Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak said he will step down from leading the Base app after acknowledging that his push for a social on-chain economy failed to boost cryptocurrency adoption as he had hoped.
The creator of Base said he had spent the last two years betting that on-chain builders and native social experiences, including Farcaster, Zora, mini-apps and creator coins, would drive the next wave of cryptocurrency growth. But in a post on X on Wednesday, he said that while developers spurred adoption through products like stablecoins, prediction markets and perpetual futures, social apps “completely disintegrated.”
“I was definitely wrong,” Pollak wrote, adding that Base’s focus on social media left it behind its 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 cryptocurrency 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 infrastructure for global finance.
