Jesse Pollak stepped down as head of Base app.

For two years, he had been betting on on-chain social products—Farcaster, Zora, mini-apps, and creator coins—as the driver of mass crypto adoption.

“I was definitely wrong,” Pollack wrote. According to him, developers did indeed drive adoption through stablecoins, prediction markets, and perpetual futures, but social apps “completely fell apart.” Because of its focus on the social direction, Base lagged behind competitors in trading, tokenization, and payments.

The app’s leadership is returning to Coinbase—led by well-known crypto investor Jordan Fish (Kobia), founder of Echo, which Coinbase acquired for $375 million last year. Pollack himself will focus on developing the Base blockchain as an infrastructure for global finance—with a priority on trading, payments, and AI agents.