Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak said he was stepping down from running the Base app after acknowledging that his bet on an on-chain social economy had failed to drive crypto adoption as he had intended.
The Base creator said he spent the last two years betting that builders and native on-chain social experiences, including Farcaster, Zora, mini-apps and creator coins, would power the next wave of crypto growth. But in an article on
“I was definitely wrong,” Pollak wrote, adding that Base’s focus on social left it behind competitors in key areas such as commerce, tokenization and payments.
As part of the pivot, Pollak said leadership 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 app for onchain,” including expanding beyond the Base ecosystem, while Base itself will prioritize commerce, payments and AI agents as it seeks to become an infrastructure for global finance.
