Base founder admits fault: We bet right on developers, but wrong on social.

By Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

On July 15, Base founder Jesse Pollak published a long post, announcing that he would hand back leadership of the Base App to Coinbase, and that he would then devote all his efforts to the Base blockchain itself, with the goal of turning Base into a “global financial blockchain.” Jesse will still continue to lead the Base chain, but he will no longer be responsible for the Base App; the Base App will be taken over by Jordan Fish, known to the crypto community as Cobie.

What’s most notable in this change is not that Jesse is leaving the Base App, but that he rarely admitted that Base made strategic misjudgments on the social front over the past two years.

Previously, Base tried to position itself as the consumer-level entry point to the crypto world. From Farcaster to Zora, from creator coins to miniapps, and then to Base App, Base hoped to onboard more mainstream users by using “on-chain social + the creator economy.”

But now, Pollak admits in his own words: Base bet right on builders, but bet wrong on social. This line can almost be seen as a provisional verdict on Base’s social experiment.

On-chain social didn’t become the next adoption center. What truly emerged instead were prediction markets, perpetual futures, stablecoins, and tokenized assets. Users weren’t unwilling to go on-chain; they were unwilling to go on-chain for social itself.

They’d rather go on-chain for trading, payments, yield, and speculation.

1. What did Jesse say?

In the long post, Jesse took a detailed look back at the reflection and adjustments made over the past six months. He said plainly: “Q1 2026 is a heavy punch.” In the past two years, Base made two-track bets: first, believing that builders would unlock the next wave of crypto adoption; second, believing that adoption would be driven by “a new on-chain native social experience” (creators, content, messages).

The result was: “Our bet on builders was correct, but our bet on social was clearly wrong.” Builders did indeed drive the adoption wave—prediction markets, perpetual futures, and stablecoins became the strongest growth engines—but social never sat at the center. Instead, “the entire social side market we kept trying to build—Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and yes, creator tokens—completely collapsed.”

He stated directly: “I was wrong. Whether the timing was wrong… or whether it was completely wrong—time will tell us, but either way, I’m sure I was wrong.” The collateral damage was substantial: in key areas, Base fell behind—perpetual futures (even with Avantis, etc.) and prediction markets (even with Limitless, etc.) were behind mature competitors; there was also plenty of room for improvement in enterprise tokenization and payment unlocks. People lost confidence, and CT has been reminding everyone of his mistakes every week.

Jesse said this year was “a training exercise to eat shit.” But the lesson he learned was: when things feel worst, the best approach is to lower your head and build. He has shifted his attention from the App back to the chain, restarted writing code, rolled out Azul, Beryl, B20, privacy, ledger, and other features, and re-examined assumptions: Does crypto need social to grow? Does Base need an App? Can Base be bigger than Coinbase?

The conclusion turned clear: “Better money is enough—we’re seeing it in real time through stablecoins, prediction, perpetuals, tokenization… I’m focused on getting a billion people on-chain by making global finance actually work.” The specific three pillars for 2026: winning trading (all assets, including tokenized stocks, memes, app tokens, etc.), payments (global stablecoins that work for both individuals and enterprises), and agents (AI agents accelerate everything, because crypto is computer-native money, and AI will create tens of trillions of new economic participants).

He has handed back the Base App to Coinbase, led by Cobie, and also allowed it to expand beyond the Base ecosystem (something he, as Base leadership, “won’t like”). He emphasized that builders remain the cornerstone, and Base will continue to support them through the Base Layer, Batches, ecosystem funds, and more.

2. Why did the social dream for Base break?

Base’s bet on social wasn’t without logic.

Jesse is the soul of Base and the most important shaper of Base’s community culture. Years ago, friend.tech exploded on Base, leading the market to believe that Jesse and Base might become the main battleground for on-chain social and the creator economy. friend.tech proved one thing: when social relationships are financialized, on-chain products can attract massive attention in a very short time.

That also reinforced Base’s preference for social, and the rapid fall of friend.tech didn’t change Base’s judgment.

Behind Farcaster, Zora, creator coins, miniapps, and Base App was actually a complete vision: if Coinbase provides a compliant entry point, Base provides a low-cost on-chain environment, Farcaster provides the social graph, and Zora provides content and creator asset tokenization tools, then Base would have a chance to build a consumer-level on-chain ecosystem different from traditional DeFi.

But that logic ultimately didn’t play out. The problem was that on-chain social is too easy to turn into on-chain speculation.

The explosive success of friend.tech wasn’t fundamentally because users found a better social experience, but because they realized social relationships could be traded. Creator tokens were similar: they turn content, influence, and community relationships into assets, but often, asset trading is far more important than consuming content.

Once speculation heat fades, social relationships don’t naturally stay.

What Farcaster faces is the social network cold-start problem. What Zora faces is the tension between content consumption and asset issuance. Creator coins are very prone to becoming short-cycle attention trades. Base invested a large amount of resources hoping these products would bring mainstream users, but what remained were mostly crypto-native users, airdrop hunters, short-term traders, and creator token players.

That’s also why Jesse said the entire social side market “completely collapsed.” It wasn’t that it had no heat—it was that it didn’t form sustainable adoption.

By contrast, demand for stablecoins, prediction markets, perpetual futures, and tokenized assets is more direct. Users don’t go on-chain to “own social relationships,” but to trade faster, pay at lower cost, earn higher yield, get better chances to speculate, or enter markets that traditional finance can’t provide.

For Base, this is a brutal but necessary course correction. Social can be part of an on-chain application, but it’s hard for it to become the center of Base’s next stage of growth.

3. The positive pressure brought by Robinhood Chain

If it were only a failed social experiment, Base would still have enough time to adjust slowly.

But the sudden surge of Robinhood Chain rapidly amplified Base’s sense of crisis.

In early July, after Robinhood Chain launched, it quickly accumulated trading activity. According to Token Terminal data, after Robinhood Chain went live on mainnet for 11 days, its daily transaction volume reached 7.6 million, while Base in the same period was 9.2 million—far smaller than what the market previously expected.

More importantly, Robinhood Chain’s growth wasn’t pure on-chain idle activity. It’s tied to Robinhood’s tokenized stocks platform, targeting over 120 countries with stock tokenization products, and it has Robinhood’s roughly 23 million brokerage users as a potential entry point. Data also shows that Robinhood Chain has already achieved daily trading volume of over $500 million in its Uniswap deployments, second only to the Ethereum mainnet, and at one point it even surpassed Base to become Uniswap’s second-largest spot activity deployment.

Of course, Robinhood Chain’s early data has obvious subsidy factors. Before Robinhood went live on mainnet, it paid users gas fees for 90 days, and this subsidy is expected to continue through the end of September 2026. That means whether today’s high transaction volume can persist after subsidies end still needs to be observed.

But for Base, the real danger isn’t whether Robinhood Chain is currently “fat with activity.” It’s what it represents: a new competitive model.

Base’s past advantage was Coinbase exchange traffic, US-compliant brand recognition, and a developer ecosystem. Robinhood Chain, however, has another more direct entry point: tokenized stocks of the stock market, ETFs, options, retail accounts, and tokenized US stocks. It isn’t fighting for traffic from crypto-native users; it brings traditional brokerage users straight into the on-chain finance world.

If Base’s past ideal was to “turn on-chain social into a consumer entry point,” Robinhood Chain’s answer is simpler and more blunt: users are already trading—so put the traded assets on-chain.

This is positive pressure for Base.

4. Base’s new starting point

This shift by Jesse is essentially a re-positioning for Base.

Previously, Base’s narrative leaned more toward onchain consumer. It aimed to bring ordinary users on-chain with low costs, strong distribution, and social products. But now, Base’s narrative is turning into onchain finance: trading, payments, stablecoins, AI agents, and the settlement layer.

This aligns better with the industry trend. Over the past year, almost all the on-chain demand that truly took off was finance-related: stablecoin payments, tokenized stocks, prediction markets, perpetual futures, RWA, on-chain lending, and AI agent payments. Social may bring narratives, but finance brings trading, revenue, fees, and retention.

Base’s advantages are still clear. It has Coinbase behind it, with a strong compliant brand, exchange entry points, a developer community, stablecoin use cases, and enterprise customer resources. At the same time, Base is not starting from zero in the AI space. Venice and Virtuals are the two most representative cards within the Base ecosystem: the former represents AI applications and privacy, as well as open-model directions; the latter represents AI agent tokenization and the agent economy.

If Jesse’s claim that “AI will create tens of trillions of new economic participants” holds true, then Base’s opportunity isn’t just to capture human traders—it also includes capturing wallets, payments, settlement, and trading activities of AI agents.

This is also the most imaginative part of Base’s new narrative: stablecoins solve the payment medium for machines and humans; prediction markets and perpetual futures provide trading scenarios; tokenized assets provide tradable underlying products; and AI agents could become the new on-chain users. If Base can connect these modules, it may no longer be merely Coinbase’s Layer2, but could become the primary settlement layer in the Coinbase system for next-generation financial activity.

Base’s biggest advantage has never only been the user base, compliance, stablecoins, institutional relationships, and financial infrastructure capabilities behind the Coinbase entry point. The social experiment can fail, but if Base can rebuild advantages in trading, payments, stablecoins, AI agents, and tokenized assets, it will still be one of the most strategically valuable networks among Ethereum Layer2s.

The real question is that the market won’t give Base much time to keep telling stories. Robinhood Chain has already used tokenized stocks and subsidized trading to quickly close in. Stripe is rebuilding the merchant-side entry point with stablecoin payments. Solana and Hyperliquid continue to apply pressure on trading experiences and market microstructure.

Robinhood Chain’s rise once again proves this: in Layer2 competition, no one’s position is unbreakable. Base once became the “top pick” with Coinbase’s endorsement, but now it faces direct pressure from challengers supported by similarly powerful platforms.