Base Co-Creation: Betting on on-chain social networking is wrong and will focus on transactions, payments, and AI agents

Comparing the news, Base Co-Founder Jesse Pollak wrote an article reviewing the direction of development over the past two years, admitting that its previous bet on native social networking on the chain was wrong. It said that social trends such as Farcaster, Zora, Miniapps, and creator coins failed to become the core driving force for crypto adoption, and as a result, Base lags behind some of its competitors in the fields of perpetual contracts, market forecasting, tokenization, and payments.

Pollak said that in the future, Base will position itself as the “blockchain for global finance,” focusing on the three major directions of transactions, payments, and AI agents in 2026. Among them, transactions cover tokenized stocks, meme coins, and application tokens, and payments revolve around global stablecoins for individuals and enterprises. AI Agent will use cryptocurrencies as native computer currency to serve future large-scale machine economy participants.

Additionally, the Base app will be returned to the Coinbase team, and Cobie will take over and possibly expand beyond the Base ecosystem. Pollak also said that Base will continue to support developers through Base Layer, Base Batches, Ecosystem Fund, and Coinbase distribution resources.