Base’s social bet left it trailing in prediction markets and perps: Pollak

Base creator admits social bet was wrong

Base creator Jesse Pollak is stepping back from leadership of the Base App after admitting he was “definitively wrong” to bet on social experiences driving crypto adoption.

Pollak added he will be returning leadership of the Base App to Coinbase, under Jordan Fish, known on X as “Cobie,” while he focuses on the Base blockchain.

Pollak’s post came just days after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong acknowledged content coins “didn’t work,” prompting the company to pivot earlier this year.

“We messed up, time to turn the page,” Armstrong said on Monday.

In February, Base sunset its Creator Rewards program and Farcaster-powered social feed as part of a strategic shift to tradable assets.

Creator Rewards and the social pivot

The Creator Rewards program launched in July 2025 and was intended to make the Ethereum layer-2 Base a more social ecosystem, where activity and engagement translate into earnings.

Meanwhile, Pollak admitted the Base App was an “imperfect Farcaster client.”

Strategic shift to tradable assets

Last week, Base activated its B20 token standard on the mainnet, introducing a native framework for stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) and other fungible tokens.

In May, Base launched Base MCP (Model Context Protocol), a tool that lets users manage their crypto directly from an AI model’s chat interface and interact with crypto protocols such as:

• Morpho
• Moonwell
• Uniswap
• Aerodrome
• Avantis
• Bankr
• Virtuals

In April, Base said it was upgrading key systems in preparation for an AI agent economy as part of its 2026 roadmap. It highlighted real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, stablecoins, and prediction markets as being key growth areas in 2026.

“We’re going to build base into the blockchain for global finance and do everything we can to be the place that the world’s money settles over the next century,” Pollak said on Wednesday.