Jesse Pollak steps back from Base App after social bet falls short

Base has overhauled its growth strategy after its creator-first approach fell behind competing blockchain ecosystems in prediction markets and perpetual futures, prompting founder Jesse Pollak to step back from leading the Base App.

According to a Wednesday post by Base creator Jesse Pollak on X, the network underestimated the importance of financial applications after betting that creator tools, content, and messaging would bring crypto to mainstream users.

Pollak said the strategy failed as demand for social products “disintegrated completely,” leaving Base behind in sectors that had become more important. While the network launched perpetual futures through Avantis and prediction markets through Limitless, he acknowledged both products trailed larger competitors.

Dune Analytics data shows Base-native prediction market Limitless accounted for just 0.5% of total monthly notional prediction market volume in July.

Source: Dune Analytics.

“We realized how our focus on social had meant that Base had fallen behind in key areas that were now increasingly critical,” Pollak wrote, adding that the network had “made the wrong bet.”

Base hands app leadership back to Coinbase

Alongside the strategic reset, Pollak said he will hand leadership of the Base App back to Coinbase, where Jordan Fish, better known as Cobie on X, will oversee the product. Pollak said he will instead concentrate on developing the Base blockchain.

The announcement comes days after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong publicly admitted the company’s content coin strategy had failed. 

“They didn’t work and we pivoted early this year. We messed up, time to turn the page,” Armstrong said, responding to criticism on X earlier this week

Armstrong also said Coinbase now prioritizes trading, payments, and AI agents, with most of the company’s resources currently directed toward trading infrastructure. He added that payment systems require foreign exchange capabilities, while AI agents can build on both trading and payment tools.

Earlier this year, Base ended its Creator Rewards program and removed its Farcaster-powered social feed as part of the same strategic change. The rewards program, introduced in July 2025, was designed to let creators earn income from engagement, while Pollak described the Base App as an “imperfect Farcaster client.”

The decision follows more than a year of experiments with social products, including Farcaster integration, Zora content coins, and miniapps. Base had promoted those tools as a way to bring crypto to “a billion people,” but both Pollak and Armstrong have since said financial applications offer a stronger path for adoption.

Stablecoins and AI remain part of roadmap

While stepping away from social products, Base continues to expand its financial infrastructure.

Pollak said Base still intends to become “the blockchain for global finance” and “the place that the world’s money settles over the next century,” underscoring the network’s renewed focus on financial use cases over creator-led social experiences.

Last week, the network activated its B20 token standard on mainnet, creating a native framework for stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and other fungible tokens.

A few months earlier, Base introduced Base MCP, a Model Context Protocol tool that lets users manage crypto directly through AI chat interfaces while interacting with protocols including Morpho, Moonwell, Uniswap, Aerodrome, Avantis, Bankr, and Virtuals.

In April, Base said it was upgrading core infrastructure to support what it described as an AI agent economy. Its 2026 roadmap identifies tokenized real-world assets, stablecoins, prediction markets, global markets, and AI-powered applications among its development priorities.