Founder Apologizes: Base App Surrenders, Coinbase’s On-Chain Social Dream Shattered

Tao Zhu, Golden Finance

Summary: Base APP’s creator-content token route, which it pushed for a year as its main strategy, has officially failed. Going forward, Base’s long-term roadmap will prioritize trading, payments, and AI agents, with its current internal resources focused on the trading sector. Base APP’s return signals a shift from chasing the “super app” fantasy to positioning itself as financial infrastructure.

I. Base App surrenders; the SocialFi route doesn’t work

On July 15, 2026, Base’s founder Jesse Pollak did something quite rare across the entire crypto industry: he publicly admitted he was wrong. Pollak announced that he would no longer lead Base App. His previous bet—that an on-chain social experience could drive crypto into the mainstream—simply didn’t work.

In my view, our bet on builders was right, but clearly our bet on social was wrong. Builders really did drive the next wave of crypto adoption—prediction markets, perpetual futures, stablecoins—but social wasn’t at the center. In fact, the “market social” aspects that many of us have been working on—Farcaster, Zora, Miniapps, and creator incentives—have fully fallen apart. I was wrong—whether it was the timing that was off ($ansem counts as a creator token?) or I was wrong entirely. Only time will tell, but either way, I was wrong.

Pollak handed over leadership of Base App to Jordan Fish. Fish is better known in crypto circles under the name Cobie (note: Coinbase acquired the platform Echo last year for about $375 million, and Fish therefore joined Coinbase). It’s important to note that Pollak adjusted the direction for Base App, not abandoning Base as an L2 network. Instead, he said that in the future, he would put more effort into Base as the infrastructure for a “global financial blockchain,” re-centering Base’s “global financial blockchain” positioning.

During Pollak’s tenure, Base App had some degree of independent operational authority. The new product plan brought Base App back under the jurisdiction of its parent company, Coinbase.

Over the past two years, Base App had been betting on developing an on-chain native social experience for developers and users, including Farcaster, Zora, mini apps, and creator tokens—believing these would drive the next wave of crypto growth and aiming to onboard crypto to “one billion users” through them.

However, the real results didn’t match expectations.

Over the past year, Base APP invested heavily in the creator economy, hoping to build a new user-growth flywheel through on-chain content, social relationships, and token incentives. The most representative attempt was around “creator content tokens.” The plan aimed to let ordinary users, content creators, and community members capture value by issuing tokens, shifting social interaction from the traditional platform traffic-distribution model to assetization on-chain. But this concept ultimately failed to form the expected network effects.

In December 2025, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero announced a major strategic shift for the platform—abandoning the “social-first” path of pursuing product-market fit for more than four years, and moving to a wallet-centered growth model. This February, Base APP ended its creator rewards program and the Farcaster-supported social information feed.

After Pollak posted on X to announce Base’s new business plan, this experiment in Web3 social ultimately ended with Base APP conceding.

II. Base ecosystem’s new strategy

Base ecosystem’s new strategy has three pillars: trading, payments, and AI agents.

In 2026, this specifically means three things: win trading, win payments, and win agents.

Trading means every type of asset—tokenized stocks, Meme coins, app tokens, whatever you want to trade. Payments means globally usable stablecoins for individuals and enterprises. Agents mean accelerating all of this, because cryptocurrency is the native currency of computers, and AI will create hundreds of trillions of new economic participants.

The 2023 Friend.tech mass social token craze led the crypto industry to believe SocialFi could become the next user-growth entry point. But as the hype faded, users still weren’t really coming into crypto market just because they had on-chain identities. Instead, trading proved more attractive. Therefore, Base ultimately concluded that attracting users to crypto likely wouldn’t happen through social, but through trading channels.

Payments are the second core of Base’s new strategy. Stablecoins increasingly take on cross-border payments, enterprise settlement, and personal transfers. Last May, Base announced x402. This payments protocol supports instant stablecoin payments directly via HTTP. According to data from x402’s official website, in the past 30 days there were 75.41 million transactions with total transaction volume of $24.24 million, 94,060 buyers, and 22,000 sellers. Base hopes users will make global payments through stablecoins; enterprises will settle through on-chain dollars; and AI agents will complete transactions autonomously through on-chain assets. Compared with SocialFi, payments have clearer commercial value.

Base’s third direction in its strategy is AI agents. Pollak believes AI will create “hundreds of trillions of new economic participants.” Since cryptocurrency is the native currency of computers, AI agents naturally need on-chain financial infrastructure. Coinbase Developer Platform launched AgentKit, which is currently Base’s most core development tool for entering the AI Agent space.

According to Coinbase’s official website: AgentKit is a toolkit that enables AI agents to interact with blockchain networks and provides secure wallet management and comprehensive on-chain capabilities. It is built on the Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) SDK and provides everything needed to create autonomous agents capable of executing complex blockchain operations.

In sum, Base’s future positioning has shifted from bringing one billion users into crypto world through social, to using trading, payments, and AI agents to attract users into the on-chain financial system.

III. Does Base APP still have a future?

Over the past two years, Base APP attempted to build an on-chain super app independent of Coinbase.

In Pollak’s vision, Base App would be more than just a wallet—it would be a new entry point connecting social, content, the creator economy, and on-chain assets. Time has shown that this idea couldn’t be realized smoothly.

As Base App is reabsorbed into Coinbase’s ecosystem, Base ecosystem’s future development direction will be even closer to Coinbase’s own strengths: finance, trading, and payments.

Base App is moving from a product trying to be an “on-chain social entry point” to one that serves as an entry point for Base’s financial ecosystem.

As for Base itself, compared with other L2 projects, Coinbase backing it is its biggest advantage—sitting on a stable user base, mature fiat on-ramps, compliant trading platforms… Base may be an L2, but its ambitions go beyond being an L2. After Base’s strategic pivot to trading, payments, and AI agents, it will in the future face competition in the payments network driven by stablecoin issuers; crypto financial infrastructure providers such as Hyperliquid and Solana; and competitors in the AI Agent track that haven’t yet been clearly divided.

Competition on TPS and fee levels may be downplayed in the L2 track; liquidity may determine who is king.

As Pollak noted:

“We’re seeing stablecoins, prediction, perpetual contracts, and tokenization develop in real time. I only expect it to accelerate. Right now, I’m focused on bringing a billion people on-chain by making global finance actually run. In terms of applications, my focus is building Base into the blockchain of global finance.”

If it succeeds, Base may become an important on-chain financial entry point for Coinbase. Even if it fails, Base will only be one among many L2s, lurking quietly in the crowd.