Social experiments failed, competition approached, and Base completely switched to the financial circuit
Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher
Original title: Base founder Jesse rarely publicly admits strategic mistakes and shatters social dreams
July 15, Founder of BaseJesse PollakHe published a long article announcing that he would return the leadership of the Base App to Coinbase, while devoting all his energy to the Base blockchain itself, with the goal of making Base a “global financial blockchain.” Jesse will continue to lead the Base Chain, but will no longer be responsible for the Base App; the Base App will be taken over by Jordan Fish, known as Cobie in the crypto community.
The most notable adjustment was not Jesse's departure from the Base App, but rather his rare admission of Base's strategic misdecisions in the social direction of the past two years.
In the past, Base tried to establish itself as a consumer-grade entrance into the crypto world. From Farcaster to Zora, from creator coins to miniapps, to Base App, Base hopes to use “on-chain social + creator economy” to bring more regular users to the chain.
But now, Pollak personally admits: Base bet on the right builder and misplaced the social network. This statement can almost be viewed as a phased judgment in the Base social experiment.
On-chain social networking has not become the center of the next round of adoption; what really comes out is predicting markets, perpetual contracts, stablecoins, and tokenized assets. It's not that users don't want to go online; they don't want to go online for the sake of social networking itself.
They are more willing to go on the chain for transactions, payments, earnings, and speculation.
1. What did Jesse say?
In the long post, Jesse reviewed in detail the reflections and adjustments of the past six months. “The first quarter of 2026 was a big punch,” he confessed. Over the past two years, Base has made a two-track bet: one is believing that builders will unlock the next wave of cryptographic adoption; the other is believing that adoption will be driven by “new on-chain native social experiences” (creators, content, messages).
The result: “Our bet on builders was right, but our bet on social was clearly wrong.” Builder is indeed driving a wave of adoption — predicting markets, perpetual contracts, and stablecoins as the strongest growth engines — but social networking isn't at the center. Instead, “the entire social side marketplace we've been trying to build — Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and yes, creator tokens — has completely crashed.”
He said bluntly: “I was wrong. Whether the timing is wrong... or completely wrong, only time will tell, but in any case, I'm sure it was wrong.” Collateral damage is quite serious: Base lags behind in key areas — perpetual contracts (althoughAvantisetc.), predicting the market (althoughLimitlessetc.) all lag behind mature competitors; there is also plenty of room for improvement in enterprise-level tokenization and payment unlocking. People lost confidence, and CT reminded him of his mistakes every week.
Jesse said this year was a practice of “eating shit.” But the lesson he learned was: when things feel the worst, the best thing to do is to bow down and build. He has refocused his attention from the app to the chain, started writing code again, introduced features such as Azul, Beryl, B20, privacy, ledger, etc., and re-examined the hypothesis: Does crypto need social networking to grow? Does Base need an app? Can Base be bigger than Coinbase?
The conclusion turned clear: “Better money is enough — we're seeing this in real time through stablecoins, forecasting, perpetuity, tokenization... I'm now focusing on getting one billion people on the chain by making global finance actually work.” The three main pillars of 2026 are: winning transactions (all assets, including tokenized stocks, memes, app coins, etc.), payments (global stablecoins, effective for individuals and businesses), and proxies (AI agents accelerate everything, because encryption is the native currency of computers, AI will create trillions of new economic participants).
He has returned the Base App to Coinbase, led by Cobie, and allowed it to expand beyond the Base ecosystem (something he “wouldn't like” as the leader of Base). He stressed that builders are still the cornerstone, and Base will continue to support them through Base Layer, Batches, Ecosystem Fund, etc.
2. Why did Base's social dream come to an end?
Base's bet on social isn't without logic.
Jesse is the soul of Base and the most important shaper of Base community culture. A few years agofriend.techThe explosion on Base made the market believe for a while that Jesse and Base might become the main location for on-chain social networking and creator economy. friend.tech proved one thing: social relationships are financialized, and on-chain products can get huge attention in a very short period of time.
This also strengthened Base's social preferences, and the rapid fall of friend.tech did not affect Base's judgment.
Farcaster, Zora, creator coins, miniapps, and the Base App are actually a complete set of imagination: if Coinbase provides a compliant portal, Base provides a low-cost on-chain environment, Farcaster provides social graphs, and Zora provides content and creator capitalization tools, then Base has the opportunity to build a consumer-grade on-chain ecosystem different from traditional DeFi.
But in the end, that logic didn't work. The problem is that on-chain social networking is too easy to turn into on-chain speculation.
The popularity of friend.tech is essentially not because users have found a better social experience, but because users have discovered that social relationships can be traded. The same goes for creator tokens, which turn content, influence, and community relationships into assets, but many times, asset transactions are far more important than content consumption.
Once speculation declines, social relationships don't naturally stay.
Farcaster faces the problem of cold starting social networks, Zora faces tension between content consumption and asset distribution, and creator coins can easily become short-term attention trade. Base invested a lot of resources and hoped these products would bring mainstream users, but in the end, more were native crypto users, airdrop hunters, short-term traders, and creator token players.
That's why Jesse said the entire social side market “completely collapsed.” It's not that it's not without popularity, it's that it's not developing sustainable adoption.
In contrast, the demand for stablecoins, predictive markets, perpetual contracts, and tokenized assets is more immediate. Users go online not to “have social relationships,” but to trade faster, pay at lower costs, have higher returns, stronger speculative opportunities, or enter markets that traditional finance cannot provide.
This was a cruel but necessary correction for Base. Social networking can be part of an on-chain app, but it's unlikely to be the center of Base's next phase of growth.
3. Positive pressure brought about by the Robinhood Chain
If it's just a social experiment that fails, Base still has plenty of time to adjust slowly.
However, the sudden outbreak of Robinhood Chain quickly amplified Base's sense of crisis.
In early July, Robinhood Chain quickly accumulated trading activity after launch. According to Token Terminal data, Robinhood Chain processed 7.6 million transactions in a single day 11 days after the main network was launched, while Base was 9.2 million in the same period. The gap between the two was far less than the market's previous expectations.
More importantly, Robinhood Chain's growth is not pure on-chain idling. It is tied to Robinhood's tokenized stock platform to launch tokenized stock products in more than 120 countries, and has approximately 23 million Robinhood brokerage users as potential entrants. The data also shows that Robinhood Chain has achieved a trading volume of more than 500 million US dollars in a single day in the Uniswap deployment, second only to the Ethereum mainnet, and once surpassed Base to become Uniswap's second-largest spot activity deployment.
Of course, Robinhood Chain's early data had a clear subsidy factor. Robinhood pays users for gas 90 days before the mainnet goes live, and this subsidy is expected to continue until the end of September 2026. In other words, it is still necessary to observe whether the current high trading volume can continue after the subsidy ends.
But for Base, the real danger isn't whether the Robinhood Chain is currently “fat,” but rather that it represents a new competitive model.
Base's past strengths were Coinbase exchange traffic, US compliant brands, and developer ecosystem; Robinhood Chain has another more direct entry point: stocks, ETFs, options, retail accounts, and tokenized US stocks. Instead of competing for traffic from native crypto users, it brings traditional brokerage users directly to the world of on-chain finance.
If Base's ideal in the past was to “turn on-chain social networking into a consumer portal,” Robinhood Chain's answer was simpler and crude: if users are already trading, then put the traded assets on the chain.
This is a positive pressure on Base.
IV. Base's new starting point
Jesse's shift this time is essentially repositioning Base.
In the past, Base's narrative was biased more towards the onchain consumer. It hopes to bring regular users to the chain with low-cost, strong distribution, and social products. But now, Base's narrative is turning into onchain finance: transactions, payments, stablecoins, AI agents, and settlement layers.
This is more in line with overall industry trends. In the past year, almost all of the actual on-chain demand was related to finance: stablecoin payments, tokenized stocks, prediction markets, perpetual contracts, RWA, on-chain lending, and AI agent payments. Socialization can bring stories, but finance brings transactions, revenue, expenses, and retention.
Base's strengths are also still evident. It is backed by Coinbase and has a strong compliance brand, exchange portal, developer community, stablecoin scene, and enterprise customer resources. At the same time, Base's AI circuit isn't empty. Venice and Virtuals are two of the most representative cards in the Base ecosystem. The former represents the direction of AI application, privacy, and open model, while the latter represents the direction of AI agent capitalization and agency economy.
If Jesse called “AI will create trillions of new economic players,” Base's opportunity is to take on not only human traders, but also AI agents' wallets, payments, settlement, and transaction activities.
This is also the most imaginative part of Base's new narrative: stablecoins solve the payment medium for machines and humans; predictive markets and perpetual contracts provide transaction scenarios; tokenized assets provide tradable targets; and AI agents may become new on-chain users. If Base can connect these modules, it will no longer just be Coinbase's Layer 2, but may become the main settlement layer of the Coinbase system for the next generation of financial activities.
Base's greatest strength has never been the user, compliance, stablecoin, institutional relationships, and financial infrastructure capabilities behind the Coinbase portal. Social experiments can fail, but if Base can re-establish dominance in transactions, payments, stablecoins, AI agents, and tokenized assets, it will still be one of the most strategically valuable networks in Ethereum Layer 2.
The real problem is that the market won't give Base much time to tell stories anymore. Robinhood Chain is already rapidly approaching with tokenized stock and subsidy transactions, Stripe is using stablecoin payments to restructure merchant side entrances, while Solana and Hyperliquid continue to put pressure on the trading experience and market microstructure.
The rise of the Robinhood Chain once again proved that no one's position is unbreakable in layer 2 competition. Once a “top brand” with Coinbase's endorsement, Base is now facing a positive impact from challengers who also have strong platform support.
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