Is Base's Coin Launch Reliable This Time?

Today, Base Co-founder Jesse Pollak announced that he will soon launch his personal creator coin jesse on the Base App, with the release scheduled for November 20 at 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (1:00 AM on November 21 Beijing Time). The jesse token will be launched from his Base App account jesse.base.eth.

Following this announcement, Zora, which supports creator coins for the Base App, saw an approximately 8% increase in a day.

Why is Jesse launching his personal token? In his own words on X, "Content coins follow short-term attention, while creator coins track the long-term value of content. By combining the two, a flywheel effect is created, returning ownership, control, and revenue back to the creator and their fans. With $jesse, my flywheel effect will be complete."

However, in reality, this seems a lot like a personal promotion for the Base App. The Base App is much like Coinbase's in-house "Alipay": it serves as the application hub of the Base network, encompasses a social network with a creator economy mechanism, enables token trading and transfers, and even features a "Yu'E Bao" where USDC in the Base App can earn up to a 3.85% APY.

Ironically, Jesse's explanation for issuing his personal token in response to a tweet:

"Last time I bought a coin you shilled, it went to zero a few hours later."

Among the "well-known" figures in the crypto world, Jesse has not left a good impression on retail players and is known for "pump and forget" behavior. However, from the perspective of being a co-founder of Base and seeking attention and development for his own chain, his actions are quite understandable.

On April 17, Base tweeted with an image, "Base is for everyone," and included a link to a token minted on Zora in the tweet.

The token's market cap instantly surged to $17 million and then plummeted 90% within five minutes. In response, a spokesperson from Base stated in an email to The Block that Base did not launch "Base is for everyone" as it was automatically minted on the Zora platform, and Base merely posted about it on the platform. The token is neither the official Base token nor was it sold by Base.

Interestingly, about an hour before Base's tweet, Jesse had converted one of his tweets about the difference between content coins and meme coins into a coin on Zora. In the following days, he passionately shared his views on content coins, and a week later, Zora minted the coin.

An amusing side note is that at the time, alon, the founder of pump.fun, came forward to claim that the concept of everything being tokenizable as content was detrimental to the market. Especially for influential individuals, issuing tokens implies taking on responsibility, an unwritten but implicit rule in the blockchain space.

Fast forward to now, alon has transitioned from being a paragon of justice to being greeted daily with "Where's your airdrop?" in the trenches, while Jesse has finally stepped up to personally launch a token that bears responsibility. The crypto world works in mysterious ways.

In addition to minting several content coin tweets on Zora, Jesse has also made some purchases:

- On July 18, 2024, he spent 0.3 ETH to buy into Base's ecosystem meme coin, MIGGLES, which reached a peak market cap of around $120 million and currently has a market cap of about $8.8 million.

- On November 21, 2024, he spent 0.333 ETH to buy into a meme token, ANON, deployed by clanker AI on farcaster within the Base ecosystem. It reached a peak market cap of around $65 million and currently has a market cap of about $970,000.

This can be understood as his support for the coin within his own ecosystem. Some time ago, in order to attract a meme coin on Solana to bridge to Base, he not only had an abstract show with Chillhouse but also personally bought some Solana meme coin on Solana.

So, back to Jesse's event of issuing a personal token, those visions he depicted are not easily trusted by retail players. As he replied to alon's comment initially, these things for him are "about making a big cake, about experimenting with new things." On the one hand, such a statement as the boss of Base is reasonable, and on the other hand, it also reveals his mentality towards issuing a token, that is, "since it is an experiment, it could fail."

For retail players, this certainly sounds very ruthless, but it is not entirely unreasonable, because even in a more mature stock market, there must be a sign saying "the stock market is risky, be cautious when entering," and no company will always push its stock price up for the sake of "doing right by retail investors." Many people say that many meme coins are "pump and dump." If information asymmetry can be called a "conspiracy," then perhaps all meme coins are "pump and dump" because there are always various motives for pumping.

Perhaps this is a difference between domestic and foreign practices, or more aptly, a difference in interests between retail players and project teams. For many "well-known" foreign figures in the coin circle, issuing a coin does not have such grand goals, nor does it carry a heavy moral burden. If the launch is successful, it's either due to luck or because they are awesome, and if it fails, then it's simply a failure. Life has so many failures, and launching a coin is just one of them. Moreover, even devs or coin circle celebrities who are eager to do well do not necessarily understand the meme market better than retail players.

For example, some time ago, the privacy-themed meme coin mec on Solana, stemming from a joke by Helius CEO @0xMert_ during a live stream, was deployed by Synthetix and Infinex founder @kaiynne. At that time, @kaiynne stated that mec, the third meme coin he launched, was his "redemption work." But all he could do was use the generated creator income of the token for buybacks, and then, there was no more.

It is unrealistic to hope that celebrities will always pump the price due to their reputation.

Will Jesse take it seriously this time? It is possible. The token may experience a short-term pump after launch, but this potential hope should not be the basis for a significant investment. If you approach it by trying out Base App with a small purchase as an interactive behavior to potentially receive future Base token airdrops, lowering your expectations for this new token would be a more poised strategy.

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