Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak said he is stepping down from leading the Base app after acknowledging that his venture into an onchain social economy failed to drive crypto adoption as he had expected.
The Base creator said he had spent the past two years betting that builders and onchain-native social experiences, including Farcaster, Zora, mini-apps and creator coins, would fuel crypto’s next wave of growth. But in a post at X on Wednesday, he said while developers spurred adoption through products like stablecoins, prediction markets and perpetual futures, social applications “dissolved completely.”
“I was dead wrong,” Pollak wrote, adding that Base’s focus on social left it behind competitors in key areas including commerce, tokenization and payments.
As part of the pivot, Pollak said management of the Base app will return to Coinbase, where popular crypto investor Jordan Fish, also known on X as ‘Cobie’, will oversee its development. Pollak said Fish will work to make the Base app “the best damn app for onchain,” including expanding beyond the Base ecosystem, while Base itself will prioritize commerce, payments and AI agents as it seeks to become the infrastructure for global finance.
