Coinbase's Jesse Pollak hands Base app leadership to Cobie after admitting social bets fell short

Base blockchain creator Jesse Pollak will no longer be leading the Base app team, according to a confessional post on X where the Coinbase executive admitted that some of Base’s earlier bets on social and creator features largely missed the mark.

According to Pollak’s X post, Jordan Fish, better known by his handle and online moniker 'Cobie,' will now lead the Base app team. Fish joined Coinbase last year after the exchange acquired his ICO launchpad Echo for approximately $375 million in a cash-and-stock deal.

"First off — in case it’s not obvious, the first quarter of 2026 was a punch in the face," Pollak said in a message Wednesday, pointing to some of Base’s experiments with Farcaster, Zora, miniapps and creator coins had "disintegrated completely."

Base launched in 2024 and has grown to become one of the most active Ethereum Layer 2s, though many of the features and apps Pollak and Coinbase promoted have not taken off. 

Indeed, Farcaster, the independent web3 protocol once valued at $1 billion, was sold, Zora pivoted to Solana, and many creator coins investors on Base are underwater, with Coinbase’s leadership, including Brian Armstrong, admitting the feature "didn’t work."

"The collateral damage was pretty bad! And this year has been an exercise in eating sh**," Pollak said. “We realized how our focus on social had meant that Base had fallen behind in key areas that were now increasingly critical."

Pollak noted that he will now shift his attention to Base’s chain infrastructure, prioritizing trading, stablecoin payments, and AI agents. 

"We’re going to build Base into the blockchain for global finance and do everything we can to be the place that the world’s money settles over the next century."

The move comes shortly after Robinhood’s native Ethereum Layer 2 launched last week, which has prioritized stock and meme trading. It also comes months into an industry-wide shift as the crypto industry has become decidedly more institutional, particularly through tokenization and perps trading. 

"Trading means every asset. tokenized stocks, memes, app coins, whatever you want to trade," Pollak said. "Payments means stablecoins that work globally, for people and for enterprises. Agents means accelerating all of it because crypto is native money for computers and artificial intelligence is going to create trillions of new economic actors."

Base suffered two mainnet chain stalls back-to-back in late June, around the time of a scheduled update that introduced some new features to the blockchain.