Base co-founder Jesse Pollak said the company got a central part of its strategy wrong, writing in a post published on July 16 that while its decision to back developers in 2024 and 2025 was correct, its bet on social was not.
Pollak said the broader onchain social segment, including Farcaster, Zora, MiniApps and creator tokens, has "completely fallen apart." He said that misjudgment left Base trailing scaled competitors in core categories such as perpetuals and prediction markets, and also exposed clear weaknesses in tokenization and enterprise payments.
A painful first quarter in 2026
Pollak described the first quarter of 2026 as "a punch in the face." He wrote that the community had been reminding him of his mistakes every week and added, "it felt bad, and it still feels bad."
He said one lesson from a decade of building in crypto has stayed with him: "when it feels the worst, the best option is to put your head down and work." After that, he shifted his time away from the application layer and back toward the chain layer, wrote code himself, and helped launch a series of projects including Azul, Beryl, B20, privacy features and Ledgers.
Three assumptions under review
In the post, Pollak said he revisited three core assumptions: whether crypto needs social to grow, whether Base needs its own app, and whether Base can surpass Coinbase.
His conclusion was direct. Better money on its own is enough to drive growth, he wrote, and stablecoins, prediction markets, perpetuals and tokenization are already proving that point. Base will now organize around a goal of "making global finance actually work and bringing a billion people onchain."
Base's three pillars for 2026
Pollak said Base will focus on three pillars in 2026:
- Trading, covering asset categories including tokenized stocks, meme coins and app tokens;
- Payments, built around global stablecoins for individuals and businesses;
- Agents, based on the view that crypto is the native money of computers and AI will create trillions of dollars in new economic actors.
Base app moves back to Coinbase
On the organizational side, Pollak said the Base app has been handed back to Coinbase, with Cobie taking over the effort to build a cross-ecosystem onchain app. He also said it is "extremely difficult" to grow a decentralized network inside a large public company. Brian, as CEO, cannot post memes on a public timeline, he wrote, but Base's decentralization work is still moving ahead.
Support for builders remains in place
Pollak said builders remain the backbone of Base. He said the network will keep supporting them through Base Layer, Base Batches and its ecosystem fund. In his words, "when builders win, Base wins."