The crypto market rose 1% over 24 hours, pushing total capitalization to $3.11 trillion. BTC traded at $89,233.18 and ETH at $3,010.47, while PIPPIN led gainers with a 61.7% surge and RIVER posted a 12.35% decline.

Base co-founder Jesse Pollak said on July 21 that Robinhood Chain was moving in the right direction by bringing tokenized stocks to an EVM environment, while acknowledging that Base had fallen behind in that segment. He said Base is now working with Coinbase on its own product and plans to offer tokenized equities backed 1:1 by shares rather than using a derivatives structure. The remarks marked Pollak’s second public admission of a strategic miss in recent weeks. Earlier, he said Base’s year-long push into social and creator tokens had failed to produce sustainable adoption, with projects tied to Farcaster, Zora and content tokens losing momentum as prices fell and early builders cooled off. Since then, leadership of Base App has shifted back to Coinbase, with Cobie taking over while Pollak focuses on core chain infrastructure. The article argues that Robinhood Chain’s launch has intensified scrutiny of Base’s unresolved issues, especially around decentralization, reliability and community trust. Even so, Base still holds the highest TVL among L2 networks at nearly $12 billion, keeping it in a strong position as competition tightens.

Two developments highlighted by Morning Minute and translated by TechFlowPost suggest the center of gravity in crypto infrastructure is shifting. On one side, Base is changing course internally: Coinbase executive Jesse Pollak said the consumer-facing Base App will be run by Cobie, while Pollak moves his attention back to the Base chain itself. He also said one of his core assumptions from 2024 to 2025 was wrong, acknowledging that growth did not come from onchain social products as he had expected. Pollak said the social push around Farcaster, Zora, Mini Apps and creator coins had effectively broken down, leaving Base behind in areas such as perpetuals, prediction markets, tokenization and payments. He now wants Base to focus on trading, payments and agents in 2026. On the other side, the report says Stripe and Advent have made a $53 billion offer for PayPal. The rationale, as presented in the article, is stablecoin infrastructure consolidation: Stripe already has Bridge and Tempo, while PayPal operates PYUSD. If combined, the merged system would link issuance, payment rails and settlement channels under one roof. Taken together, the two stories point to the same theme: crypto’s power centers are moving away from social narrative experiments and toward financial utility, especially in trading, payments and stablecoin distribution.

Base is reworking its strategy after publicly acknowledging that its social and creator-token experiment did not deliver the growth it expected. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on July 13 that the effort had failed, while Base creator Jesse Pollak later laid out a new focus for the network: trading, payments and AI. Pollak said Base spent the past two years betting that onchain social products such as Farcaster, Zora and Miniapps could drive mass adoption, only to see that thesis break down as social tokens sold off and products tied to prediction markets, perpetuals and stablecoins gained traction in the first quarter of 2026. The shift comes as Robinhood Chain is expanding quickly in the Layer2 market. Token Terminal data cited in the report showed Robinhood Chain moved ahead of Base in daily active addresses and daily transactions shortly after mainnet launch, while DeFiLlama data showed its DEX daily volume has exceeded Base for several trading days. At the same time, Base is also trying to lean harder into community culture. Brian Armstrong changed his X avatar to a Base community-created superhero image, and Cobie is taking over product development for Base App as the company looks to strengthen its position in trading products and meme-driven user activity.

ChainFeeds published a new research roundup on July 17, pulling together five separate pieces on crypto privacy, Wintermute’s view of the next cycle, U.S. equity valuations, Base’s strategy reset, and Trade[XYZ]’s market-building model on Hyperliquid. One article said privacy tokens gained 127.3% over the past year even as most crypto sectors fell, while also noting that 73 exchanges had delisted privacy tokens in 2025. Another argued that crypto’s next major opening may come from the “machine economy,” where AI agents, robots, and autonomous systems need payment, identity, authorization, and settlement rails. The newsletter also highlighted a valuation piece on U.S. stocks that said standard market-wide indicators remain near historic highs and that valuation dispersion between growth and value is sitting in extreme percentile ranges. On Base, the roundup focused on Jesse Pollak’s admission that the network “bet right on builders, but bet wrong on social,” alongside his decision to step back from leading Base App while continuing to lead the Base chain itself. The final feature examined Trade[XYZ], saying it has built 92 markets and captured 98% of HIP-3 trading volume, with the analysis centered on listing speed, liquidity depth, market-maker participation, and after-hours risk controls.

A cluster of crypto and tech developments emerged around July 16. Visa said it is launching the Visa Stablecoin Platform, a system aimed at banks and fintech firms that want to add stablecoin services to existing payment and treasury workflows. The company said it processes about $15 trillion in annual payments, has already settled billions of dollars in stablecoin volume, and wants to extend access to roughly 15,000 financial institution clients and more than 200 million merchants. Injective said it has filed an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to register as a transfer agent, part of an effort to move ownership records for securities on-chain. Elsewhere, AI infrastructure startup Fireworks AI announced a $1.5 billion funding round at a $17.5 billion valuation, while 1inch co-founder Anton Bukov said he has left the company’s operating team and started a new blockchain infrastructure project, Second Tier. In Washington, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a non-binding resolution stating that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried should not receive a presidential pardon or commutation under any circumstances. Base creator Jesse Pollak also outlined a reset in strategy, saying the network will focus in 2026 on trading, payments, and AI agents. South Korea’s central bank raised rates by 25 basis points to 2.75%, and TSMC reported second-quarter net profit of NT$706.6 billion, up 77.4% year over year.

Base’s retreat from social and creator-token experiments has turned into a public admission of failure from the people who championed the strategy. On July 15 and 16, Jesse Pollak said on X that he had been “definitively wrong” on social and creator coins, describing the first quarter of 2026 as a “punch in the face.” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong had already said content coins “didn’t work” and wrote, “We messed up, time to turn the page.” Base App has since been handed back to Coinbase, with Jordan Fish taking over, while Pollak returns to product and engineering work around Base’s broader financial infrastructure ambitions. The article argues that Base did not fail because decentralized social is inherently unworkable. It failed because token incentives were placed ahead of social behavior itself. Zora’s token fell from a market cap of about $550 million to roughly $30 million, while Farcaster’s activity and revenue metrics also slid sharply after earlier hype around Frames. By contrast, the piece points to Bluesky and Hive as examples of projects on the same broad track that chose different models. One removed token speculation at the product layer; the other treated tokens as rewards rather than the purpose. The broader conclusion is that the real challenge is not whether decentralized social can exist, but whether builders are willing to prioritize censorship resistance, data portability, privacy, open infrastructure, and sustainable governance over growth driven by speculation.

Base lead Jesse Pollak has published a sweeping reassessment of the network’s recent strategy, saying his team was right to back developers but wrong to center the next wave of crypto adoption on social products, creators, content and messaging. In his account, that mistake had real costs: while Base built in those areas, it lost ground in sectors that are now scaling faster, including perpetuals, prediction markets, tokenization and enterprise payments. Pollak said he is now repositioning Base as a blockchain built to serve global finance. For 2026, he named three priority areas: trading, stablecoin payments and AI agents. He also said he has handed Base App back to Coinbase, with Cobie taking over responsibility for the product, while he returns more of his time to Base chain infrastructure and core technical work. Even as he apologized for his earlier call on content tokens, Pollak said Base will keep backing builders through Base Layer, Base Batches, the Base Ecosystem Fund, and distribution support from his team, Coinbase and Base App. He added that while he was wrong on content tokens, he does not plan to abandon $JESSE.