Did Base Try a Rug Pull or a Marketing Gimmick? Jesse Pollak Responds

Transcript

I think a lot of this is downstream of what I would classify as a level of cultural toxicity that exists on Crypto Twitter, which is that you have to conform. And if you do something that's outside of that conformed sense of what is right or, you know, what some group thinks is right, people will attack you. And my job as a leader is to make it so that there's psychological safety for people on base to do new things and to experiment. Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto.

I'm your host, Laura Shin. We are now featuring quotes from listeners on the show. Today, we have comments responding to my interview with Bitwise's Matt Hogan and FalconX's Matthew Sheffield about the market turmoil and its impact on Bitcoin. On X, Craig says, "Quote, strong fundamentals always take time to shine. Feels like the long-term play is still very much alive." Also on X, Amin Cad writes, "The real question is when does Ethereum begin to fulfill its potential?" To have your comment featured, write a review of the podcast overall or leave a comment on our video on YouTube, X, or Farcaster.

This is the April 18th, 2025 episode of Unchained. Bitkey is the Bitcoin wallet from the team behind Square and Cash App. It's the first two of three multi-sig hardware wallet with recovery tools that replace the need for a seed phrase. Get 20% off with code Unchained. Tune in AI that speaks crypto and does the work of a team of analysts. Introducing Focal by FalconX, bringing clarity to a world of noise. Visit askfocal.com. Mantle is building the future of on-chain finance. Experience its enhanced index fund, Mantle Banking, and Mantle X. Visit group.mantle.xyz to learn more.

Today's guest is Jesse Pollak, head of Base and Coinbase Wallet. Welcome, Jesse. Thanks. Glad to be here. On Wednesday, Base became the center of crypto's attention when the Base X account tweeted, "Base is for everyone." And in a reply wrote, "Coined it." And posted a link to a coin on Zora. The price pumped up to about, I think it was $17 million market cap within an hour, and then it immediately dumped down to less than $2 million. Users Users were crying foul, saying that what happened here was a rug pull. Coinbase later issued a statement saying Base posted on Zora, which automatically tokenizes content. Yet, you had also tweeted that you had green-lit the token launch. So, what happened? Was this

intentional? Was it a mistake? Or just explain the behind-the-scenes. Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the biggest priorities for Base right now is figuring out how we can give creators better tools for being creative online. Because when we look at the last 20 years of the internet history, one of the biggest things that has driven the growth of the internet is creators. You know, they're the ones creating all the content on Twitter, on TikTok, and Instagram. When you look at the reality of those creators, they're kind of getting left out to dry. Those platforms are making massive amounts of money off of the creativity, but the creators aren't earning. And so, one of our beliefs about on-chain is that it's an opportunity for us to build a new creative economy where creators can

actually earn from their creativity. Instead of platforms taking 90% of the value, the creators can take 90% of the value. And so, that's something we've been iterating on for the last while. Uh we've been using Zora and other creative platforms for last 2 years since the beginning of Base uh to figure out what's a model both for brands and individual creators that actually works. You might remember when Base launched uh the testnet, we did the Base Introduced NFT. At the time, that was the biggest NFT that ever had been on chain.

400,000 people collected it. And so, it's been 2 years of iterating and experimenting and trying to figure out how this system is actually going to work for creators. And through that iteration and experimentation, what we've seen is that the systems that we've been iterating through haven't been perfect, and there's always opportunity to improve them. And one of the big learnings has been that coins, you know, the the simplest form of tokenizing something on chain is actually a really, really powerful tool for capturing the value of content and capturing the value of creativity and letting creators own that. And this has been led by, you know, Pump, it's been led by Zora. And over the last 6 weeks, Zora actually shifted their entire

platform. So, instead of creating an NFT every time you post, you create a coin every time you post. And we think that's good. We think that's normal. We think that there's a big stigma around coins because people have done bad things with them historically, but that really it's just another piece of technology that can help creators earn more money. And so, over the last 5 weeks, I've been creating on Zora. I've created a ton of different content. All of them have been coins. I've been sharing all of my thinking about why I'm doing that, about what that looks like, about what the impact is for me and for other creators. And yesterday, we took the next step, which is that if I'm going to lead the way and kind of break that seal, we also need brands to do it. And Base is the biggest crypto-native brand that's doing

on-chain native marketing. And so, that's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to coin content because we believe that every brand should be coining their content. Every creator should be coining their content because that's the best way for creators to get their value creativity valued in the open market and then actually capture that creativity and let them earn more so that they can have a better livelihood. And so then, it does sound like it was intentional. Um so then just square that with the Coinbase statement about Base posted on Zora, which automatically tokenizes content.

Every time you post on Zora, it turns into a coin. That's the Zora protocol. We're going to put content on Zora, that's going to turn it into a coin. Uh, Base is going to keep posting on Zora, and we're going to keep creating coins for all of our content. Oh, interesting. And it So then it just uh, like if I'm going to walk through what this future looks like, then is it a situation where we could expect that Coinbase would ever list Bases for everyone coin? Well, I think if you look at what Brian and, you know, other Coinbase leaders have said and I've said as well, our goal with Coinbase is to list everything.

We don't want Coinbase to be playing this role of picking and choosing, because when we're thinking about building an open global economy and when we're thinking about increasing economic freedom, what that means it means giving everyone access to this global market that's being formed, and then giving the them the tools and information so that they can make decisions for themselves. And so, the next big thing that Brian's been talking about is actually integrating DEXes directly into Coinbase. So that all assets will be directly available to our customers on Coinbase. And so, there's, you know, no news on that today, but again, the North Star for Coinbase is list everything and give our customers access to the entire global economy.

Okay, well, I guess um, we'll have to see when or if this gets listed. Um, I did want to mention something that a lot of people talked about, which was that LooksOnChain reported that three wallets bought large amounts of Bases for everyone token before the Base account posted about it. And those accounts all quickly cashed out, and I wondered if Coinbase has looked into who was in control of those wallets, or if you plan to try to investigate that, you know, because it it seems like either they had some insider knowledge, like potentially they could be Coinbase employees, or they're they just got very lucky, or what what do you think happened there?

And what do you what do you plan to do about it? Absolutely not Coinbase employees or anyone affiliated with Coinbase or affiliated with Base. Coinbase has very strict trading policies that we enforce. We are constantly monitoring all of the employee behavior and there was absolutely nothing connected to Coinbase about people who were buying Base as forever. So I just want to be really really clear about that. And just to understand the certainty around that cuz there was that incident with the two brothers or the two relatives one of whom worked at Coinbase. I'm just forgetting the the exact details but so like so now yeah.

that case Coinbase had monitoring. Coinbase detected that. Coinbase reported it to the government and we supported the case against those folks. And so again Coinbase has probably the most rigorous employee trading surveillance of anyone in the industry and can give you 100% certainty that there was not you know insider Coinbase activity. Absolutely not. Now in terms of how did people find out about it? We always post our content first on chain. We posted it on Zora. Before we put it on X we posted it on Zora. And shocker there's a lot of people who are on Zora.

There's people who are scrolling the Zora feed constantly because they're using on chain products. I think that might seem crazy at times to people. It's like oh my god they're they're using on chain products. They're not just talking about stuff on Twitter. But yes there are people using on chain products. And you know when we're thinking about content and putting content on chain you know that content is going to be variable in how much it's valuable and people are going to make decisions about do I think this content is more valuable or less valuable? In that case some people thought it was valuable. They saw Base posted. They bought it and then they later sold it. And you know you mentioned that the price went up and then the price went down. And I think it's also really important to note that the price also

went back up. I think I was looking the price is $11 million dollars now. You know who knows if that's the right valuation for this piece of content? It's There was so much hysteria yesterday about Oh my god, base rug. Base did not rug. There was no insider trading. The market is a free market where people are valuing this content. People decided to buy it. Some people decided to sell it. Then some people decided to buy it. And when we're thinking about the global crypto economy, this is what a free market is. And the most important thing is creating a culture and then creating technology systems where we're creating long-term positive sum outcomes for creators.

And that's what Zora is doing. That's what Base is focused on. We're not always going to be perfect, but we think the best way to figure it out and the best way to pave the road for hopefully people like you one day to actually earn more money from your content is to be out there in the trenches creating content, putting it on chain, listening, learning, seeing what happens, and then making it better. And so that's what we're doing. We're going to keep coining things, and we think that it's going to have a really positive impact on the ecosystem. And if you look at the last 24 hours, there have been more creators creating on Zora than ever before. Cuz people are realizing, "Oh my god, if instead of me creating content and Facebook decides how much it's worth, and then Facebook

monetizes it through ads, and then Facebook takes all of that value, I can create content, the market can decide how much it's worth, and then I can capture the value." That's actually a pretty good thing. And so I actually think that um there was a lot of kind of furor yesterday about this, but I kind of see this as a turning point where people are realizing, "Okay, the only way to the other side was through a little bit of chaos." But now that I'm coining every day and Base is coining every day, and there's lots of people coining every day, there's no stigma here. Coin your content. If you coin your content, you'll make more money.

You'll have more direct connection with your fan. You'll have more direct connection with your fans, and you're safe. It's a safe thing to do. Yeah, well, um, we'll see if they take that lesson away considering how you were you were criticized on all sides, but um, you know, you were either prepped very well by somebody or you just managed to somehow hit a certain soft spot I have, which is this notion that I do think that Web3 has the potential to help creators, which, you know, they um, were they were not served well by Web2. Um, and you know, I saw you talking a little bit about how Basis for Everyone Coin is not a meme coin.

You were calling it a content coin, but how do you differentiate between those two things? And then how do you also square that? And maybe this is just a different category entirely, but you know, there are ideas like Story Protocol, where, you know, you could use that to pay royalties to anybody who contributes on an artistic project. So, like, what's your vision for you know, how this would all work? Yeah, so first let me talk about this meme coin versus content coin thing. And really where this has come from is I've been creating on chain I've been creating on chain for I mean, I've been building on chain for 12 years. I've been creating on chain for as long as people have been creating on chain. I did it with one of ones. I did it when Zora was, uh, you know, open editions, and now I've been doing coins

for the last 6 weeks. Created a bunch of different coins. I've learned a bunch of things from it. And the biggest single thing that I learned is the first time I created a coin on Zora. Everyone instantly mapped their mental model of meme coins. And people were in my replies, they were like, "When are you going to like tweet about this specific piece of content again?" And like, "When are you going to create the Telegram group for this specific piece of content?" I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You guys, like, never. It's a piece of content. Treat it like a piece of content." The second time I created a a piece of content on Zora that got coined, people were like, "Jesse's rugging." Because they were mapping that expectation of this is a long-term project that's a meme that Jesse's running with to this thing

that's actually just a piece of content that should be valued like a piece of content. The fifth time I created a piece of content, no one was talking about it anymore. They were just like, "Oh, this is just a piece of content. And if I think it's a cool piece of content, I can collect it. If I think that other people think it's a cool piece of content, I might speculate on it increasing in value, but I'm going to treat it like a piece of content." And so, I think sometimes when I'm talking about this like content coin versus meme coin, people are like, "What's the technical difference? Like, you know, how how do you segment these things? How do you you know, and and and really my perspective is is this is really a cultural and an expectations difference, right? If I'm telling people, "This is a

piece of content. Value it like a piece of content. If you think it's cool, collect it cuz you can spend 10 cents and support me as a creator. And if you think other people think it's going to be cool, you can speculate on that." That's really, really different than me saying, "I'm launching a meme. I'm going to create a Telegram group for that meme. I'm going to create all these different content around that meme." Almost like an aggregated series of content. And so, what I've been trying to do with this um kind of language around content coins and meme coins is really just help people kind of segment their thinking about what's happening on chain right now. Because a coin is at the end of the day just a piece of technology. It's a financial primitive that we can map into a bunch of different use cases. We can map into a

bunch of different uh uh contexts. And I believe that mapping it onto a content context is going to be a huge, huge unlock because it's going to let all of that content be valued in a way where we can then redirect that value to creators. So, that's the first thing. Now, the second thing on on your question around story and IP, I think a lot of this goes to the question of in this future, let's just imagine for a second where all content is tokenized, what does the value accrual system look like? And is it built on the historical model of value accrual, which is really IP-driven and kind of legal-driven, where it's like, you know, I have a right to use this content, and that right gives me access to revenue, or is

it something new? I think my hypothesis, and a lot of this is informed through conversations with Jacob Horn, who's the creator of Zora, is that it's going to be something new. And he has this phrase, which is free but valuable. Which is basically in this new era of on-chain, because we have the ability to have the content tokenized on-chain in the form of a coin, and have that provenance directly connected to the creator, and then have it valued by the free market, we can actually have this world where the content is valued in and of itself. And that drives kind of this value accrual to the creator, whether it's through trading fees or ownership of that content. And because that's happening, because the attention is kind of manifested in that coin, then you can

also make it totally free. So, that's something that just is is valuable in and of itself, and then everyone else can benefit from it. And it's kind of turning the world on its head, but if you look at the history of crypto, you know, you look at CCO, like Creative Commons, like that's been at the core of crypto. There's always been this idea that if we let things be free, they will proliferate more, and as a result of them proliferating more, the value will accrue back in some way. And I think what we're realizing with coins and content and all this stuff is the way it accrues is through attention. And when there's attention, there's some segment of people who think it's cool to own a small part of it, just because.

And that is a economic engine that can then drive value and can drive value capture for a creator. Mantle is revolutionizing its on-chain financial hub, powered by a $4 billion treasury and proven products like Mantle Network and MEV protocol. Mantle is launching three innovation pillars. Enhanced index fund for optimized crypto exposure, Mantle banking for blockchain powered banking, and Mantle X for AI-driven innovation. Experience the future of finance with Mantle, and follow Mantle on X to stay tuned.

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We have another listener comment. This one responding to Matthew Sheffield's remarks on some of ETH's problems. On X, Uncle Sam of Afronix says, quote, "ETH isn't just some yield machine, it's infrastructure. If you're only in it for coupons, you're missing the entire innovation stock it's powering." Again, if you want to hear your comment featured on the show, please write a review or leave a comment on an episode on YouTube, X, or Farcaster. Yeah, it's super interesting what you're saying. Um, that bit right there made me think, "Oh, um, if this comes to fruition, then it would spell the end of, you know, certain middle men." Like I was just thinking about if you're a visual artist, and, you know, you, um, you know, basically reach your market

through a dealer, um, then then this type of software would allow you to to, um, you know, pass by that. But he did want to say the one thing about the meme coins and content coins description that you gave me. Um, it was interesting cuz actually it felt to me like, um, the differences that you are making between meme coins and content coins are the exact same differences that people used to make between NFT coins and meme coins. Cuz you were saying like, "Oh, the meme coin comes with, you know, this like road map and this group and, you know, whatever." But to me that's more like NFTs. And then the way you were talking about content coins, I was like, "That That to me sounds like a meme coin."

Yeah. Yeah, well, I think that the reality is all of this is very gray, and we're kind of figuring out as we go. But I think what what naturally happens if you think about kind of NFTs as a prototype of meme coins, we've basically gone uh expanding the aperture of what can be brought on chain. Right? With NFTs, it was like, you have to bring on this whole collection, you have to make it all. With meme coins, it's like, you have to actually just bring on this idea, and then everyone else can create content around that, and that can drive the attention. And then with content, it's not even an idea anymore. It's just a piece of content. And those that content could ladder up to an idea. And I actually think we're going to get to a future where you might have a meme coin,

and this is actually happening on Base already. You have a meme coin, and then that meme coin is creating tons of content about their meme. And every single one of those sub pieces of content actually has an economic relationship back to the meme coin. So it creates this kind of driver of attention and value accrual back to the meme coin. And that's going to give us this world where we kind of have layered value that's letting creators capture value at every single point of the life cycle. And maybe just to to bring this back to to kind of you personally, my bet would be that if you decide to coin your videos, just every video that you posted, you would make money because those videos are worth something.

Yeah, I mean, we we aren't doing like pods and yeah, we're in a we're in fountain. We're in a bunch of I like Well, I think we're on like Dracula. We're on a bunch of these, yeah. Yeah, we don't remember them all. You're already experimenting, right? And and I think the funny thing is if you look back at the history of, you know, base posts on Zora and and my posts on Zora, before Zora actually went full coins, they had this kind of hybrid model where it started out as an NFT and then it turned into a coin. And base had posted a ton of those before. And so, there already been economic assets that looked like this. It's just that there's this really, you know, funny cultural stigma right now around coins that I think is is kind of well placed because there's all this history that, you know,

we need to to work through as we're building out kind of new models. But again, my feeling is like we have to work through it to get to the other side. And as we do that work, we're going to find better and better models for how to monetize with creators. And I actually think that, you know, we'll we'll see platforms potentially like pods and others say, "Hey, what we're seeing on Zora is really interesting. It's actually accruing value better for creators than our current model." And then they might adopt it. And so, again, our attitude on all of this is we want to be at the forefront because that's the only way you can learn. We're going to do it in public because building in public is how we normalize experimentation. It's how we create space for everyone else to feel safe.

And we're going to do things on chain because if we're not doing things on chain, if we're not using the apps, how can we expect anyone else to? And so, sometimes that's going to be a little bit messy, but this is the part This is what it takes to build a new internet. It's what it takes to build a new social network. It's what it takes to build a new global economy. Yeah, I I like what I hear in the sense that there's a certain amount of open-mindedness and like not feeling like you have to do things the way it's been done before and you know, I just saw this exchange which I'm sure a lot of people saw where Alon of Pump Fun tweeted quote, I think there's a reality where what Base did is normal in a few years time but it definitely isn't today. I'm a huge

advocate for the vision of tokenizing everything but you can't change current market realities. If you launch a coin and have social influence, that comes with responsibility, namely the responsibility to stick to the space's social standards to a T. Don't launch or shill other coins, don't set high expectations, don't talk about price, et cetera. And you responded and and he's he also said these standards aren't dictated by him or Pump Fun or by Coinbase or anybody but by the users. And then you responded, next time I will definitely make sure to conform to the prescribed pump.fun trench standards for how to correctly use internet capital markets.

And so you know, that that reflects this attitude you talked about but I did want to ask because you know, as we mentioned so this moment in time where you have been the punching bag on a crypto Twitter for the last 24 hours it feels like you know, we've seen this before. There has been other times when the crypto community has derided for instance, your videos when you ask people if they'd like to make money to get on chain and I just wondered if what people are picking up on there is that it feels more top-down or it feels more like you're trying to create activity whereas crypto historically has been more of like a grassroots grassroots phenomenon, more

decentralized. And so I wonder just like how you think about how a more centralized entity like Base or Coinbase participates in this world that's trying to move toward a more decentralized world. And first off, let me just address the Alan tweet and and my reply. I just think it's kind of funny. Like if you if you would have asked 6 months ago, Alan, how do you feel about, you know, people in Ethereum or somewhere else telling you that pump.fun is wrong? He would have been like, "That's the most ridiculous thing in the world." And now here he is and I'm saying, "Hey, we can do something slightly different."

He's like, "No, no, no. You have to follow the rules that are set by the pump.fun trenches or else." I mean, like come on. We talked about internet markets. We're talking about free markets. We're talking about open global economy. And we're talking about a reality where there's less than 1% of the world on chain. Do we really think that if we follow the the rules that the pump.fun user base has set, we're going to bring a a billion people on chain? I'm sorry. Like I don't I don't buy it. Like I'm going to keep experimenting.

I'm going to keep pushing boundaries. I'm going to keep trying new things because trying new things, embracing new products, being unafraid, even when there's cultural backlash, to push those new things, that's how greatness happens. And I don't know whether we're there right now, but I'm not going to stop experimenting. And so that's the first thing. Now, the second thing is do I think that the reaction that people have to uh me is as a result of some centralization or some top-down? I don't think so. I think that some of the stuff I'm doing is genuinely like somewhat transgressive.

Right? Like have you seen other people out on the street trying to bring people on chain before I did it? No. No, right. Yeah, cuz it's it's it's freaking weird and hard and and super painful. And have you seen other people trying to normal- I will say, yeah, there I mean, Bitcoin meetups maybe back in the day. But anyway. Back in the day, yeah, yeah. Yeah, have you seen other people trying to normalize enabling creators to value and monetize their content with coins? No, because it's super hard and because when I did it, who who like, you know, people love you know, like me in a lot of ways, I got on for 24 hours. How could an everyday creator do it? There's no psychological safety there. I think a lot of this is downstream of what I

would classify as a level of cultural toxicity that exists on crypto Twitter, which is that you have to conform. And if you do something that's outside of that conformed sense of what is right or you know, what some group thinks is right, people will attack you. And my job as a leader is to make it so that there's psychological safety for people on base to do new things and to experiment. Because if people do not have psychological safety to do new things and experiment, even if I disagree with it, even if crypto disagrees with it, we are not going to make any progress.

And so, I'm happy to get on for 24 hours. I'm happy to be the punching bag. That's the best thing ever because if me being the punching bag makes it so that there's one or five or 10 or 100 more creators who feel the safety to do something new, it's all worth it. And when you look at the data, and people will look at the data from the last 24 hours, what you will see is that as a result of me coining some stuff on Twitter and posting about it and the crypto Twitter attacking me, hundreds and thousands of new creators have experimented with a new economic paradigm and a new platform. And some of them will not like it, but my guess is that a lot of them will like it. And a lot of them will realize,

"Oh my god, this lets me earn more money. This lets me feel more valued. This lets me connect more directly with my fans and my community." And then they're going to stick around and they're going to be the ones who get to benefit from this new global economy that we're building. So, I don't think it's about centralization. I think it's about we need to get comfortable with trying new things and that's a little bit of a process that all of us need to work through. Yeah. Yeah, I totally get it. Trying to change Trying to change people can be challenging. Well, Jesse, I so appreciate that you came on the show, especially at a time when um people were, you know, throwing eggs and whatnot at you online.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, otherwise it's been such a pleasure having you on our Jade. Awesome. Thanks so much, Laura. Appreciate you.