Open letter to Brian and Jesse - an honest brain dump on Base...
A pattern I keep seeing, laid out chronologically:
2023-24, memecoins: Most people's first bridge to Base was to buy $BRETT. That team wanted a deeper partnership and were more serious/engaged than 100x other meme teams. Base ignored them, but shilled a string of micro-cap memes that all rugged instead. Also worth noting: Base had "liquid NFTs" via $NPC in 2023 - genuinely early tech that never got acknowledged, while later projects got credit for the same idea.
Late 2024, AI agents: The biggest spike in Total Value Bridged was the $VIRTUAL -led AI agent rush - you can see the shark-fin spike and crash on the attached chart. This was 100% organic demand. Base ignored Virtuals for most of this run too. Base's entire "AI chain" reputation exists because of that community, not because of anything the team did.
2025, creator coins: Instead of leaning into AI (the demand the market was clearly showing), the focus shifted to Zora and "creator coins" - a vertical CB had venture funded, which is probably why it got the push. It didn't work. Jesse and Brian both publicly walked it back, and the Zora team left for Solana.
Since then: Rather than course-correct toward the legit AI builders already on Base, the support went to some of the worst actors — $NOICE (now rugged), and reported outreach to people with sketchy track records (Sahil and some known-rugging rappers). That's a bad read on builders, multiple times in a row.
The question: This isn't one bad call - it's a consistent pattern of missing or ignoring the loudest organic signals on your own chain, then funding the opposite. Traders and builders who've been onchain the whole time have said this out loud repeatedly.
Now Robinhood's chain is doing 2x Base's volume a few weeks after launch. + the Base airdrop still isn't happening any time soon.
So: is this a hiring/insight problem, or does the actual strategy just not prioritize traders and builders the way we assumed?
Genuinely want to understand the "why" here.
c/c @jessepollak and @brian_armstrong
I'm hiring a Head of Social Support @Coinbase, and I'll be honest: the bar is high.
I'm looking for someone who is calm under fire, great at social, fluent in crypto and sees every reply as an opportunity to build trust.
If that sounds like you, my DMs are open - let's talk!
@BitHomepage@BitHomepage “And instead of going even further, people started putting bets on speeches, on things that they thought, you know, Donald Trump would say or things like that. And that's when, to me, it started blowing…”