Early yesterday morning, Base co-founder Jesse Pollak posted a long thread on X, reviewing what Base's development strategy had done well and poorly over the past two years.
It was a rather candid post, both to himself and the public. It's not easy for anyone to admit they've made mistakes. Jesse believes it was a mistake for him and the Base team to place their bet on the social field, expecting on-chain native social experiences to drive mass adoption of Base and even cryptocurrency as a whole. However, the other bet—that application developers on Base would also drive mass adoption by producing great applications—was correct.
Now, he has handed over Base App (Base's super app, not the Base chain) to Cobie and has returned to focus on developing the Base chain. From the perspective of an on-chain player, looking back at some of Jesse's actions over the past two years, while I highly commend the candor of this "letter of self-criticism," I also feel there are debatable points in his reflections.
Betting on Social: 0 points
Native on-chain social does not enhance the social experience for the masses at all; it even makes social interactions more complicated. In fact, I wish Jesse had thoroughly analyzed in his "letter of self-criticism" what exactly users could gain from building a brand-new social app like Farcaster—what new social enjoyment they could experience, what new forms of social content they could access, or what novel paths for social network formation the app itself provides—that led him and the entire Base team to think this thing could drive Base's mass adoption by challenging the traditional social media market...
If it were for the ideal of decentralized social, this move might score some points. But thinking this could drive mass adoption? That's a pure 0.
Let's continue. On the social front, Jesse also mentioned creator tokens, referencing the recently popular $ANSEM on Solana. He indicated he wasn't entirely sure whether he promoted Zora at the wrong time or whether the idea of creator tokens was wrong from the start.
This understanding also gets 0 points. First, pushing the concept of "creator tokens" is itself strange. From the debate between Jesse and Toly back then, it was clear: Jesse believes "content" has value, and creators as personal brands have value. Therefore, unlike meme coins, this has fundamentals, so he wanted to promote something with fundamentals.
But who could this logic convince? In any case, Jesse himself led by example and issued $JESSE. Nearly 240 days later, the situation is as follows:
Content and personal IP do have value, but is issuing a token some uniquely effective monetization channel? What caliber of creators can you attract? How do you ensure the value you emphasize has a logical chain of reasoning? There are too many problems to solve in between. But Base gave people the feeling of, "The stage is set, and people will naturally perform."
In this regard, Jesse's understanding is completely defeated by Toly's. At least Toly could say something like, "Meme coins have no value, but mobile game items and skins also have no value, yet people worldwide are still willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on worthless things."
$ANSEM isn't the kind of "creator token" Jesse was pushing at all. First, it wasn't issued by Ansem himself, nor was it created to monetize his personal IP. It's a mismatch in every way.
In short, Jesse, regarding the social bet, you were really wrong, but you haven't fully figured it out yet. In fact, the best reference case in Crypto + social so far should be the social trading app FOMO.
Lagging Behind in Perp DEX and Other Areas: 80 points
The score could actually be even higher. Looking horizontally, Solana hasn't shown much stronger competitiveness in the Perp DEX and prediction market fields compared to Hyperliquid and Polymarket either, not significantly better than Base.
The reason Jesse feels quite regretful is, "Because we over-invested in social, we didn't keep up in these two areas." This is setting the bar a bit too high for oneself. After all, this is hindsight from a god's perspective. Hyperliquid is a competitor that completely figured out this sector. Without its emergence, Perp DEX would likely have remained at the level of GMX, dYdX. As for prediction markets, Polymarket has first-mover advantage; it's not a major competitive failure.
Moreover, Base has been quite successful in AI. It not only has a presentable but also a leading on-chain narrative sector in the entire market. In terms of specific tokens, there are major ones like $vvv that attracted market-wide attention, and launchpads like Virtuals. The x402 protocol is leading in Agent payments and has also made USDC the dominant stablecoin for inter-agent payments.
Base's success in the AI narrative has also spilled over into some tech narratives related to AI. For example, among the tokens performing well in the robotics sector, quite a few have appeared on Base. In RWA, before Solana dominated on-chain U.S. stock token spot trading with $SPCX, on-chain players would also think of Base more often, such as $LFI, which previously worked on on-chain real estate tax lien trading.
If Jesse did anything less than ideal in this regard, I think it goes back to the beginning of the article, where he mentioned "betting that Base's application developers would also drive mass adoption by producing great applications." In fact, Base's support for its on-chain developers isn't as good as he suggests. From the perspective of an on-chain player, when selecting tokens on Base, checking whether project founders have some connection with the Base team is crucial—you have to play within the "circle." The scenario where a developer has a flash of inspiration, creates a hot project outside Base's prioritized sectors, and quickly receives Base's support is really rare.
Developers complained about this earlier this year, "the three years a developer wasted on Base." I believe that not being sufficiently engaged with the developer community and the market, perhaps as much as overemphasizing the social sector, is a reason for the relative weakness in innovation competition within new narrative sectors.
Jesse's Reflection: 60 points
Does cryptocurrency need social to drive mass adoption on the scale of a billion people? Jesse previously thought it definitely did and was the only path. Now he believes stablecoins, prediction markets, Perp DEX, and RWA can all drive adoption; social isn't the only path to mass adoption.
Therefore, he stated that Base will now focus on winning the competition in three areas: trading, payments, and AI Agents. Base aims to become an indispensable part of the global on-chain financial system.
Jesse has realized one thing—exhausting oneself to pull in users directly and spending heavily to be the vanguard of cryptocurrency evangelism is less effective than overnight policy friendliness or even support for sectors like stablecoins, RWA, and prediction markets. No matter how much you promote Bitcoin/stablecoins for real-world payments, perhaps only users with real inflation-hedging needs, like those in Venezuela or Africa, are easily won over. This is a matter of national-level direction, not something easily done by companies.
But I only give a passing grade because, whether it's Jesse, Solana's Toly, Ethereum's Vitalik, or others, none have realized that for many years, meme coins have been an important path to driving mass adoption.
They have regressed from "I have a mission to actively promote cryptocurrency's conquest of the world" to "National-level forces have already become friendly, we just need to go with the flow." Jesse says he now thinks social is no longer the only path to mass adoption. He still doesn't understand—of course, cryptocurrency still needs word-of-mouth and active discussion among billions of people worldwide. But this isn't something you can achieve by providing an on-chain social platform.
People using Polymarket to bet on World Cup match outcomes won't discuss what stablecoins are. Similarly, people using Agent payments or trading U.S. stocks on-chain also won't care about stablecoins or blockchain. After all these years, the extent to which concepts like NFTs and the metaverse became mainstream topics is now only matched by the most disliked pump.fun, which persists in promoting lottery-like meme coin get-rich-quick stories to once again capture the public's mind.
Whether it's Jesse, Toly, or Robinhood's Vlad recently, everyone knows meme coins are a great user acquisition tool, but they are basically used and discarded. Everyone says nice things about liking memes, but no one steps up to guide the meme coin industry toward becoming more standardized.
Very smart and rational business cognition and choices, but the retreat in idealism and the insufficiently down-to-earth thinking about mass adoption lead me, from the perspective of a small on-chain shrimp, to ultimately give Jesse's reflection on the past two years only a passing grade.
