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