Author: Eric, Foresight News
Original Title: More Than One Person Has Wasted Three Years on Base
At 1:13 AM Beijing time on January 13, the co-founder of game studio Pandemic Labs, a user with the X handle "tuna," published an article criticizing Base for its inaction.
In the article, Tuna stated that Jesse's philosophy of Base being "application-first" rather than focusing on infrastructure attracted him to develop products on Base. However, after "three years" (Base's mainnet has only been live for about two and a half years) of developing 10 products including games, AI Agents, prediction markets, and zkTLS, the promised support from Base never materialized.
After launching the hit game Infected and gaining 50,000 followers in a month, Base proactively contacted tuna and promised support, but ultimately nothing came of it. Tuna mentioned that before Infected, they tried to reach Base officials through X, Discord, and Telegram but received no response.
Disheartened, tuna switched to Solana and developed the game Addicted, which generated $4 million in revenue within 48 hours of its launch on Solana. The stark contrast of earning $4 million in 2 days versus achieving nothing in nearly 3 years led tuna to lament that, compared to Base, which constantly promotes Farcaster and Zora, he had finally found an "organization" that treats developers like human beings.
Shivam Tandon, founder of zkCross Network, had a similar experience. He also initially believed in Jesse's story of prioritizing products and builders. However, after developing Surf on Base, their efforts to contact Base via email and private messages similarly went unanswered. Shivam Tandon stated that he doesn't mind if Base wants to support projects invested in by Coinbase, but he wishes they would be upfront about it and not waste developers' time.
Although some pragmatic users believe Base has its own preferences and that project failures shouldn't be blamed on this, most people expressed support for tuna.
Developer criticism of Base didn't start this year. In February 2025, a user with the X handle Lamboland felt that Base's approach seemed insufficiently "degen." Coinbase offered no support for a high-traffic project like Virtuals but listed the VVV token on its launch day. Lamboland mentioned that many projects were considering migrating to Solana, primarily because Base's marketing was out of touch, lacking "seasoned veterans" who understand CT culture to build a good community environment.
Similarly, just two weeks ago, Jacek, a member of DEGEN—which airdropped $50 million in tokens to Farcaster users and once had a market cap exceeding $1 billion—also posted a long thread expressing disappointment with Base.
Jacek stated that developers choose Base largely because of its connection to Coinbase, hoping to gain support or brand endorsement. However, as the previous two mentioned, Base devoted significant effort to projects like Zora, while even the official Base Twitter account didn't follow or retweet projects like DEGEN that brought massive traffic to Base. In Jacek's view, to Base, anything outside the mainstream narrative simply doesn't exist.
Furthermore, DEGEN's proposal for a $1 million airdrop on Base and the Base App was ignored. Jacek noted that when DEGEN announced plans to cross-chain to Solana, they immediately received attention and support from Solana. At offline events, Solana officials were eager to interact with ecosystem projects, even giving out Bonk keychains. It's these small, seemingly insignificant details that demonstrate official respect for developers and participants. In contrast, Jacek expressed that he doesn't mind Base promoting Zora, but the attitude of completely ignoring other projects is disappointing.
Interestingly, despite such severe public criticism, neither Base nor Jesse offered any explanation or proposed solutions in the replies to these tweets. On the 9th of this month, Jesse retweeted a post from Base product manager Nick, expressing Base's willingness to assist developers, but the comments were filled with skepticism, with the most common question being: How exactly do you plan to help?
Over the past year, Base has indeed been a gold rush destination, but it almost experienced "sudden death" after its flagship projects fizzled out. Unlike Solana, Base is part of the Coinbase ecosystem, an extension of the exchange, born with the attribute of serving stakeholders. Clearly, the unhealthy tendencies existing within the already large Coinbase have also affected Base's operations. Perhaps Base's sudden popularity was indeed supported by Coinbase's strong resources, but the core contributors to its brief success were still the talented developers in the community.
Coinbase's plans for Base in 2026 primarily revolve around on-chain assets and the Base App. Coinbase plans to gradually evolve into a comprehensive exchange in the future, with aspects like stock tokenization and commodity tokenization mainly being handled by Base. Additionally, the Base App is planned to be developed into a Web3 traffic入口 (entry point) integrating trading, social features, and a wallet. This indicates that Base will likely continue to adhere to its recognized "mainstream narrative," and its functional role in assisting Coinbase will remain stronger than being an open community itself.
Over the past year, Base wanted to use its influence to strongly promote projects like Farcaster and Zora, which have capital backing and "orthodox" narratives, but misjudged the "crazy" mainstream style of this market cycle. For Coinbase, it needs to clarify whether Base is merely a tool to serve the exchange and Coinbase Ventures, or a truly open network for the entire world. If it's the latter, it must adopt an operational philosophy like Solana's—"from the masses, to the masses."
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