Strider

x.com/i/article/2024…

Takeover is the perfect game for AI. Logical decision making with risk to balance. SKILL.md just dropped 👇 takeover.fun/base/skill.md

the way we rebuild trust is by continuing to build, in the open, as we've always done. a loss of trust is inevitable when a strategy doesn't go the way it's planned — but i believe that in a repeated game, if you are consistent in what your values are and how you show up, trust will always be rebuilt. and at every stage along the way, we have built in the open, even as we have taken on large and unconventional bets, because that's how we believe an open economy must be built. to make this concrete, let's take social (which I believe is the thing @CocosLair is referring to as alienating): we called it out as a 2025 priority (blog.base.org/base-2025-miss…), we told the world we were going to evolve coinbase wallet (blog.base.org/evolving-coinb…), we preannounced building on farcaster (an open protocol) and preannounced building on zora (an open protocol). in retrospect, we were early on making social + creators the priority, but when we learned that, we shared in it open, including my reflections just last week (x.com/jessepollak/st…). none of this was done because the team has angel investments (i stopped angel investing when i started base and coinbase has a very serious conflict policy) or because coinbase ventures invested (the size + scale of coinbase venture's investments aren't material to the product strategy). it was an intentional strategy to grow the pie, which in retrospect was not the right one. none of it was done in the dark either, we did it in the open, as we do with everything we do on base. to bring the world onchain, we need to be willing to take bets. some of those will work. some of them won't. the important thing is that we take them, then learn from them, then get better. is this complex and messy? absolutely. does the reality that base is decentralizing from within a big public company make that more messy? absolutely. but none of that should stop us from doing the hard work. both our words and our actions will continue to speak for themselves. i encourage people to judge us on them and make their own decisions on whether these are the words, actions, and culture that they want to be a part of. if not, people are welcome to go elsewhere - the beauty of open, decentralized systems is that anyone can opt out at any time. for those who want to stay - know that we will keep living our values and doing our best work, in the open. and we will learn from our mistakes and deliver better and better results. and along the way, i welcome disagreement, discourse, and conversation AND we continue to need more leaders who don't just talk — but act. see you in the trenches 🫡