Decrypt’s Morning Minute said Jesse Pollak, the Coinbase executive leading Base, has handed the consumer-facing Base app back to Coinbase and put Cobie in charge of the related trading product stack. In the same update, Pollak said one of his core strategic calls for 2024-2025 was wrong: he no longer believes onchain social would be the growth engine for Base. He said the areas he backed most heavily, including Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and creator coins, had "disintegrated completely," and he publicly apologized for his stance on content coins. The newsletter also sketched out Pollak’s new focus for Base. He wants the network to become “the blockchain for global finance,” with trading, payments, and agents set as its three priorities for 2026. Cobie, meanwhile, is expected to oversee trading products across the CB app, Pro, and Baseapp, taking on competition from Kraken, memecoin apps such as Pump Fun and Fomo, Robinhood, and Kalshi. Across markets, crypto majors pulled back in midweek trading, with BTC at $64.2k and ETH at $1,885. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs posted $107 million in net inflows on Wednesday, while spot ETH ETFs brought in $54 million. The newsletter also highlighted an $18 million exploit at Ostium, policy discussions around the CLARITY Act, blockchain IPO efforts from Cantor Fitzgerald and Securitize, and fresh moves on crypto classification in South Korea and Japan.

Base founder Jesse Pollak has handed control of Base App back to Coinbase and said he will focus fully on the Base blockchain, framing its next phase around building a "global financial blockchain." The leadership change is notable on its own, but the sharper signal came from Pollak’s public admission that Base’s social strategy over the past two years was wrong. In his telling, Base made the right call on builders but misread where adoption would come from. Social products tied to creators and onchain identity did not become the center of crypto usage, while prediction markets, perpetuals, stablecoins and tokenized assets emerged as stronger engines of growth. Pollak said Base will keep backing builders, yet its operating focus is moving away from social apps and toward trading, payments and AI agents. The article also points to a new source of pressure: Robinhood Chain. Early transaction data, tokenized stock distribution across more than 120 countries, and access to roughly 23 million brokerage users suggest a competitive model that brings traditional finance users onchain directly instead of trying to pull them in through crypto-native social products. For Base, the reset is not only about fixing a failed product thesis. It is also about responding to a market that is rewarding onchain finance far more clearly than onchain social.

A dense stretch of crypto and market news from July 15 to July 16 was led by BNB Chain’s 36th quarterly BNB burn, a wave of large ETH wallet movements, fresh disclosures from BlackRock on its digital-asset business, and a tokenization push involving DTCC and nearly 40 Wall Street firms. BNB Foundation said it burned 1,615,827.795 BNB, worth about $932 million at the time, as part of its ongoing supply-reduction plan. On-chain activity also drew attention, with several whale addresses buying, withdrawing, unstaking, or moving sizable ETH and WBTC positions, while PeckShield reported that Ostium’s public OLP vault was exploited for roughly 24 million USDC. BlackRock, for its part, said digital-asset AUM fell from $79.6 billion a year ago to $48.8 billion despite net inflows of about $15.1 billion, and reiterated a 2030 crypto-revenue target of around $500 million. Elsewhere, Revolut received in-principle approval from Dubai’s VARA, Aave V4 expanded to Avalanche, Coinbase set a deadline to end support for USDC on Noble, and Summer.fi said it will wind down after an exploit tied to Lazy Summer Protocol. The period also included updates on US regulation, stablecoin payments, AI funding, prediction-market research, and Fed commentary on inflation, labor, and AI-driven price pressure.

Jesse Pollak said he is stepping back from leading the Base App and handing responsibility for the product back to Coinbase, while he shifts his full focus to expanding Base as a blockchain built for global finance. In a post on X on Wednesday, Pollak reviewed the network’s performance over the past six months and said Base’s strategy around on-chain social products and creator coins did not produce the adoption he had expected. Pollak wrote that his thinking had been based on two core assumptions: that developers would drive the next wave of crypto adoption, and that growth would come from new on-chain native social experiences. He said the first call was right, but the second was not. Instead, prediction markets, perpetuals, and stablecoins emerged as the strongest demand drivers. He also said the social segment many teams had been building toward, including Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and creator coins, had “disintegrated completely.” Under the new structure, Jordan Fish, better known as Cobie, will take over development of the Base App. Pollak said Base’s priorities for the rest of 2026 will be trading, payments, and AI agents.

Jesse Pollak, the Coinbase executive who created and leads the Base blockchain, said he has handed the consumer-facing Base app back to Coinbase, with pseudonymous trader and podcaster Cobie taking over the product. Pollak disclosed the change in a long post on X, saying it reflects a pullback from his multiyear thesis that crypto’s next phase would be driven by social apps. He said his 2024 and 2025 strategy rested on two bets: that builders would drive adoption, and that growth would come from onchain social experiences such as creators, content and messaging. In his account, the first call was right and the second was wrong. Pollak said the social segment he backed, including Farcaster, Zora, miniapps and creator coins, had “disintegrated completely,” leaving Base behind competitors in perpetuals, prediction markets, tokenization and payments. Going forward, he said he wants to build Base into a blockchain for global finance, with stablecoins, prediction markets, perpetuals and tokenization taking priority over social apps. He also set three priorities for 2026: trading, payments and agents.

Base co-founder Jesse Pollak said the network misread one major trend in its 2024-2025 strategy review: backing developers was the right call, but backing social was not. In a long post published on July 16, Pollak said the broader onchain social sector, including Farcaster, Zora, MiniApps and creator tokens, has effectively collapsed. He said that mistake left Base behind larger competitors in key areas such as perpetuals and prediction markets, while also exposing weak spots in tokenization and enterprise payments. Pollak described the first quarter of 2026 as "a punch in the face" and said the community had been reminding him of those mistakes every week. He added that the experience pushed him back toward chain-level work, where he personally wrote code and helped launch projects including Azul, Beryl, B20, privacy features and Ledgers. Looking ahead, Pollak said Base no longer sees social as a necessary growth engine. Instead, the company will center its 2026 strategy on three pillars: trading, payments and agents. He also said the Base app has been handed back to Coinbase, with Cobie taking over development of a cross-ecosystem onchain app, while Base continues its decentralization efforts and support for builders.

Base co-founder Jesse Pollak said the network’s push into onchain-native social products was the wrong strategic call over the past two years, arguing that areas such as Farcaster, Zora, miniapps and creator coins did not become the main driver of crypto adoption. He said that misstep left Base trailing some rivals in perpetuals, prediction markets, tokenization and payments. Pollak now wants Base to position itself as “the blockchain for global finance,” with its 2026 roadmap centered on three areas: trading, payments and AI agents. Trading will include tokenized stocks, meme coins and app tokens, while payments will focus on global stablecoin use cases for consumers and businesses. For AI agents, Pollak said crypto can function as a native currency for computers and support large-scale machine economy participants. He also said the Base app will be handed back to the Coinbase team, with Cobie taking over its development, and that the app may expand beyond the Base ecosystem. Base, he added, will continue supporting developers through Base Layer, Base Batches, its ecosystem fund and Coinbase distribution.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says the company got it wrong when it leaned into content coins and heavily promoted the crypto social app Zora before pivoting earlier this year. His comments came in response to criticism from X user smileyXBT, who argued that Coinbase and its Base network spent more than a year chasing new narratives instead of strengthening the users and culture already in the ecosystem. Armstrong agreed that content coins “didn’t work” and said the company “messed up,” though he pushed back on the idea that a move toward AI agents means abandoning community. He said Base is now focused on trading, payments, and agents, in that order, and described the three as tightly linked. The debate has revived scrutiny of the confusing token setup around Coinbase, Base, and Zora in 2025, along with the backlash over creator coins, user losses, and later controversies involving a fake Tyson Fury account and proposed collaboration with Sahil Arora. Data cited in the report shows Zora’s daily volume fell from nearly $63 million in May 2026 to below $100,000 in recent months, a 99.8% drop, while the Zora token has fallen nearly 96% from its August 2025 all-time high.