Base Protocol Co-Founders Acknowledge Social Strategy Mistake, Will Refocus on the Three Pillars of Trading, Payments, and Oracles

BlockBeats News, July 16, Base co-founder Jesse Pollak published a long article, candidly reviewing the successes and failures of the past six months. He admitted that the decision to focus on developers in the dual-track strategy for 2024 to 2025 was correct, but the focus on social was a mistake— the entire on-chain social sector, including Farcaster, Zora, MiniApps, and creator tokens, has completely collapsed. This miscalculation has led Base to fall behind in key areas such as perpetual contracts and prediction markets compared to scaled competitors, and has also shown significant shortcomings in tokenization and corporate payments.

Jesse described the first quarter of 2026 as a "punch in the face," with the community reminding him of his mistakes every week. He expressed, "It feels bad, and it still feels bad." However, the core lesson he learned from a decade of crypto entrepreneurship is that "when feeling the worst, the best choice is to put your head down and work"— following this, Jesse shifted the focus back from the application layer to the chain layer, personally wrote code, and launched a series of projects such as Azul, Beryl, B20, privacy features, and Ledgers, while reflecting on three core assumptions: whether crypto needs social interaction to grow, whether Base needs its own apps, and whether Base can surpass Coinbase.

Jesse came to a clear conclusion: a better currency itself is enough to drive growth, with stablecoins, prediction markets, perpetual contracts, and tokenization proving this point. The focus will now be on "getting global finance truly moving and bringing a billion people onto the chain." Centered around this goal, Base in 2026 will focus on three pillars— Trading (covering tokenized stocks, meme coins, and app tokens, among other asset classes), Payments (global stablecoins for individuals and businesses), and Smart Bodies (crypto is the native currency of computers, and AI will create tens of trillions of new economic entities).

At the organizational level, Jesse has returned the Base application to the Coinbase parent company, with Cobie taking over to build cross-ecosystem on-chain applications. At the same time, he acknowledged that developing a decentralized network within a large public company is "extremely difficult," and CEO Brian cannot post memes on a public timeline, but he is consistently advancing Base's decentralization.

Jesse emphasized that builders are the backbone of Base and will continue to support builders in all aspects through initiatives like Base Layer, Base Batches, and the ecosystem fund, stating, "When builders win, Base wins."