Base creator Jesse Pollak pivots after admitting social strategy failed

Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak said he is stepping back from leading the Base app after acknowledging that his bet on an onchain social economy failed to drive crypto adoption as he had expected.

The Base creator said he had spent the last two years betting that builders and onchain-native social experiences, including Farcaster, Zora, mini apps and creator coins, would fuel crypto’s next growth wave. But in a post on X on Wednesday, he said while developers did spur adoption through products like stablecoins, prediction markets and perpetual futures, social applications “disintegrated completely.”

“I was definitively wrong,” Pollak wrote, adding that Base’s focus on social left it behind competitors in key areas including trading, tokenization and payments.

As part of the pivot, Pollak said that the leadership of Base app will return to Coinbase, where popular crypto 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 damn app for onchain,” including expanding beyond the Base ecosystem, while Base itself will prioritize trading, payments and AI agents as it seeks to become infrastructure for global finance.