Base co-founder admits a misstep in its social strategy and will refocus on its three core pillars: trading, payments, and agents.

BlockBeats message, July 16: Base co-founder Jesse Pollak published a long post, candidly looking back on the strategic gains and losses of the past half-year. He admitted that in the dual-track strategy he set for 2024 to 2025, the idea was “getting developers right but getting social wrong”—the entire on-chain social segment, including Farcaster, Zora, MiniApps, and creator tokens, has completely collapsed. This misjudgment caused Base to fall behind scaled competitors in key areas such as perpetual futures and prediction markets, and it also has clear weaknesses in tokenization and enterprise payments.

Jesse described the first quarter of 2026 as “getting punched in the face.” Each week the community keeps reminding him of his mistakes: “It feels terrible, and it still feels terrible.” But the core lesson he learned from a decade of crypto entrepreneurship is: “When it feels worst, the best option is to bow your head and get to work.” Afterwards, Jesse pulled his focus back from the application layer to the chain layer, personally wrote code, and launched a series of projects including Azul, Beryl, B20, privacy features, and Ledgers, while also reflecting on three key assumptions: whether crypto needs social to grow, whether Base needs its own applications, and whether Base can surpass Coinbase.

Jesse’s conclusion is clear: better money itself is enough to drive growth. Stablecoins, prediction markets, perpetual futures, and tokenization are proving this, and Base will focus on “making global finance actually work and getting a billion people on-chain.” To achieve this, in 2026 Base will focus on three major pillars—trading (covering tokenized stocks, Meme coins, app tokens, and all categories of assets), payments (global stablecoins for individuals and enterprises), and agents (crypto is the native currency of computers, and AI will create tens of trillions of new economic entities).

On the organizational level, Jesse has handed the Base app back to Coinbase’s parent organization, with Cobie taking over the building of cross-ecosystem on-chain applications; meanwhile, he also admitted that developing decentralized networks inside large publicly listed companies is “extremely difficult.” As CEO, Brian cannot post Meme content on the public timeline, and he is continuing to push Base’s decentralization.

Jesse emphasized that builders are the backbone of Base, and he will continue to support builders in every possible way through Base Layer, Base Batches, and the ecosystem fund—“when builders win, Base wins.”