$ETH In this period, the fiery momentum of the Robinhood chain has stirred up a fairly significant wave across the entire Ethereum Layer 2 scaling ecosystem.

BASE, which has long ranked No. 1 in TVL metrics, now seems a bit uneasy. Jesse Pollak, co-founder of Coinbase, recently posted a long article online (see the reference link after the article), reflecting on the experiences and lessons he learned over the past few years while building the BASE ecosystem.

First, the social-type applications Jesse put a lot of effort into fostering (including content tokens, the creator economy, and so on) basically didn’t achieve the results he expected.

Second, Jesse didn’t pay attention to applications like prediction markets, perpetual contracts, and tokenization of assets—but their popularity has actually surged.

For the social-type applications Jesse worked hard to support, the first wave of hype appeared as early as the 2017 ICO, and then there was a brief second hype wave in 2021.

In those hype periods, I also observed the related applications, but I was never sure whether this kind of application could truly create a new ecosystem and new patterns within the Web 3 ecosystem—so my interest gradually faded over time.

As for the later applications Jesse mentioned that became relatively hot—prediction markets, perpetual contracts, and asset tokenization—in my view, their sudden surge in popularity is somewhat surprising.

Because these applications have existed for quite a long time even before this current round of hype.

Polymarket launched as early as 2020;

the perpetual contract markets (dYdX) launched even earlier in 2019;

and asset tokenization was created long before, when BM created Steemit.

These apps are not new at all—they existed already, but they had been there all along, neither too hot nor too cold.

This situation looks almost exactly like the early stage of the internet bubble explosion around the late 1990s of the last century.

At that time, lots of internet applications (including e-commerce, pets, and so on) rushed onto the scene. But very quickly, when that round of bubble burst, the vast majority of those projects went to zero. In this respect, they were even more miserable than the Web 3 projects mentioned above.

But later, after entering the year 2000—especially after Amazon and Alibaba rose—those once-tried, once-failed internet projects revived again.

This time, they were proven feasible: there were business models, and they could make money.

That is the cost of being born at the wrong time.

Perhaps a similar story will play out again in the crypto ecosystem.

Jesse’s reflection also, from another angle, further reinforces my understanding of this:

The success of commercial ecosystems and the formation of innovation is almost impossible to design and plan in a human way. An ecosystem built and driven heavily by a force like Coinbase (social-type applications), in the end, would be this bleak even without gaining market recognition—let alone others.

So for a platform’s development, the best approach is really to treat every project in the ecosystem as fairly as possible: treat each project as your own guest, and create a consistently good ecosystem environment for all guests.

That is the method that best fits how a platform should develop.

And the lack of this—along with the unfairness—may precisely be what Jesse and the Base ecosystem have been most criticized for over the past two years. Applications that bring massive traffic and users to the BASE ecosystem often receive little attention. And only after these projects turned their heads to Robinhood, where they received a warm welcome, did Base feel enormous pressure.

However, although Base’s team has been taking a different attitude toward ecosystem projects—hot versus cold—over these two years, there is one thing I still haven’t figured out:

Among the many Layer 2 scaling options, Base is one of the most active.

But it seems so indifferent toward many popular projects—where does its “activity” actually come from?

Especially since many hackers and builders really like to innovate on BASE, and some well-known hackers even compare BASE to a new Ethereum, saying that BASE has a strong “geek” vibe and charm.

If there were only Base as the ecosystem within Layer 2, it would be hard to see many of these issues clearly. Now that there’s a strong new competitor, it can only benefit the development of Ethereum’s entire ecosystem, with no downside. #夏日创作营