Early yesterday morning, Base cofounder Jesse Pollak posted a long tweet on X, looking back at what Base did well and poorly over the past two years’ development strategy.

It’s a pretty honest tweet, both toward himself and the public. For a person to admit the mistakes they’ve made is not easy. Jesse believes that he and his Base bet heavily on the social space, expecting that native on-chain social experiences would drive mainstream adoption of Base and even cryptocurrency. He thinks that was wrong. But on the other side, the bet that Base’s application developers would also drive mainstream adoption by shipping great apps is correct.

Now, he has handed responsibility for Base App (Base’s super app, not the Base chain) to Cobie, while he returns to focus on developing the Base chain itself. From the perspective of an on-chain player, looking back on some of what Jesse did over the past two years, I give high praise for the candor of his “self-criticism,” but I also feel there are parts of his understanding that are still worth debating.

Bet on social: 0 points

Native on-chain social cannot improve the mainstream social experience at all, and it even makes “social” itself more complicated. In fact, I really hope Jesse can dissect in his “self-criticism” what new kinds of social fun users can actually get from a brand-new social app like Farcaster, what new forms of social content it can provide, or what novel paths for forming social networks the app itself offers—so that he and even all of Base would feel this can drive mainstream adoption of Base by challenging traditional social media markets...

If the goal were idealistically to decentralize social, then this move might earn some points. But if you think this thing can drive mainstream adoption, then it’s purely 0 points.

Let’s continue. In terms of social, Jesse also mentioned creator tokens, and mentioned the recently hot $ANSEM on Solana. He said he wasn’t really sure whether he pushed Zora at the wrong time, or whether the creator token idea was already wrong from the start.

That understanding also deserves 0 points. First, pushing the concept of “creator tokens” is just weird. In the earlier debate between Jesse and Toly, you could already see Jesse thought “content” has value, and that creators themselves—personal brand as individuals—have value. So this thing is different from meme coins; it has fundamentals, and he wants to push something with fundamentals.

But who does that logic persuade? Anyway, Jesse himself led the charge by creating a $JESSE. After nearly 240 days, the situation is as follows:

Content and personal IP do have value, but is issuing tokens a particularly unique monetization channel? What kind of tier of creators can you attract? How do you ensure there’s a reasonable logic chain behind the value you emphasize? There are too many problems to solve in between, but what Base feels like is: “I built the stage, and people will come on stage.”

In this regard, Jesse’s understanding completely lost to Toly. At least Toly could still say things like: “Meme coins have no value at all, but game items and skins have no value either—yet people around the world are still willing to spend over a hundred billion dollars a year on worthless things.”

$ANSEM also isn’t the kind of “creator tokens” that Jesse pushed. First, it wasn’t issued by Ansem, and second, it wasn’t something he made for monetizing his personal IP—everything about it is mismatched.

In short, Jesse, on social, you’re genuinely wrong, but you still haven’t fully figured it out. In fact, as for the Crypto + social space, the best reference sample for doing it well so far should be FOMO—a socialized trading application.

Fell behind in Perp DEX and other areas: 80 points

Actually, the score could even be higher. When compared horizontally, Solana hasn’t shown much more competitive strength than Hyperliquid and Polymarket in either Perp DEX or prediction markets—so it’s not much stronger than Base.

The reason Jesse feels quite annoyed is: “We bet too much on social, and we didn’t keep up on these two aspects.” That’s setting requirements too high for himself. After all, it’s a hindsight perspective now. Hyperliquid is a competitor that has thought through this whole track completely; it’s not something that “appeared.” Perp DEX—like GMX and dYdX—is the same. As for prediction markets, Polymarket has a first-mover advantage, and it’s not really a major competitive failure.

Moreover, Base has been quite successful in AI—so successful that it not only has something presentable, but also occupies a leading on-chain narrative segment in the entire market. In terms of specific targets, there are big plays like $vvv that draw market-wide attention, and there’s also a large-scale launchpad like Virtuals. While the x402 protocol is leading in Agent payments, it also makes USDC the overwhelmingly leading stablecoin used for payments between Agents.

Base’s success in the AI narrative also spreads to some AI-related tech narratives. For example, in the robot track, targets that perform relatively well and appear on Base are also relatively common. In RWA, before Solana leveraged $SPCX to dominate on-chain US stock token spot trading, on-chain players also thought of Base more often—for instance, the earlier on-chain trading of $LFI related to property tax lien holds.

If Jesse did something poorly in this area, I would actually point back to the opening of the article. He mentioned that “betting on Base’s application developers also means they will drive mainstream adoption by producing good apps.” But from the perspective of on-chain players, Base’s support for its own chain-based developers isn’t as good as he says. Choosing targets on Base depends critically on whether the project team can connect in some way with the Base team, and you need to play within the “circle.” Cases where a developer has a sudden flash of inspiration, builds a hot project outside the track Base cares about, and then gets rapid Base support—those are truly rare.

Earlier this year, developers already complained about this: “A developer wastes three years on Base.” I think not going deep enough into developer groups and the market—may also be the reason they’re relatively powerless in this kind of innovation-competition within new narrative segments, just like how overemphasizing the social segment causes weakness.

Jesse’s reflection: 60 points

Does crypto need social to drive mainstream adoption at the billion-person scale? Jesse used to think definitely yes and that it was the only path. Now he thinks that stablecoins, prediction markets, Perp DEX, and RWA can all drive mass adoption—so it’s not only social that can.

So he says Base will focus on winning competition in three areas: trading, payments, and AI Agents. Base should become an indispensable part of the world’s financial on-chain infrastructure.

Jesse also realized something—that no matter how hard you try to personally pull users on stage and spend huge costs to be the front-runner to preach crypto, it’s still not as effective as policy overnight being friendly to, and even supportive of, tracks like stablecoins, RWA, and prediction markets. No matter how much you promote using Bitcoin/stablecoins for real-world payments, you might only be able to win over users with real anti-inflation needs, like in Venezuela or “brothers in Africa.” That’s a national-level direction, not something an enterprise can easily do.

But the reason I only give it passing marks is that neither Jesse nor Toly from Solana, nor people like Ethereum’s Vitalik, realized that over all these years, meme coins have been an important path to drive mainstream adoption at scale.

They’ve already degraded from “my mission is to proactively push crypto to take over the world” into “national-level forces have gotten friendly and jumped in—so we can just ride the wave.” Jesse says he thinks social is no longer the only big path to mass adoption. But he still hasn’t understood: crypto definitely still needs word-of-mouth and active discussion among billions of people worldwide—but that’s not something you can accomplish by simply providing everyone with an on-chain social platform.

People who use Polymarket to buy the outcome of World Cup matches won’t discuss what stablecoin is used to buy the outcomes. Similarly, people who use Agent payments to trade US stocks on-chain also don’t care about stablecoins or blockchains. After all these years, to the extent that concepts like NFT and the metaverse became mainstream topics back then, what exists now is basically the most hated pump.fun still trying to promote lottery-like meme-coin stories about striking it rich—something that can again enter the mainstream public’s minds.

Whether it’s Jesse, Toly, or Vlad from Robinhood recently, everyone knows meme coins are a very good lead-generation tool—but basically it’s use-and-discard. Everyone will say they love the scenes around meme coins, but no one has stepped in to guide meme coins into a more standardized industry.

Very smart and rational in business judgment and decision-making, but with retreat from idealism and a lack of thinking about mass adoption that isn’t grounded enough in real life. From my perspective as a small on-chain shrimp, in the end I can only give Jesse a passing score for his reflection on the past two years.

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