Pollak Logs Off: Base Creator Hands App to Cobie, Vows to Stop Swiping Right on Social 😬

Jesse Pollak, the creator of Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network Base, said Wednesday he is stepping back from leading the Base App and returning responsibility for the product to Coinbase, where Jordan Fish, better known as "Cobie," will take over development. Pollak said he will focus on growing Base as a blockchain for global finance, with priorities for the remainder of 2026 centered on trading, payments and AI agents.

In a lengthy post on X, Pollak acknowledged that Base's strategy around on-chain social and creator coins failed to drive the adoption he had expected, calling the first quarter of 2026 "a punch in the face." He said his strategy rested on two assumptions: that developers would drive the next wave of crypto adoption, and that growth would come through "new onchain-native social experiences." "[In my opinion] we made the right bet on builders, but obviously the wrong bet on social," he wrote, noting that prediction markets, perpetuals and stablecoins emerged as the strongest drivers of adoption instead.

"The entire social side of the market that many of us had been building towards—Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and yes, creator coins—disintegrated completely," Pollak wrote. He added that Base had fallen behind in key areas: "We realized how our focus on social had meant that base had fallen behind in key areas that were now increasingly critical — we had perps (shoutout avantis!) and prediction markets (shoutout limitless!), but both were well behind scaled competitors." Taking responsibility for the outcome, Pollak wrote, "I was wrong. Whether it was timing wrong…or fully wrong, only time will tell, but regardless, I was definitively wrong."

Pollak's post came days after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on Monday, "We messed up, time to turn the page," acknowledging that content coins "didn't work." Earlier pivots included Base sunsetting its Creator Rewards program and Farcaster-powered social feed in February, a program launched in July 2025 that had been intended to make Base a more social ecosystem where activity and engagement translated into earnings. Pollak also admitted the Base App was an "imperfect Farcaster client."

Launched in 2023, Base is Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network designed to make on-chain transactions faster and cheaper. In 2025, Coinbase expanded the ecosystem with the Base App, rebranding Coinbase Wallet into an "everything app" that combined crypto trading, social networking, messaging, AI tools and creator monetization in a single platform. Last week, Base activated its B20 token standard on the mainnet, introducing a native framework for stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets and other fungible tokens, and in May it launched Base MCP (Model Context Protocol), a tool that lets users manage crypto directly from an AI model's chat interface and interact with protocols including Morpho, Moonwell, Uniswap, Aerodrome, Avantis, Bankr and Virtuals.

Pollak said Base welcomes competition from Robinhood and Stripe as it works to "build Base into the blockchain for global finance and do everything we can to be the place that the world's money settles over the next century." Separately, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the clearinghouse that processes U.S. securities transactions, on Wednesday launched a pilot to test tokenized stocks and U.S. Treasuries with nearly 40 financial institutions.