbase to come onchain. And then if we're building a platform to make it easy for Coinbase to come onchain, let's build the platform to make it easy for everyone to come onchain. And that's Base. And then the really, I think, powerful thing is we, you know, from the beginning, like we knew what it was in our hearts, but we didn't know where to start. We had this idea and we like, oh, there's like this app store thing. It's like kind of there. It's like, oh, in order to app store, you have the identity. Like we're kind of feeling the different parts of the elephant. If you know that, like whatever, like the blind man feels different parts of the elephant and they're all like, whatever, it's hard to tell from one from the trunk or the foot or whatever it is. And then I think once we had Base, now we're almost speed running it, like the rest of the elephant. It's like, oh, now we have Base. Okay, great. Let's launch Base Names. Boom, Base Names live. Oh, apps are going to need names too. Like, let's get Base Names for apps so apps get Base Names that we can help them label their contracts and give them rewards and, you know, do all these things that they need to do onchain in a trusted way. And we have apps. Well, what if we give them more distribution? That's the onchain content network. We can now give apps distribution across 30 million monthly active users. Like that sort of kind of like building up from the ground. I feel like we kind of had to start at the top and we like worked our way down trying to figure out what it was. And then we got to Base and we're like, okay, now we have our platform and now we're gradually building our way back up until all the systems are there and all of them work really well together. And I think as those things kind of come together, it's going to be this platform that the rest of the world can come onchain with and where you will have kind of like, you know, done the through line to figure out all the little bits and pieces and make them really tight and work seamlessly together. Then everyone else is going to benefit from that kind of like smooth, seamless, easy to use experience that we're going to build.

Exactly.