Base lead Jesse Pollak said he was wrong to bet that crypto’s next wave of adoption would be driven by onchain social products, creators and content tokens, calling that strategic choice a clear mistake after months of reflection and a week of feedback from the market.
In a long post, Pollak said Base made two major calls in 2024 and 2025 as it tried to expand globally. The first was that developers would drive the next cycle of crypto application adoption. The second was that adoption would be led by native onchain social experiences, including creators, content and messaging.
He said the first thesis held up, but the second did not. Developers did help push the latest wave of crypto apps, he wrote, pointing to growth in prediction markets, perpetuals and stablecoins. Social products, in his view, were not at the center of that expansion. He said much of the crypto social sector that many teams had spent time building, including Farcaster, Zora, Mini Apps and creator tokens, had effectively fallen apart.
"I was wrong," Pollak said. He added that it is still too early to know whether the failure was about timing or about the direction itself, though he said that distinction does not change the fact that his judgment was off. He also referenced $ANSEM as an example of how blurry the creator-token category can be.
The cost of that call
Pollak said the fallout from that mistake has been serious and that he has been dealing with the consequences throughout this year. By prioritizing social, Base lost time in sectors that are becoming more important.
He cited Avantis, Base’s perpetuals platform, and Limitless, its prediction market, saying both are visibly behind rivals that have already reached scale. He also said Base still has substantial work to do if it wants to become a tokenization and payments platform that enterprises can actually use.
He acknowledged that confidence in Base has weakened and said people on Crypto Twitter have continued to bring up his past mistakes on a near-weekly basis. That, he wrote, still feels bad.
Back to the chain and the technical stack
Pollak said his experience building in crypto over the past decade taught him that when things look worst, the right response is to keep building. He said that is what he has started doing.
Instead of spending his time mainly on the application layer, he has shifted his focus back to the Base chain itself, returned to coding, and has been shipping projects including Azul, Beryl, B20, privacy and ledger-related work.
That process also led him to revisit several assumptions: whether crypto needs social products to grow, whether Base needs an app at all, and whether Base can become a network larger than Coinbase.
For a long time, Pollak said, he believed only social products could produce the kind of viral growth needed to bring 1 billion people into crypto. He now thinks that view was wrong as well. Better money alone can drive growth, he argued, and the rise of stablecoins, prediction markets, perpetuals and tokenization is already showing that. He added that he expects that trend to accelerate.
His current goal, he said, is to bring 1 billion people onchain by making the global financial system actually work.
Base App goes back to Coinbase
On the app side, Pollak said he is now focused on building Base into "a blockchain for global finance." As part of that shift, he has handed Base App back to Coinbase.
Cobie will now take over and try to turn it into the best onchain app, Pollak said. That effort will also extend beyond the Base ecosystem itself.
He said plainly that, as the head of Base, he does not especially want to see that happen. Still, he described building a decentralized network inside a large public company as extremely difficult, and said much of the discussion on Crypto Twitter over the past week relates to that tension.
Pollak framed the relationship in a lighter way with two remarks he said can both be true at once: Base and he personally like memes, but Brian may never post a bullish meme take on his timeline because, in Pollak’s words, once someone is over 40, that kind of behavior is probably "illegal."
He said the relationship is complicated, but decentralization has been part of Base’s promise from the start and the team is still working through those issues as the network moves further in that direction.
Three priorities for 2026
Pollak said Base will now be built as a blockchain that serves global finance, with the aim of becoming a venue for global money settlement over the next century.
He said competition will be intense and explicitly welcomed Robinhood and Stripe into the race. Some people may leave, he wrote, but Base accepts competition and has a responsibility to earn support and respect.
For 2026, he said Base needs to lead in three areas:
- Trading: all assets, including tokenized stocks, memes, app tokens and anything else people want to trade.
- Payments: building stablecoins that can be used globally by both individuals and businesses.
- Agents: Pollak said AI agents will accelerate all of the above because crypto is the native money of computers and AI will create trillions of new economic actors.
Under those three pillars, he said, developers remain the foundation.
Developers stay at the center
Pollak said that if there is one thing he is most proud of since Base was launched, beyond the wins and the mistakes, it is that the team consistently chose to back developers.
In his telling, Base exists in its current form because of the people building on it. Not the roadmap. Not the infrastructure alone. What defines Base, he said, is the group of developers who came in, launched products, and kept shipping through every phase of change on the network, in good periods and bad ones.
He said Base will continue supporting them through Base Layer, Base Batches and the Base Ecosystem Fund, along with distribution help from Pollak himself, his team, Coinbase and Base App wherever possible.
His position was simple: if developers succeed on Base, Base succeeds.
Apology on content tokens, but not on $JESSE
Pollak also said he does not have every answer worked out. Base will keep trying things, will keep making mistakes, and will keep adjusting in public. Feedback from the outside, including sharp criticism, helps the team improve, he wrote, even when he cannot respond to each point directly.
He described Base’s broader mission as building a global economy that supports innovation, creativity and freedom, and said the team intends to do that by doing the right thing, working hard, staying optimistic, pushing limits through creativity, and putting the team ahead of the individual.
He added that some of those efforts are already showing results. Base’s DEX market share and payment volume both posted quarter-over-quarter growth, and the team has shifted its attention back to products that can support durable growth.
Pollak said he hopes the market can now stop talking about content tokens, repeating that his call on that area was wrong and apologizing for it. At the same time, he added a final note of irony: if someone else eventually makes content tokens work, he said, that would be hard for him to stomach.
He also said he remains committed for the long term to any project he launches. That includes $JESSE, which he said he is not giving up.
Pollak closed the post with a short line: he had written enough, and it was time to get back to work.