Base founder Jesse rarely publicly admits a strategic mistake, shattering the social dream into pieces

Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

On July 15, Base founder Jesse Pollak published a long post announcing that he would hand back leadership of the Base App to Coinbase, while he would devote all his efforts to the Base blockchain itself. His goal is to make Base a “global financial blockchain.” Jesse will still continue to lead the Base chain, but he will no longer be responsible for the Base App. The Base App will be taken over by Jordan Fish—known to the crypto community as Cobie.

The most noteworthy part of this adjustment is not that Jesse is leaving the Base App, but that he, unusually, admitted Base’s strategic misjudgments on the social front over the past two years.

Previously, Base tried to position itself as a consumer-level on-ramp for the crypto world. From Farcaster to Zora, from creator coins to miniapps, and then to Base App, Base hoped to bring more mainstream users on-chain by using “on-chain social + the creator economy.”

But now, Pollak admits in his own words: Base bet right on builders, but bet wrong on social. This line can almost be regarded as a milestone verdict on Base’s social experiments.

On-chain social didn’t become the next adoption center. What truly took off were prediction markets, perpetual futures, stablecoins, and tokenized assets. Users are not unwilling to go on-chain—they just don’t want to go on-chain for social itself.

They’re more willing to go on-chain for trading, payments, yield, and speculation.

I. What did Jesse say?

In the long post, Jesse reviewed in detail the reflections and adjustments over the past 6 months. He said bluntly: “Q1 2026 is a heavy blow.” Over the past two years, Base made dual-track bets: first, believing that builders would unlock the next wave of crypto adoption; second, believing that adoption would be driven by “a new native on-chain social experience” (creators, content, messaging).

The result was: “Our bet on builders was correct, but our bet on social was clearly wrong.” Builders did drive an adoption wave—prediction markets, perpetual futures, and stablecoins became the strongest growth engines—but social was not at the center. Instead, “the entire social-side market we’ve been trying to build—Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and yes, creator tokens—collapsed completely.”

He stated directly: “I was wrong. Whether it was the timing being wrong… or whether it was completely wrong, time will tell us—but in any case, I’m sure it was wrong.” The damage was quite severe. Base fell behind in key areas—perpetual futures (though with Avantis and others) and prediction markets (though with Limitless and others) lagged behind mature competitors; there is also plenty of room for improvement in enterprise-level tokenization and payment enablement. People lost confidence, and CT has been reminding him of his mistakes every week.

Jesse said that this year was a “practice of eating shit.” But the lesson he learned was: when things feel the worst, the best approach is to lower your head and build. He has shifted his focus from the App back to the chain, started writing code again, rolled out functions such as Azul, Beryl, B20, privacy, the ledger, and more, and reexamined assumptions: Does crypto need social to grow? Does Base need an App? Can Base become bigger than Coinbase?

The conclusion turned clear: “Better money is enough—we’re seeing it in real time through stablecoins, prediction, perpetuals, and tokenization… I’m now focused on getting a billion people on-chain by making global finance actually work.” The three specific pillars for 2026: winning trading (all assets, including tokenized stocks, memes, App coins, etc.), payments (global stablecoins that work for both individuals and enterprises), and agents (AI agents accelerate everything, because crypto is computer-native money, and AI will create tens of trillions of new economic participants).

He handed the Base App back to Coinbase, with Cobie leading it, and allowed it to expand beyond the Base ecosystem (which he, as Base’s leader, “won’t like”). He emphasized that builders are still the cornerstone, and Base will continue to support them through Base Layer, Batches, ecosystem funds, and more.

II. Why did Base’s social dream break?

Base’s bet on social was not without logic.

Jesse is the soul of Base and the most important shaper of Base community culture. Years ago, friend.tech blew up on Base, leading the market to believe that Jesse and Base could become the main battleground for on-chain social and the creator economy. friend.tech proved one thing: when social relationships are financialized, on-chain products can gain massive attention in an extremely short time.

This also reinforced Base’s preference for social, and the rapid collapse of friend.tech didn’t affect Base’s judgment.

Behind these arrangements—Farcaster, Zora, creator coins, miniapps, Base App—is actually a complete vision: if Coinbase provides a compliant entry point, Base provides a low-cost on-chain environment, Farcaster provides the social graph, and Zora provides content and creator asset tokenization tools, then Base would have a chance to build a consumer-level on-chain ecosystem different from traditional DeFi.

But in the end, this logic didn’t play out. The problem is that on-chain social is too easy to turn into on-chain speculation.

The explosion of friend.tech wasn’t fundamentally because users found a better social experience. It was because users found that social relationships could be traded. The same is true for creator tokens. They turn content, influence, and community relationships into assets, but many times, trading assets matters far more than consuming content.

Once speculative hype cools down, social relationships won’t naturally stay.

Farcaster faces the cold-start problem for social networks. Zora faces the tension between content consumption and asset issuance. Creator coins are very likely to become short-cycle attention trades. Base invested a large amount of resources hoping these products would bring in mainstream users, but what ultimately remained was more crypto-native users, airdrop hunters, short-term traders, and creator-token players.

That’s also why Jesse said the entire social-side market “completely collapsed.” It wasn’t that there was no heat—it was that it didn’t form sustainable adoption.

By contrast, demand for stablecoins, prediction markets, perpetual futures, and tokenized assets is more direct. Users don’t go on-chain to “own social relationships.” They go on-chain to trade faster, pay at lower cost, earn higher yields, pursue stronger speculation opportunities, or enter markets that traditional finance can’t provide.

This was a brutal but necessary course correction for Base. Social can be part of an on-chain application, but it’s difficult for it to become the center of Base’s next stage of growth.

III. The positive pressure brought by Robinhood Chain

If it were only that the social experiment failed, Base would still have enough time to adjust slowly.

But the sudden breakout of Robinhood Chain rapidly amplified Base’s sense of crisis.

In early July, after Robinhood Chain launched, it quickly accumulated trading activity. According to Token Terminal data, after Robinhood Chain went live on the mainnet for 11 days, its daily transaction volume reached 7.6 million transactions, while Base during the same period was 9.2 million; the gap between the two was far smaller than the market’s prior expectations.

More importantly, Robinhood Chain’s growth was not just pure on-chain idling. It is tied to Robinhood’s tokenized stocks platform. It launched stock tokenization products to more than 120 countries, and it has about 23 million brokerage users from Robinhood as a potential entry point. The data also shows that Robinhood Chain has already achieved daily trading volume of over $500 million in its Uniswap deployments—second only to the Ethereum mainnet—and at one point it even surpassed Base to become Uniswap’s second-largest spot activity deployment.

Of course, Robinhood Chain’s early data has clear subsidy factors. Before going live on the mainnet, Robinhood paid users’ Gas fees for 90 days, and this subsidy is expected to continue through the end of September 2026. That means whether today’s high transaction volumes can continue after the subsidies end still needs to be observed.

But for Base, the real danger isn’t whether Robinhood Chain is currently “inflated.” The danger is what it represents: a new competitive model.

Base’s past advantage was Coinbase exchange traffic, its compliant brand in the U.S., and its developer ecosystem. Robinhood Chain has another more direct entry point: stocks, ETFs, options, retail accounts, and tokenized U.S. stocks. It is not competing for traffic from crypto-native users; instead, it brings traditional brokerage users directly into the on-chain financial world.

If Base’s ideal in the past was to “turn on-chain social into a consumer on-ramp,” then Robinhood Chain’s answer is simpler and more straightforward: users are already trading—so put the trading assets on-chain.

This is positive pressure on Base.

IV. Base’s new starting point

Jesse’s shift is, in essence, a re-positioning of Base.

In the past, Base’s narrative leaned more toward onchain consumer. It wanted to bring ordinary users on-chain with low cost, strong distribution, and social products. But now, Base’s narrative is becoming onchain finance: trading, payments, stablecoins, AI agents, and the settlement layer.

This aligns even more with the broader industry trend. Over the past year, almost all on-chain demand that truly took off has been related to finance: stablecoin payments, tokenized stocks, prediction markets, perpetual futures, RWA, on-chain lending, and AI agent payments. Social can create narratives, but it’s finance that brings trading, income, fees, and retention.

Base’s advantages are still obvious. It is backed by Coinbase, with a strong compliance brand, exchange on-ramp, developer community, stablecoin scenarios, and enterprise customer resources. At the same time, Base is not blank in the AI track either. Venice and Virtuals are the two most representative cards in the Base ecosystem: the former represents the direction of AI applications and privacy/open models, while the latter represents the direction of AI agent tokenization and the agent economy.

If Jesse’s claim that “AI will create tens of trillions of new economic participants” holds true, then Base’s opportunity is not only to capture human traders, but also to capture AI agent wallets as well as payment, settlement, and trading activities.

This is also the most imaginative part of Base’s new narrative: stablecoins solve the payment medium for machines and humans; prediction markets and perpetual futures provide trading scenarios; tokenized assets provide tradable underlying; and AI agents may become new on-chain users. If Base can connect these modules, it would not just be Coinbase’s Layer2 anymore—it could become the main settlement layer for Coinbase’s next generation of financial activity.

Base’s biggest advantage has never only been the users, compliance, stablecoins, institutional relationships, and the financial infrastructure capabilities behind the Coinbase on-ramp. The social experiment can fail, but if Base can rebuild advantages in trading, payments, stablecoins, AI agents, and tokenized assets, it will still be one of the most strategically valuable networks among Ethereum Layer2s.

The real problem is that the market will no longer give Base much time to tell stories. Robinhood Chain has already used tokenized stocks and subsidized trading to quickly close in; Stripe is rebuilding the merchant-side on-ramp with stablecoin payments; and Solana alongside Hyperliquid continues to apply pressure on trading experience and market microstructure.

Robinhood Chain’s rise once again proves: in Layer 2 competition, no one’s position is unbreakable. Base once became “the headliner” thanks to Coinbase’s endorsement, but now it faces a direct onslaught from challengers that are also strongly supported by platforms.

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