Morning Edition · Thursday, July 16, 2026Published at 1:28 AM EDT · New York
Base Creator Jesse Pollak Steps Back From App Leadership, Admits Social Strategy Failed
Pollak said the network's multi-year bet on on-chain social products did not deliver, and is redirecting Base toward trading, payments and artificial-intelligence financial tools.
Jesse Pollak, the Coinbase executive who created the Base layer-2 network, is stepping back from day-to-day leadership of the Base app after acknowledging that its bet on on-chain social products did not produce the growth the team expected…
Continue the Crypto Intelligence Brief
Track on-chain flows, protocol shifts, stablecoins, and regulation.
- 5 crypto intelligence signals a day
- Tracked crypto trends, day over day
- Stablecoin and regulatory movement
- Source-grounded analysis with confidence labels
The Global Intelligence Brief stays free.
Part of a tracked trend
Layer-2 Fee Revenue Becomes the Prize
As applications and brands run their own chains, the contested value in the layer-2 stack shifts from raw throughput to who captures the fee stream, pushing base networks to negotiate direct revenue shares.
More from this edition
- DTCC Runs First Live Tokenized Trades of Stocks and Treasuries With Wall Street's Biggest Firms
- Ostium Halts Trading After Attacker Uses Compromised Oracle Key to Drain $18 Million
- Privacy Layer-2 Networks Ship Live Confidential Execution and Pitch It as Institutional Baseline
- Morgan Stanley Wins Preliminary Approval to Pull Crypto Custody, Staking and Lending In-House
- Ether Outpaces Bitcoin as Exchange-Traded Fund Inflows Return, Led Almost Entirely by BlackRock
- Japan's Parliament Reclassifies Bitcoin and Crypto as Financial Products
- China Moves to Treat Crypto Mixer Use as Evidence of Money Laundering
- United States Freezes $131 Million in Tether Tied to Iran's Central Bank
- Stanford Study Says Polymarket's Five-Minute Bitcoin Bets Moved $8.2 Million to Manipulators
- Bitcoin Untouched Since the 2017 Peak Moves $383 Million, as Old and Seized Coins Reawaken
- Trump to Meet Senators as Ethics Fight Threatens Crypto Market-Structure Bill