Decrypt’s Morning Minute said Jesse Pollak, the Coinbase executive who has been running the Base blockchain, has handed the consumer Base app back to Coinbase and placed it under Cobie, the trader whose onchain fundraising platform Echo was acquired by Coinbase. Pollak said his focus is now shifting back to the Base chain itself rather than the app.
Pollak says his social thesis was wrong
In his announcement post, Pollak said his 2024-2025 strategy rested on two bets: that builders would drive adoption, and that growth would come from onchain social. He said he still stands by the first view, but plainly rejected the second.
According to Pollak, the segment he championed most heavily, including Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and creator coins, has “disintegrated completely.” He said that left Base trailing rivals in perps, prediction markets, tokenization, and payments. He ended with a public apology: “hopefully we can shut up about content coins now. i was wrong and i’m sorry.” Decrypt noted that the remark echoed comments from Brian Armstrong earlier this week, when he said Base had “messed up” on content coins.
Pollak now wants to build Base into “the blockchain for global finance.” He argued that crypto, stablecoins, perps, prediction markets, and tokenization together can bring a billion people onchain. He set trading, payments, and agents as Base’s three priorities for 2026.
Cobie takes on Coinbase trading products
As laid out in the newsletter, Cobie will be responsible for trading products across the CB app, Pro, and Baseapp. The job comes with pressure from several directions.
Decrypt listed four competitive fronts:
- centralized exchanges such as Kraken, which are chasing growth ahead of a potential IPO;
- memecoin apps such as Pump Fun and Fomo, which already have hundreds of thousands of users;
- Robinhood, which offers overlapping products and made a notable onchain push in the past week;
- Kalshi, which is expanding from prediction markets into perps.
The newsletter said Cobie faces a difficult challenge, while adding that if anyone in crypto is suited to the task, he may be one of the strongest candidates.
Markets pull back; ETF inflows continue
Crypto majors were mostly lower in a midweek pullback. BTC fell 1% to $64.2k, ETH rose 1% to $1,885, SOL fell 2% to $76, and HYPE dropped 3% to $65.85.
Top movers included ONDO, up 16%, along with NIGHT and UNI, both up 4%.
In broader markets, oil was flat at $80 and gold was unchanged at $4,035. Stock futures were mixed, with the Dow up 0.2% and the Nasdaq down 0.7%.
Deals, policy, and corporate developments
The newsletter said Stripe, together with Advent, bid $53 billion to acquire PayPal. If completed, the deal would combine Stripe’s Bridge and Tempo stablecoin rails with PayPal’s PYUSD.
Strategy’s CEO said the company feels “very secure” until Bitcoin falls to $8,000-$10,000.
Trump is expected to attend a White House meeting later in the day to discuss the disputed ethics section of the CLARITY Act.
Cantor Fitzgerald and Securitize are working together on blockchain-based IPOs, taking tokenization from secondary-market trading into primary issuance.
South Korea will revise a 76-year-old law to classify crypto as national assets, which the newsletter described as a foundational step toward bringing crypto into the financial system.
Japan has reclassified crypto as a financial asset, opening the way for a flat 20% capital-gains rate.
Chamath published a 73-page report on crypto privacy that examined models used by projects including Monero and ZCash.
ETF flows
In corporate treasury and ETF updates, spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $107 million in net inflows on Wednesday, while spot Ethereum ETFs saw $54 million in inflows.
Meme coins and onchain movers
Meme leaders were mostly red: DOGE fell 1%, SHIB lost 2%, PEPE dropped 2%, PENGU rose 1%, TRUMP was flat, and BONK fell 5%.
Among Robinhood chain tokens, Tendies jumped 400% and Index rose 20%, while Cashcat dropped another 20% and Pons fell 35%.
On Solana, HBULL gained 55% and SOLdiers rose 48x. ANSEM fell 25% to a $170 million valuation.
Protocol and airdrop tracker
Ostium suffered an $18 million exploit as the recent wave of oracle attacks in DeFi continued.
Noxa, the launchpad behind the Robinhood Chain memecoin surge, shut down abruptly after collecting about $12 million in fees. The platform halted token launches over spam concerns and redirected all revenue to creators.
A Stanford study flagged manipulation in Polymarket’s five-minute Bitcoin markets. It found that 821 traders pushed the settlement price with last-second Binance orders and earned about $8.2 million.
NFTs were mostly flat
NFT leaders were largely unchanged. CryptoPunks were flat at 32.4 ETH, BAYC fell 1% to 8.9 ETH, Pudgy rose 1% to 4.42 ETH, and Hypurr’s gained 8% to 188 HYPE.
Invisible Friends, up 50%, and Mocaverse, up 26%, led the top movers. Following auctions by diewithmostlikes, nameless dread rose 30% and beef brothko climbed 44%.