Base is revising its strategy: the app has been handed over to Koby, and the bet on social networks has been acknowledged as a mistake.
Base blockchain lead Jesse Pollak has made a strategic decision to return the consumer application to the Coinbase structure. Management will be entrusted to the well-known trader Koby. In his statement, Pollak openly admitted that his long-standing bet on the development of crypto-social applications and creator coins turned out to be wrong.
In a detailed post on platform X, Pollak explained that the application is returning to the "parent structure" of Coinbase. According to him, it will now be handled by his good friend Koby to create the "best onchain app." Koby is a well-known trader and host of a popular podcast who joined Coinbase after the company acquired his onchain fundraising platform Echo. Pollak emphasized that the application's development will extend beyond the Base ecosystem, and as the network's leader, he is not entirely comfortable with this.
Revisiting Previous Dogmas
Pollak described the first quarter of 2026 as a "slap in the face." He admitted that in 2024 and 2025, he made a double bet: that developers would create a new wave of cryptocurrency adoption, and that new social services would be its driving force.
As it turned out, his bet on developers was correct—the new wave was indeed driven by developers through prediction markets, perpetual contracts, and stablecoins. However, decentralized social networks "were not at its center." Moreover, the entire social segment of the market, according to him, simply "fell apart." Pollak stated outright that he made a mistake, and time will tell whether he was wrong about the timing or completely incorrect. The failure, in his view, was obvious.
New Focus on Blockchain and Finance
Pollak described the damage from his bet as "serious." Due to his preoccupation with social networks, the Base project fell behind in areas that became critically important, such as perpetual contracts and prediction markets. People lost confidence, and the entire year was a difficult ordeal for him.
Nevertheless, Pollak chose a familiar path: focusing on the blockchain itself, getting back to the code, and revisiting previous dogmas. He previously believed that only social networks could bring a billion people into cryptocurrency, but now he is convinced otherwise. In his opinion, "better money" is more than sufficient for this purpose.
Pollak sees his new goal as making global finance "truly work" by bringing a billion people onchain. This is why he has focused on turning Base into a blockchain for global markets.
Developing a decentralized network within a large public company, as Pollak admitted, is extremely difficult. Some of the recent controversies surrounding Base stem precisely from this contradiction, which the team is gradually resolving through network decentralization. At the same time, Pollak is not afraid of competition. He welcomed the entry of Robinhood and Stripe into the sector and stated that in 2026, the Base project is "aiming to win" in three areas: trading, payments, and agents.
Expert opinion: This admission is a landmark moment for the entire industry. Pollak, as one of the main ideologues of the "social" vector of cryptocurrency development, publicly acknowledges its failure. The shift to a pure focus on financial infrastructure and DeFi primitives, such as perpetual contracts and stablecoins, appears pragmatic and likely a more viable step for Base amid fierce competition with Solana and other L2 solutions.