How Jesse Pollak Is Mapping Out Base's Next Chapter After the App Pivot
Show notes
Jesse Pollak owns the Base App's social miss, unpacks Robinhood Chain's rise, and explains Brian Armstrong's memecoin moment. ======================================================== Thank you to our sponsor! Cape: Your biggest crypto vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your phone number. Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier that rotates your SIM identity daily and blocks SIM swaps before they happen. Get 33% off your first six months at cape.co/unchained (use code: UNCHAINED). ======================================================== Jesse Pollak spent the week owning a very public miss. In a lengthy post, the Base creator admitted the Base App's social bet had not worked, leaving Base behind in perps, prediction markets and tokenization, and handed the app's reins to Jordan Fish, better known as Cobie. Pollak joins Laura Shin to unpack why the pivot happened now, what he makes of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's memecoin controversy over a token called $BRIAN, and how Base plans to compete as Robinhood Chain outpaces it on daily active users, according to Artemis data. They cover Base's move off Optimism's stack onto its own Azul, Beryl and Cobalt upgrades, a roadmap toward 20,000 transactions per second under the new B20 stablecoin standard, and the x402 agentic payments protocol already handling roughly 90% of Base's transaction volume. Pollak argues less than 1% of the world uses crypto, and that Base's bet is on whoever builds the trusted rails first. Host: Laura Shin, Host / Unchained Guests: Jesse Pollak - Creator of Base Timestamps 🗞️ 01:48 Why Jesse Pollak feels 'fired up' despite Base App's social miss 🧭 03:58 Pollak on why the timing was wrong for Base App's social bet 💳 05:42 Cape: Get 33% off six months of privacy-first mobile service at https://cape.co/unchained 🖼️ 06:39 Pollak on Brian Armstrong's Coinbaseman meme coin controversy 🏎️ 10:43 How Pollak plans to compete as Robinhood Chain overtakes Base in DAUs 🤝 12:53 Why Coinbase's distribution edge matters for onboarding new users 🔀 15:37 Why Pollak handed the Base App to Cobie to focus on the chain 🌉 18:20 Why Base App is expanding beyond Base to Solana and Bitcoin ⚙️ 21:05 Base's Azul, Beryl and Cobalt upgrades and its new B20 standard 🔐 24:27 Base Ledgers, agentic payments and privacy in Pollak's roadmap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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