Founder publicly apologized: Base App has officially surrendered, and Coinbase’s on-chain social dream is shattered

陶朱, Golden Finance

Summary: Base APP’s creator-content token route, which it has been pushing for a full year, has officially failed. For Base’s long-term future roadmap, the priority will be trading, payments, and AI agents, and currently internal resources are focused primarily on the trading sector. The return of Base APP signals a shift in positioning—from the fantasy of a super app to that of financial infrastructure.

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

On July 15, 2026, Base’s founder Jesse Pollak did something very rare across the entire crypto industry: he openly admitted he was wrong. Pollak announced that he would no longer lead Base App. The approach he had bet on—using on-chain social experiences to mainstream crypto—simply did not work.

In my view, our bet on builders was correct, but obviously our bet on social was wrong. Builders truly drove the next wave of crypto adoption—prediction markets, perpetual futures, stablecoins—but social didn’t sit at the center. In fact, many of us have been committed to building the market and social aspects we’ve worked on—Farcaster, Zora, Miniapps, and creator incentives—have completely collapsed. I was wrong—whether it was wrong timing ($ansem counts as creator tokens?) or completely wrong, only time will tell, but either way, I was indeed wrong.

Pollak handed leadership of Base App to Jordan Fish. In the crypto circle, Fish is a more familiar name—Cobie (note: Coinbase acquired the Echo platform last year for about $375 million, and Fish therefore joined Coinbase). It’s important to note that Pollak is adjusting the development direction of Base App, not giving up Base, the L2 network. Instead, he said that going forward he will put more effort into Base as the infrastructure for a “global financial blockchain,” and refocus on building Base’s “global financial blockchain” positioning.

During Pollak’s leadership, Base App had a certain degree of independent operating authority. The new product roadmap brought Base App back under the jurisdiction of its parent company, Coinbase.

Over the past two years, Base App had been betting on developing developer and on-chain native social experiences, including Farcaster, Zora, mini apps, and creator tokens. The belief was that these would drive the next wave of crypto growth, and that through them, crypto could be promoted to “one billion users.”

However, the real outcome did not meet expectations.

In the past year, Base APP devoted massive resources to the creator economy direction, 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,” a plan intended to let ordinary users, content creators, and community members capture value by issuing tokens, shifting social interactions from the traditional traffic-distribution model of centralized platforms to the tokenization of on-chain assets. But this concept ultimately failed to form the expected network effects.

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

With Pollak posting on X to officially announce Base’s new business plan, this attempt at Web3 social ultimately ended with Base APP’s surrender.

II. Base ecosystem’s new strategy

Base ecosystem’s new strategy includes three pillars: trading, payments, and artificial intelligence agents.

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

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

The Friend.tech mass social token craze in 2023 led the crypto industry to believe SocialFi could become the next user-growth entry point. But as the heat faded, users still didn’t really enter the crypto market simply because of an on-chain identity; instead, trading proved far more attractive. Therefore, Base ultimately concluded that attracting users into the crypto industry likely wouldn’t happen through social means, but through trading channels.

Payments are the second core of Base’s new strategy. Stablecoins are increasingly taking on cross-border payment, enterprise settlement, and personal transfer functions. In May last year, Base announced x402. This payment protocol supports instant stablecoin payments directly via HTTP. According to data on the x402 official website, over the past 30 days there were 75.41 million transactions, with total transaction volume of $24.24M, 94,060 buyers, and 22,000 sellers. Base hopes users can make global payments with stablecoins; enterprises can settle through on-chain dollars; and AI agents can complete trades autonomously via 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 “tens of trillions of new economic participants.” Since crypto is the native currency of computers, AI agents naturally require on-chain financial infrastructure. Coinbase Developer Platform has launched AgentKit, which is currently the most core development tool for Base to enter the AI Agent space.

According to the Coinbase official website: AgentKit is a toolkit that enables AI agents to interact with blockchain networks and provides secure wallet management and comprehensive on-chain functionality. 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 summary, Base’s future positioning has shifted from pulling one billion users into the crypto world through social means 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 has tried to build an on-chain super app independent of Coinbase.

In Pollak’s vision, Base App would be not just a wallet, but a new entry point connecting social, content, the creator economy, and on-chain assets. But time has shown that this vision could not be carried out smoothly.

As Base App is folded back into the Coinbase ecosystem, Base’s future development direction is also becoming closer to Coinbase’s own strengths: finance, trading, and payments.

Base App is moving from a product trying to build an “on-chain social entry point” to an entry point serving Base’s financial ecosystem.

And when it comes to Base itself, compared with other L2 projects, Coinbase is Base’s biggest advantage. With a stable user base, mature fiat on-ramps, compliant trading platforms… although Base is an L2, its ambitions go beyond being just an L2. After the strategic pivot of Base toward trading, payments, and AI agents, the future will need to face payment-network competition pushed by stablecoin issuers; crypto financial infrastructure ecosystems such as Hyperliquid and Solana; and competition in the AI Agent track where the leaders have yet to be decided.

The TPS and fee competition might be deemphasized in the L2 race; liquidity will determine who the king is.

As Pollak pointed out:

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

If it succeeds, Base could become an important on-chain financial entry point for Coinbase. Even if it fails, Base will still just be one of many among the L2s.