Speaker 1: Hey, folks, I've got Jesse Pollock, who's head of Base
Speaker 1: and coinbas wallet, joining me.
Speaker 2: How are you, Jesse. I'm doing awesome. It's been an
Speaker 2: epic day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure you've done a lot of panels and
Speaker 1: things like that, but I'm really excited about what's happening
Speaker 1: on Base. Followed that for a long time, and it
Speaker 1: seems you guys did it the right way. You didn't
Speaker 1: launch a token, and you're seeing a lot of adoption.
Speaker 1: Tell us a bit about what you're most excited about
Speaker 1: with Base.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, for those who don't know, the mission of
Speaker 3: Base is to build a global economy that increases innovation, creativity,
Speaker 3: and freedom. The way that manifests is from a technology
Speaker 3: perspective is it's a chain where anyone anywhere in the
Speaker 3: world can come and build, and then you can come
Speaker 3: and use the products that other people build, whether that's
Speaker 3: coins or social apps or games or business offerings. And
Speaker 3: we've been live for about twenty months and at this point,
Speaker 3: Base is the largest Layer two in the world that
Speaker 3: we build on top of Ethereum. It's one of the largest,
Speaker 3: most important chains in the world. Then you know, we're
Speaker 3: just seeing incredible adoption. I mean today alone, we announced
Speaker 3: a bunch of really cool things, Shopify rolling out USDC
Speaker 3: on base payments to all of their stores. Shopify served
Speaker 3: one hundred and seventy five million people last year, and
Speaker 3: USDC on base is now a default payment method. And
Speaker 3: then we also saw Coinbase, who has obviously been a
Speaker 3: huge supporter of Base, integrate based assets directly into the
Speaker 3: coinbakes app. So now every Base asset is listed on coinbase,
Speaker 3: and that's like a huge win for the bas ecosystem
Speaker 3: in for growing the economy.
Speaker 1: It's exciting. So is Base does it have the capability
Speaker 1: to surface both retail and institutional investors?
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: You know, we like to say basis for everyone, and
Speaker 3: that applies to people from every single country in the world,
Speaker 3: but also people with different backgrounds and people you know,
Speaker 3: from different segments. And so there's a huge kind of
Speaker 3: like retail consumer population that's on Base, that's using games
Speaker 3: and social products. But then we also have a really
Speaker 3: big institutional capital base and allocators and traders who are
Speaker 3: on Base as well. Because we now have you know,
Speaker 3: the most highest volume ethereum pools on chain. We have
Speaker 3: the highest volume bitcoin pools on chain, and we're increasingly
Speaker 3: starting to have the highest volume for every single asset
Speaker 3: because Base is becoming the center of the on chain
Speaker 3: economy because it's fast, it's cheap, it's easy to use,
Speaker 3: it's globally accessible, and it's super powerful.
Speaker 2: With the EVM.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I'm gonna ask some questions and I'm a bit
Speaker 1: of a nube here, So does it Will there be
Speaker 1: possibly a layer three, so to speak, on top a
Speaker 1: layer on top of Base.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The way I think about kind of layer one, layer two,
Speaker 3: layer three is layer one is kind of pure infrastructure
Speaker 3: like the Internet. Layer two are these economies that bootstrap
Speaker 3: off of that infrastructure and Base we like to say
Speaker 3: it's a global economy that everyone can be a part of,
Speaker 3: and then layer threes are apps that plug into those
Speaker 3: economies for kind of the functionality the economy provides. Maybe
Speaker 3: it's the on rams, maybe it's the market structure, maybe
Speaker 3: it's the liquidity. But the layer threes are getting kind
Speaker 3: of their own dedicated block space, but using all the
Speaker 3: infrastructure that the economy actually provides. And so today we
Speaker 3: actually already have a ton of layer threes that run
Speaker 3: on Base. Those are folks building games deep in social
Speaker 3: products where they want their own dedicated blockspace. They've already
Speaker 3: been consuming gas on Base, but they want more control.
Speaker 3: They already have a pretty high spend, and so they
Speaker 3: spin up their own l three.
Speaker 2: We helped host some of them.
Speaker 3: We have an app chains product that enables that, but
Speaker 3: then a lot of them also use other ecosystem offerings
Speaker 3: from folks like Conduit and Caldera. And this is one
Speaker 3: of the really cool powerful things about Base is that
Speaker 3: it's an open platform and so you can build on
Speaker 3: it no matter which way you choose. It's open and
Speaker 3: available to you.
Speaker 1: Will you primarily say in the Ethereum ecosystem, are their
Speaker 1: plans to branch out to Solona or whatever it may be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean we've said from the beginning that we
Speaker 3: want Base to be a bridge, not an island, and
Speaker 3: so that was why we built on etherorem as a
Speaker 3: layer two, so we could be connected to the largest
Speaker 3: to centralized economy in the world. But it's also why
Speaker 3: we've been excited about finding ways to collaborate with Slona.
Speaker 3: We've brought in a ton of bitcoin to base coin bases,
Speaker 3: building their whole bitcoin borrowing product on top of Base,
Speaker 3: and all of that is kind of anchored on the
Speaker 3: thesis that we're stronger together and that in order to
Speaker 3: bring the world on chain, it's can require all of
Speaker 3: us working together. And so absolutely like we're just getting
Speaker 3: started in terms of collaborating with other folks.
Speaker 2: What's on your road map that you can share.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'd say the thing that I'm most excited about
Speaker 3: right now is I've been working on Base, the chain
Speaker 3: and builder tools for the last almost three years now
Speaker 3: at this point. But then just in the fall, I
Speaker 3: took over coinbas wallet, where I'm now getting to be
Speaker 3: back working on consumer products because before I started working
Speaker 3: on Base, I led our consumer products on the engineering
Speaker 3: side for five years, and so I took over that
Speaker 3: team in October. We right away started a ground up
Speaker 3: rewrite of the product and we're nearing the end.
Speaker 2: It's actually in private beta right now.
Speaker 3: You know, it's a totally different the screen can't see,
Speaker 3: but it's a totally different product. It's a social app,
Speaker 3: so there's a whole social feed in here. We have
Speaker 3: a text based social feed, we have a whole video
Speaker 3: feed with like TikTok. We have mini apps where you
Speaker 3: can go and play games, you know, it's all on chain,
Speaker 3: all on crypto. We have a full trading and payments experience,
Speaker 3: we have a full messenger notifications, and then of course
Speaker 3: a global wallet. And one of the really powerful things
Speaker 3: about the global wall is because we have stable coins
Speaker 3: for all these different countries, including the Eurozone and Brazil
Speaker 3: and South Africa, we can make this wallet work for
Speaker 3: people everywhere in the world. And so really we're thinking
Speaker 3: about this as the entry point to this new global
Speaker 3: economy that we're building, and it's in private beta right now.
Speaker 3: People are loving it. I personally have moved a huge
Speaker 3: amount of my screen time to the new wallet, and
Speaker 3: I think it's gonna have a really profound impact on
Speaker 3: bringing more people on chain and getting this flywheel spinning
Speaker 3: faster and faster.
Speaker 1: One of the challenges as a content creator I have
Speaker 1: is dealing with bots and fake profiles. Will this type
Speaker 1: of infrastructure help resolve that because it's verifiable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there's absolutely gonna be stuff that we
Speaker 3: can do around verification that makes it easier for us
Speaker 3: to filter.
Speaker 2: Out spam and bops.
Speaker 3: The other thing that I think is going to be
Speaker 3: really meaningful is we're we're building content tools that are
Speaker 3: on chain native. And what that means is that because
Speaker 3: we can use this on chain platform, we're actually gonna
Speaker 3: be able to earn more money for creators. Instead of
Speaker 3: Facebook or Instagram taking ninety five percent of the value
Speaker 3: of your creativity, you're gonna get that ninety five percent of.
Speaker 2: Value, which it means you're gonna make ten times more.
Speaker 3: It means you're gonna own the relationships with your fans
Speaker 3: so you can move around and not lose access to it,
Speaker 3: and it means that you're not gonna be at risk
Speaker 3: of being deplatformed. And so as we're thinking about this
Speaker 3: next phase of coinbas wallet, and as we're thinking about
Speaker 3: the next phase of crypto adoption, I really think it's
Speaker 3: gonna be driven by creators because we've been in the
Speaker 3: developer era. Developers are finally kind of having the tools
Speaker 3: they need to build apps. But if you look at
Speaker 3: the kind of scale of developers around the world, there's
Speaker 3: sole only around ten, ten million, twenty million developers. There
Speaker 3: are hundreds of millions of creators. And by giving them
Speaker 3: better tools that let them earn more and do better,
Speaker 3: they're then gonna tell the story of on chain.
Speaker 2: They're gonna share with their audiences.
Speaker 3: Come on chain, come with me over here, because it's
Speaker 3: better for me and it's better for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, It kind of gives you equity, so to speak, right.
Speaker 3: One hundred percent, you now co own the network that
Speaker 3: you're creating on and you can benefit from it, and
Speaker 3: that can let you live a more prosperous, successful life.
Speaker 1: It's funny because there's certain laws like mechas law and
Speaker 1: reads law and that are playing out here with these
Speaker 1: blockchain networks. It's just fascinating the CIT's economies being built.
Speaker 2: One hundred percent.
Speaker 3: I mean, we are doing this in real time, like
Speaker 3: trying to figure out how do we build a global
Speaker 3: economy that actually works for everyone, that actually increases innovation,
Speaker 3: creativity and freedom. And unfortunately there's or fortunately or unfortunately
Speaker 3: there's no playbook. No one's ever done this before, and
Speaker 3: we're just excited to get to be kind of at
Speaker 3: the frontier.
Speaker 1: This may be a hard question to answer, but creating
Speaker 1: that social aspect I love that. But how do you
Speaker 1: compete against the behemits of the out there? Do you
Speaker 1: go pitch them and say integrate our technology.
Speaker 3: I think it's both, you know, like we're always going
Speaker 3: to be out at the frontier, and I don't think
Speaker 3: we should stop being out at the frontier. We're gonna
Speaker 3: keep innovating, We're gonna keep finding new ways for creators
Speaker 3: to earn We're gonna keep taking our shots to give
Speaker 3: people this platform that can really serve their creativity. At
Speaker 3: the same time, like I said earlier, we have this
Speaker 3: mindset of we went together and we're constantly in conversation
Speaker 3: with platforms across social and commerce. We obviously had this
Speaker 3: huge Shopify announcement today, And what the message that we're
Speaker 3: always sharing is we.
Speaker 2: Want to work together with you.
Speaker 3: We want to help you come on chain, we want
Speaker 3: to help you get leverage from that, help you get
Speaker 3: more reach, help you build more efficient systems, help you
Speaker 3: reward creators. And we're seeing a lot of excitement and
Speaker 3: engagement about that. And so I really think that over
Speaker 3: the next few years it's going to be a mix
Speaker 3: of us kind of pioneering and then us gradually helping
Speaker 3: bring people along to build this new creator economy.
Speaker 1: Another rookie question for you, as Coinbase is already a
Speaker 1: very big company. You have a large customer based, great brand.
Speaker 1: You're gonna be able to bring a lot of people
Speaker 1: into these products, but as you scale and you become
Speaker 1: more popular and you kind of hit that tipping point
Speaker 1: of mass adoption. Is Base able to handle the volume
Speaker 1: of transactions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: You know, in the last like year or so, we've
Speaker 3: scaled basically twenty x in terms of our capacity and throughput.
Speaker 3: The average like the median fee on Base right now
Speaker 3: is way less than a cent, like a tenth of
Speaker 3: a cent or even one hundredth of a cent, And
Speaker 3: we have a really ambitious roadmap to keep scaling.
Speaker 2: We'll do another ten x or twenty x over the
Speaker 2: next twelve months.
Speaker 3: And so we think that at some point it might
Speaker 3: get close where if we grow fast enough, we're gonna
Speaker 3: be kind of like pushing the limits of scaling. But
Speaker 3: that's the motivator for us, right We always want to
Speaker 3: be one step ahead, and with the team that we have,
Speaker 3: with the collaboration that's happening across the Ethereum ecosystem, I
Speaker 3: feel really confident that we're gonna be able to scale
Speaker 3: to keep up.
Speaker 1: Final question, if I let you go, are you integrating
Speaker 1: AI or AI agents anyway to help achieve those goals?
Speaker 3: One hundred percent. And that's happening in two ways. So
Speaker 3: one is on our internal team, we are using AI
Speaker 3: like gangbusters, Like I'm writing code right now and I
Speaker 3: haven't been writing code in a long time. But because
Speaker 3: we're using a kind of AI enabled code stack with
Speaker 3: cursor and all these tools that we've built, I can
Speaker 3: actually go I can say I want to fix this ticket,
Speaker 3: and then I can ship a pr and it like
Speaker 3: I don't even really write code in the editor anymore.
Speaker 3: I just have a prompt interface. It's crazy, and it's
Speaker 3: so much better than it was six months ago. And
Speaker 3: the thing that we're seeing is that as the engineers
Speaker 3: on our team adopt it, they're like three to four
Speaker 3: times more impactful, like literally like three to four times
Speaker 3: the impacting. They can shift something that would have taken
Speaker 3: weeks in hours, and so that's one way we're seeing
Speaker 3: AI really adopt this. We rewrote this whole app from
Speaker 3: the ground up in six months. We did a similar
Speaker 3: rewrite a couple of years ago it took more than
Speaker 3: a year, and so the timelines for how quickly we
Speaker 3: can innovate are really getting compressed. And then the second
Speaker 3: place we're releasing AI adoption kickoff is that there are
Speaker 3: all these agents that are using on chain and crypto
Speaker 3: as a platform where they can pay, they can transact,
Speaker 3: they can trade for you, they can manage your assets.
Speaker 2: And so we're actually building agents.
Speaker 3: Directly into the app where you'll be able to have agents.
Speaker 3: They'll be in your chat, you'll be able to talk
Speaker 3: with them, help, you'll be able to approve things for
Speaker 3: your wallet to do. So an agent can be like, hey,
Speaker 3: do you want to do this transaction?
Speaker 2: Boom approve.
Speaker 3: Hey, we want to move this money to get you better,
Speaker 3: ye know, Boom approve. Hey, I'm in a group chat
Speaker 3: with my friends. Agent, why don't you set up a
Speaker 3: new pool for all of us to, you know, make
Speaker 3: a bet.
Speaker 2: On this game that's happening right now. Boom approve all
Speaker 2: of that.
Speaker 3: Because we've built on this open platform that's composable, just works,
Speaker 3: and it's gonna let us bring AI combined with money
Speaker 3: into all of our day to day lives. And I
Speaker 3: think it's gonna be incredible just in terms of the
Speaker 3: consumer experiences that unlocks.
Speaker 1: That's amazing and I can't wait to see many of
Speaker 1: these things come through Fruition and being able to test it.
Speaker 2: I will have to be a beta tester. Yeah, we
Speaker 2: gotta get you.
Speaker 3: We gotta get you on board, Sarah, We got to
Speaker 3: get them on board. Yeah, we're just starting. I think
Speaker 3: we have like a few, like two thousand people on
Speaker 3: on on it right now, but we're starting to roll
Speaker 3: out and we'd love.
Speaker 2: To get you in there.
Speaker 1: That's exciting, man.
Speaker 2: Jesse