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- [00:00]
Jesse Pollock
When I think about trading and I think about building a trading product, there's no better than him to do that. And that's where the focus of the Base app has shifted over the last six months. You know, we made that pivot six months ago, but I think that he's the right person to carry it forward and really deliver that world class trading product that I think crypto Twitter wants to see and I think will deliver a huge amount of value for the customers who use it. And so that I think to both of us felt just like this natural partnership with where I could double down on this blockchain for global finance, on continuing to work towards decentralization, on continuing to be the best place for developers and enterprises and scaled adopters to come on chain. And then he could focus in on that trading problem alongside kind of a new scope that he also took on across the coinbase products for trading to make sure that they're building the best possible products there. And so I'm fired up about it. I don't think I would be feeling as fired up if I didn't trust Jordan to be such a good shepherd of this product that we've built. And I think we're gonna see a lot of good things on both sides for next year.
- [01:00]
Laura Shin
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Before we dive in, we're gonna take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. This episode is brought to you by Kape, America's privacy First mobile carrier. Same premium service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed so your number, your location and your data actually stay yours. Get 33% off six months at Cape Co Unchained. Today's guest is Jesse Pollock, creator of Base. Welcome, Jesse.
- [01:38]
Jesse Pollock
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
- [01:40]
Laura Shin
Yeah, excited to chat with you. You had a lot of big news this week and it must have been challenging for you to share. You wrote a long tweet about how you felt a lot of what the Base app in particular had aimed to do in the social arena had failed and that spending resources on that had resulted in bas falling behind in key areas such as perps, prediction markets, even tokenization and payments. So you announced you would be returning to focus primarily on BAS and would have hand the reins of the BASAP over to Jordan Fish, AKA Kobe. So first of all, I just want to say I have a lot of respect for you for always being so transparent and putting yourself out there. And especially because you know that can be tough when what you're attempting doesn't succeed. But I also detected a note of optimism and joy when you talked about putting your head down, building, writing code. So tell us how you're feeling right now.
- [02:34]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, I think I'm mostly feeling excited. I mean, as an entrepreneur, I feel like it's always a little scary to take big bets and some of those bets won't work out. But when you have a bet that doesn't work out, putting it behind you and saying, okay, let's double down on what is working and lean into that and get fired up about that. I think it's just like a huge opportunity. And so that's exactly what I'm doing. And I think, you know, one of the things that maybe has gotten a little bit lost in the conversation about base app is that base chain has been kind of behind the scenes cooking for the last two years. It's now the biggest spot market in the world for crypto trading on chain. So bitcoin, ethereum, other assets trade more on base than any other chain. It is one of the world's most important stablecoin settlement rails. It's leading in agentic finance and agentic payments. And so that for me is this like energizing signal that crypto is starting to hit real product market pit and me taking my energy and saying, hey, the bet on the app that we made last year didn't quite work out. Let's refocus on the chain and growing that while handing the app to Jordan, who's just a killer and I think is going to absolutely crush the mandate of building an on chain trading product. That just feels like a win, win, win. And I'm fired up to get back to work on it.
- [03:52]
Laura Shin
And I'm sure you've done so much reflecting on this, but I'm curious. So obviously the numbers were showing that the social bed wasn't panning out, but why do you think it didn't work out?
- [04:04]
Jesse Pollock
You know, I think some of it, you know, was the just like timing of it. If you look at kind of where crypto is getting product market fit today, it's really infinite. Stablecoins, tokenization, prediction markets per these categories are growing incredibly quickly. I think one of the theses that I have and I've always had is that the whole world is going to be consumed by crypto. Uh, we're basically going to go from the kind of bare bones crypto of bitcoin up to having smart contracts to building finance to every single part of our society, leveraging this new technology to make it more efficient, more fair, more free and more global. And that of course includes social. But I think the thing that we missed, or maybe not missed, but the thing that maybe went wrong there was. There's so much work to do just on the finance side. And when you look at where the product market fit is today, it's really in upgrading finance. And so for me, going in there and saying, hey, let's focus there, let's make progress there, let's build that kind of foundation. And then as time goes on, of course the rest of the world will continue to upgrade as well. I think that's the big learning and lesson. And this is, I think one of my opportunities as a leader is I always want to do everything. And one of the things that I think I can do better is focus on the small, concrete things that we can do every single day to push forward where the product is right now.
- [05:28]
Laura Shin
All right, so in a moment, we'll talk more about the pivots coming at Coinbase, but first we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. If you hold crypto on your phone, your biggest vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your carrier. AT&T Verizon and T Mobile have been breached again and again, and SIM swaps are still one of the easiest ways for attackers to drain accounts. That's where Kape comes in. America's privacy first mobile carrier, same premium service, but Kape rotates the identifier on Your Sim every 24 hours, deletes your call and text metadata after a day, and protects against SIM swaps with a 24 word recovery phrase that only you control. You also get two middle to end encrypted secondary numbers for banking and signups, so you stop handing your real number to every app that asks go to Cape Co Unchained and use code unchained for 33% off your first six months. Back to my conversation with Jesse. So the day after your announcement and what you said Brian wouldn't post bullpost memes on the timeline due to his age. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, did end up in a minor controversy around a Brian meme coin that he wasn't actually direct affiliated with, he changed his X profile pic to an image of Coinbase man and it's affiliated Coin. Brian actually had just been launched a couple days prior. It ended up doing like 37x up to about a $37 million market cap. But then a couple days later he swapped it for a crypto punk and then the Token crashed about 90% and he ended up having to tweet. Please don't follow my personal X account for investment advice or signals around individual coins. My posting profile pics are also not endorsements. If you're treating my EX account as alpha, you are doing so at your own risk. Against my wishes. So people, people were obviously unhappy about what happened, that, what happened there. And I wondered, you know, if you had insight into, like, why he did this or if there was even any, like, lack of awareness about what might possibly happen.
- [07:42]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, I mean, Brian's someone who always says what he means and means what he says. And I feel like I'm the same way. And when I posted that Brian's not going to bullpost memes, I actually feel like that's exactly like what happened. Brian's not bull posting memes with changing his pfp. He's changing his PFP because he's excited about Cryptopunks, excited about Coinbase, and just kind of continuing to figure out how to be a human on the Internet. And so I, I look at this and I'm like, there's consistency in his messaging. You shouldn't be trading Brian's PFP as a core piece of financial advice. And I think what we're focused on with Base and, and with Coinbase is figuring out how do we just make more use cases, more real world impact. If people want to trade memes, if they want to trade stocks, if they, they want to trade basically anything, we want them to do it on base. But we're not going to play the kind of short term game where we say, hey, you know, listen to Brian as a key spokesperson of what things you should trade.
- [08:47]
Laura Shin
Yeah, I mean, watching that incident, it sort of felt to me like there's a gap between how you expect or you want Meme Coins or Creator coins to work and then how they actually work in the real world. And I wondered if you, you know, had thoughts about, like, why that gap exists or what needs to happen in order for that gap to not exist or for Meme Coins and Creator Coins to work the way that you had envisioned.
- [09:16]
Jesse Pollock
Well, I think a lot of it is kind of changing the culture and changing the structures from an economic perspective to be more long term. When I think about what a successful asset or project or kind of anything that we contribute to the world is, it's something that makes positive impact on, you know, our economy or on our society over A long term horizon and you can trade the ups and downs of that. I think that that's like a really important part of the market, helps with price discovery. It gives people a way to make money. But in terms of the underlying assets, the thing that you want is you want things that are oriented towards the long term that have the right incentives to, to be set up for the long term and kind of drive that change through their being. And so when I look at the kind of like Brian coin, you know, that wasn't a coin that Brian launched. It wasn't something that he endorsed explicitly, it wasn't something that was set up in a way that was geared towards the long term. And so it's kind of unsurprising to me that there was then a bunch of drama about it in a kind of short term way. And so I think what, what we want to be orienting people towards is that long term perspective of how do we get to a world of crypto culture and a world of crypto technology where we are setting up the systems, the culture and the products to be making that long term impact.
- [10:38]
Laura Shin
All right, so now let's talk about some other recent news because Robinhood chain launched just a few weeks ago and according to Artemis data, it's actually already surpassed base in terms of the number of daily active users twice. I also noticed 24 hour fees on Robinhood chain have already like roughly 4x'd the same on base. So I would love to hear your thoughts on how you intend to compete with the likes of Robinhood.
- [11:04]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, I mean when you look at base today, we've been building now for three years. We have the largest spot on chain markets in crypto. We have a ton of stablecoin volume moving through base and just an incredibly dense network of builders that have made base their home. And so know I think there's always going to be oscillation in activity and oscillation in prices. And I think particularly when you have new ecosystems cropping up and these kind of meadows emerging, there's that kind of frenzy or activity that shows up in a big way. And I think what we're focused on, again, which is probably not going to be surprising given the rest of our conversation, is the long term. It's how do we continue to make sure that base is fast, trusted, easy to use. That's a place where developers and builders are coming to build new protocols, that we're launching quality assets like stocks which are coming very soon, that we're expanding the, the sorts of markets, types that are available to make it so that people can trade spot, they can trade per, they can trade predictions, they can borrow and lend and do financing, and they can do it all in one place on base. And so when, when we look at, you know, folks coming into the ecosystem, we look at that as a really positive validation of our strategy. You know, this is the world starting to come on chain. You literally have the largest financial companies in the world starting to say, hey, let's bring our products on chain, let's bring our customers on chain. And that's just growing the pie. And so I think that we're very early in the overall adoption of crypto. You know, less than 1% of the world is using this technology. And we're just going to keep taking the learnings and then keep making sure that Base is the place where people are coming and building finance, whether it's trading or payments or agents or anything else.
- [12:48]
Laura Shin
So, you know, looking at these potential competitors, Stripes, Tempo, Robinhood, it does seem that they have an advantage in distribution that maybe base doesn't. But I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that take and how you think about that. Kind of like hurdle or obstacle.
- [13:08]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, well, I mean, first off, I think it's worth saying that Base comes from Coinbase. And Coinbase has one of the largest user bases for crypto in the United States and around the world. You know, it's the biggest place in the world for assets, in terms of assets stored. There's tens of millions of users with funded accounts, millions and millions of users with activity. And so I think that's a, that's a really strong starting point. Yeah, starting point.
- [13:33]
Laura Shin
But I guess because those are already crypto users in this phase of adoption is, you know, with non crypto. That's really what I meant.
- [13:41]
Jesse Pollock
I see what you're saying. Well, I think first off, beyond just Coinbase, over the last few years, Base has built out its own kind of integration and distribution. You know, it's integrated into every centralized exchange. It's increasingly a default for folks who are adding crypto as a payments rail. And I think that that is just this really strong starting point that lets us work better for payments use cases and trading use cases, versus some of the new entrants that have to go to build all that infrastructure, build all those integrations just to get off the ground. But in terms of the next phase, I think that it's kind of a wide open game. We've been looking and having conversations with all of these folks who are starting to Come on chain or starting to use crypto really as a backend for doing trading, for doing payments. And what they want is they want a trusted, open, fast, cheap, scalable platform. And that's exactly what Base provides. And we've been working with Coinbase to figure out how do we make that as easy as folks to integrate as possible. And so, you know, one example of this is Coinbase has really kind of built out its developer platform over the last 12 months. And today I think it's like one of the best, if not the best, for doing payments, for setting up wallets, for doing trading. And that's this incredibly powerful lever for driving new folks who are, you know, not crypto, but coming on Chain. And I think leveraging the relationships and the brand and the trust that Coinbase already has, you know, serving all of the ETFs, being embedded with, you know, so many G sibs, that's a really powerful combination of having those relationships, having the distribution, and then having a real platform from a developer perspective to make it something that anyone can just integrate. And so, again, we think the pie is growing in a really big way, and we're focused on bringing Base to the world in collaboration with Coinbase and the rest of the ecosystem that made Base what it is.
- [15:31]
Laura Shin
So I do want to just revert back to the Base app. Like, obviously, you gave your little postmortem about how some of the things that you had tried didn't work out the way that you had expected or hoped, and then you announced that you would be focusing on Base the chain, and Kobe would be taking over the app. And I would love to hear, you know, why that decision was made and that particular division of labor became the, you know, answer.
- [16:03]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, I think a big reflection for me over the last six months has been building Base into the blockchain for global finance that is really serving as the kind of settlement layer for every economic transaction over the next decade or two is just a massive undertaking. And having my full focus on that is required to achieve kind of all that we want to achieve there. And at the same time, I built a really strong relationship with Jordan Kobe over last year, him joining Coinbase. I was actually really involved in the process of getting him to join Coinbase in the first place, and we started our relationship through that. And then once he got here, we've just continued building a friendship and kind of trust between us. And I think when I think about trading and I. I think about building a trading product, there's no one better than him to do that. And that's where the focus of the base app has shifted over the last six months. We made that pivot six months ago. But I think that he's the right person to carry it forward and really deliver that world class trading product that I think crypto Twitter wants to see and I think will deliver a huge amount of value for the customers who use it. And so that I think to both of us felt just like this natural partnership where I could double down on this blockchain for global finance, on continuing to work towards decentralization, on continuing to be the best place for developers and enterprises and scaled adopters to come on chain. And then he could focus in on that trading problem alongside kind of a new scope that he also took on across the coinbase products for trading to make sure that they're building the best possible products there. And so I'm fired up about it. I don't think I would be feeling as fired up if I didn't trust Jordan to be such a good shepherd of this product that we built. And I think we're gonna see a lot of good things on both sides for the next year.
- [17:49]
Laura Shin
Yeah, yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me because it's, it's very clear just from his Twitter history that he is an active trader. So, you know, and I do think like, just as a person who myself also wears multiple hats the way that you did the past few years, it's really hard to do more than one thing. It's so hard. So anyway, so I did also want to ask about something that you hinted at in your post, which is that you said that base app might be expanding beyond the base chain. So I'm curious, you know, it sort of sounds like it'll be expanding out to other chains and I'd be curious to know what that looks like or why you're, you're looking at doing that.
- [18:36]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, well, I mean, first off, Base app has always supported more than just the base chain.
- [18:40]
Laura Shin
That's right.
- [18:41]
Jesse Pollock
It's been EVM from the beginning. We had Ethereum, we had tons of L2s, we, we recently added Solana and now has full bitcoin support. Heck, they, we just added Robinhood chain. And I think the, the, the mantra and thesis for that really comes from the founding of base, which is that we want base to be a bridge, non island. Whether it's the chain or the app, we want to make it. So when consumers are coming in to base and they're coming into crypto, they're not experiencing this fragmented world of, you know, you have to have gas on this chain or you have to, you know, only, you know, do things on this chain. We want it to just work. And then behind the scenes, we can make it so that the chain of base is kind of powering more and more of it and making that more seamless, faster, easier. But I think from a customer experience, whether you're developing or launching an asset on base and you want it on every chain or you're logging into the base app, you want to be able to trade everywhere. Making that just work is the top priority. And so that's the mandate for base app. I think that in the short term, I can imagine folks saying, oh, man, shouldn't they just focus on base if it's going to be called the base app? But I think in the medium to long term, there's much opportunity for us to go build the best product experience experiences and then figure out how do we make it so that the chain behind the scenes can enable those product experiences to get better and better.
- [20:02]
Laura Shin
Yeah, yeah. And sorry that I misspoke, but yeah, you wrote the base ecosystem, but anyway, well, so I know you don't speak for the app anymore, but do you want to give us a hint of what direction it will go?
- [20:15]
Jesse Pollock
I mean, they're just going to be doubling down on trading. I saw a bunch of new stuff they're starting to ship. You know, they, they got the trending pages be working better, better multi account support, better visibility for, for all the different assets that are launching, like, fresh, you know, out of the trenches. Whether it's on base or Salon or elsewhere, there's more coming with predictions and perps. Tokenized assets, tokenized equities are going to be a big part of it. You know, it basically should be an app where if you want to do anything on chain, but particularly trading, you can just come in. It just works. And so there's a great team behind it. Jordan's doing an awesome job leading it just in the last few weeks where I've seen him kind of take the reins, and I think they got a lot more to share in the months ahead.
- [20:59]
Laura Shin
All right, so in your post, you also mentioned a few base network upgrades, Azul Barrel, Cobalt, I guess the first two have already happened and Cobalt's coming up. Go ahead and tell us about some of the changes that you're most excited about.
- [21:16]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, so one thing that we, we did over the last six months is we moved base onto its own dedicated stack that we've built. Historically, we Used a kind of third party stack from Optimism. But as we have kind of continued to scale base, what we've realized is that having more control of the stack lets us just deliver a better product experiences for the developers, for the traders who are building on top of it. And so Azul was our first upgrade to that stack where we moved onto it. Barrel was the second one, Cobalt is the third. It's coming in I think late August or September. We're trying to get on a pretty fast cadence here where we're not waiting a year for an upgrade but instead upgrades are shipping every kind of like six to 12 weeks. We think that that's going to let us just deliver more value to customers faster. The big things that we've been focused on with those upgrades with Azul again was just migrating over and continuing to kind of scale capacity. With Bolt, we launched the B20 which is a tokenization standard that basically lets issuers, whether they're issuing stablecoins or tokenized equities or any asset, use kind of this trusted standard to get a ton of stuff out of the box. And so that gives them more controls compliance, privacy. And then it also, because it's a native token standard, lets us make it much faster and much cheaper for them to do things with the token. And so I was actually looking at a performance kind of benchmarks that we've been doing internally, which we're going to start publishing externally. And with B20 stablecoins right now we're moving towards a place where we can do 20,000 transactions per second by the end of the year. And so I mean, actually I don't even know if it'll buy by the end of the year. Maybe by the end of the quarter. That's a big upgrade. I think right now it's more like six to seven thousand transactions a second that we could do pre B20. And so that kind of headroom that we're buying for stablecoin issuers who are doing payments or traders who are trading the, the wrapped assets on, on, on base or the tokenized equities that are coming soon, that's one of the core things. And with B20s I think we've already done something like $150 million of volume of people trading the B20 asset. And so it's seeing really like high, high quality traction already. And I'm excited to see that continue to grow. With Cobalt, the focus is on native accounts. We're basically making it so that when folks are setting up new accounts on base, it just works Better. They can pay for gas in any stablecoin. They can not have to have to do multiple approvals. It's easier to do key rotation. They can have more controls around kind of the multi sig setup that they do. And so this is a big developer experience improvement that will then translate to the consumer experience. Building on all the work we've done with smart accounts and, and then as we get into the D E, the big focus for the chain is on how do we just make it work better for trading. And so we're going to be rolling out things that enable trading and traders and folks who are building trading infrastructure like exchanges and financing and lending to just build better products. And so if you're watching this and you're building that kind of infrastructure, please get us. We want to make base work as well as possible for you. And we're always open to ideas about how we can upgrade the chain to make it work better.
- [24:22]
Laura Shin
All right, so last question, you also mentioned privacy and ledgers as focus areas. And in this conversation you also talked about agentic payments. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on where you'd love to go with all three of those.
- [24:34]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah. So we launched Baseledgers, which is our privacy solution for enterprise, a month ago. It basically lets enterprises do transactions that are private while kind of retaining full compliance controls for them. It also lets them interact with base defi so they don't have to go and build their own liquidity. And so that's been this really powerful offering for folks who are looking to bring their businesses on chain but don't want to give up their customers privacy. We've seen really strong demand for that. And I think if you're an enterprise who's thinking about moving on chain, we'd love to talk to you and figure out how base ledgers can solve that privacy problem for you. I think the agentic payment side is another place where we're seeing a lot of growth x 402 today. Base does something like 90% of all the transactions, which I think is pretty remarkable. It's a lot of stablecoin transactions, people using agentic payments to pay for data, for inference, for tools like being able to generate videos or do outbound outreach to sales contacts. And so that's been growing steadily, transaction counts rising week over week, volume rising week over week. And we're excited to keep doubling down on that. And then the last thing that I'd share that's, that's kind of just another observation is that the base ecosystem is really thriving right now. If you look at Morpo, they're growing incredibly quickly, powering financing. We have, you know, folks like banker and virtuals who, who've been doing kind of builder infrastructure to help them tokenize and, and kind of grow their business with early tokenization to help them generate revenue. We have new folks like UMIA who are bringing kind of a new token model that lets them do kind of like longer term prediction market based governance. They're launching soon. And I'd say that energy of builders basically figuring out how do we use this incredibly powerful infrastructure to bring more people on chain, to bring more businesses on chain and to rewire the way that we work with money as organizations. And that's what base is all about. And it's not going anywhere. We're doubling down and I'm really excited for the second half of this year.
- [26:41]
Laura Shin
All right, well, thank you so much, Jesse, for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you on Unchained.
- [26:47]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, thanks for having me.
- [26:49]
Laura Shin
Nothing new here on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only and my guests and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit Unchained Crypto.com it.
- [27:26]
Jesse Pollock
Sam.