Base Co-Founder Jesse Pollak Reflects on Misjudgment of Base's Social Strategy
Base co-founder Jesse Pollak published a lengthy article admitting that the dual-track strategy for 2024-2025 misjudged the social direction, leading to the collapse of on-chain social sectors like Farcaster and Zora.
This misjudgment has caused Base to fall behind in perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and tokenization. He described the first quarter of 2026 as a "punch to the face," and subsequently returned to layer development personally for projects like Azul, Beryl, and B20, while restructuring the organization to return the application layer to Coinbase.
In terms of market mechanisms, the failure in social has prompted funds to flow back from the application layer to the foundational layer, making builders and developers the core drivers. The three pillars of trading, payments, and agents attract long-term capital, benefiting from stablecoins and real use cases of tokenization, while competitors face pressure in the social track.
Source: Public Information
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Jesse Pollak previously drove Base's growth at Coinbase, rapidly expanding users through social integrations like Farcaster. However, similar to many early Layer 2 social attempts like Friend.tech that later collapsed, it exposed the vulnerability of relying on viral social.
Base's capital path has shifted towards chain infrastructure, reallocating resources from application development to protocol layer projects like Azul and ecological funds. This move stems from a belief in better currency-driven growth while promoting decentralization to address internal restrictions of public companies.
Similar to Solana's early focus on developer tools rather than social, or Uniswap's focus on trading rather than the application layer, Base is currently transitioning from social experiments to financial infrastructure, strengthening synergy with its parent company Coinbase.
Essentially, this is a technological substitution change, where AI agents and stablecoin payments are replacing traditional social as the on-chain growth engine. The mechanism lies in the direct service of global financial needs by crypto-native currency attributes, bypassing social friction to achieve a scalable path for a billion users on-chain.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
- Social brings traffic, currency creates lasting value.
- In the worst moments, doing the work is better than making excuses.
- If builders win, then infrastructure wins.