Jesse Pollak, the Coinbase executive who created Base, handed the consumer Base app back to Coinbase and named crypto investor Jordan Fish, known as Cobie, to lead it, while admitting that his two-year bet on onchain social products and creator coins was a mistake.
Pollak said in a post on X on Tuesday that he had made a "two pronged bet" to grow Base: that builders would drive the next wave of crypto adoption, and that the adoption would come from onchain-native social experiences. He said the first bet was right and the second was wrong. "the entire social side of the market that many of us had been building towards - farcaster, zora, miniapps, and yes, creator coins - disintegrated completely," he wrote. "i was definitively wrong."
Base ranks as the fifth-largest blockchain by total value locked, at $4.54 billion, and is the largest Ethereum Layer 2 by that measure, ahead of Arbitrum's $1.23 billion, according to DefiLlama data on Wednesday. Zora's ZORA token, tied to the creator-coin experiment Pollak singled out, trades about 95% below its August 2025 peak, at roughly half a cent, with a market value near $31 million, CoinGecko data show.
The handoff marks the clearest reversal yet of a strategy Coinbase spent more than a year promoting. Pollak said the focus on social had left Base trailing scaled competitors in perpetuals and prediction markets, and with ground to make up in tokenization and enterprise payments. "the collateral damage was pretty bad," he wrote. "and this year has been an exercise in eating shit."
