Coinbase’s Base app will become 'less Base-centric' under Cobie, Jesse Pollak says

Coinbase's Base app will become less closely tied to its namesake blockchain as new leader Jordan "Cobie" Fish focuses on building an all-encompassing trading platform, Base creator Jesse Pollak said Thursday.

"As it's becoming a trading app, it's just becoming less Base-centric," Pollak said to The Block's Gareth Jenkinson during an interview on The Starting Block podcast. "As we've kind of broadened the aperture to trade everything, you're going to trade assets everywhere [and] add features from different networks."

Fish took over leadership of the Base app last month, allowing Pollak to refocus on the underlying Base blockchain and its push into trading, payments and financing. Fish initially joined Coinbase after the exchange acquired his crypto fundraising platform Echo for approximately $375 million in cash and stock last year.

Pollak said the app had previously been more zoomed in on growing the Base ecosystem through products built directly on the network. However, under Fish, it will broaden its scope to incorporate assets and features from other blockchains.

"He’s going to be focused on just building the best trading product," Pollak said. "Base is going to have to compete on a playing field to make sure that we’re providing the best assets, the deepest liquidity, the best execution and everything that they need in order to build the app that they want to."

"Today, you can trade any asset across pretty much any crypto ecosystem on the Base app," Pollak said, adding that the team is rolling out products including prediction markets and perpetual futures. "We’re really focused on making it so that it’s the easiest place for folks to just get started."

Pollak said he is now putting all his energy into the Base chain as demand grows across tokenization, trading, payments and financing. The network has nearly $5 billion in decentralized finance assets and processes more than $1 billion in daily trading volume, he added.

This comes as major players like Robinhood, Stripe and other companies build competing blockchain infrastructure. Pollak described their entry as "validation" of Base's strategy, saying it had been "energizing" to compete as more companies move financial products onchain.

"The pie is so big that I’m not worried about feeling boxed out or competitive as the primary dynamic," Pollak said. "I feel like we’re at the very beginning of a long journey to upgrade the global financial system — maybe 1% of the way there."