Morning Minute: Base Hands Its App Over to Cobie - Decrypt

Morning Minute: Base Hands Its App Over to Cobie

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🔵 Base Hands Its App to Cobie as Jesse Pollak Admits “I Was Wrong” on Social

Jesse Pollak, the Coinbase executive who has been running the Base blockchain, handed the consumer Base app back to Coinbase and gave it to the infamous trader Cobie. Cobie joined Coinbase after it acquired his onchain fundraising platform Echo, and Pollak says he’s now focused on the Base chain itself rather than the app.

In his announcement post, Pollak said his 2024-2025 strategy rested on two bets: that builders would drive adoption and that growth would come from onchain social. While he stands by the first, he flatly admitted the second was wrong. The social corner he championed, Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and creator coins, has in his words “disintegrated completely,” leaving Base trailing rivals in perps, prediction markets, tokenization, and payments. He closed with a public apology: “hopefully we can shut up about content coins now. i was wrong and i’m sorry.” That apology echoes Brian Armstrong’s comments from earlier this week when he said Base “messed up” on content coins.

Pollak now wants to build Base into “the blockchain for global finance,” arguing that the combination of crypto, stablecoins, perps, prediction markets, and tokenization can bring a billion people onchain. He set trading, payments, and agents as Base’s three priorities for 2026.

As for Cobie, he will be responsible for trading products at Coinbase (CB app / Pro / Baseapp). And he’s got his work cut out for him. He faces competition on multiple fronts: 1) CEXs like Kraken, which are hungry for growth ahead of potential IPO, 2) memecoin apps like Pump Fun and Fomo who have hundreds of thousands of users, 3) Robinhood itself, which offers competing products and made a major splash onchain this past week, and 4) Kalshi, which is growing its prediction market into the perps space. He’s facing an uphill battle to say the least. But if anyone in crypto is capable, Cobie might be the single best bet…

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