Jesse Pollak, Base Creator, Coinbase

Episode 69 of Season 5 of The Scoop was recorded with The Block's Frank Chaparro, and creator of Coinbase's Base Jesse Pollak.

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This episode of The Scoop was recorded with Jesse Pollak, the creator Coinbase's Base network, live from the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris.

Outline:

00:44 Crypto 'builder energy'

03:09 The L1 trade

05:07 Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2

06:45 Maturing beyond speculation

11:03 Technical obstacles to building

15:16 ZK vs. OP scaling solutions

Base, built using Optimism's OP Stack, opened to public transactions in August 2023 following a testnet period earlier that summer, positioning itself as a low-cost, Coinbase-incubated chain intended to bring the exchange's roughly hundred million verified users onchain. Notably, Coinbase structured Base without a native token, a deliberate choice that shaped much of the conversation around the network's design philosophy and how it planned to sustain itself and reward builders without the speculative dynamics that had defined many earlier layer-2 launches.

Pollak, who has led engineering efforts at Coinbase across several product areas before spearheading Base, discusses why the team chose to build on the OP Stack and align with Optimism's broader Superchain vision rather than developing an entirely proprietary rollup, framing it as a bet on interoperability and shared infrastructure across multiple chains rather than a single walled garden. He talks through the early wave of applications and developers building on Base in its first weeks, the network's approach to permissionless deployment despite being incubated by a public, regulated company, and how Coinbase thought about balancing decentralization commitments with the practical need to ship quickly.

The conversation also covers the technical roadmap for decentralizing the network's sequencer over time, a commitment central to Base's credibility within the broader Ethereum ecosystem. The two also discuss the competitive landscape among layer-2 networks at the time, including how Base's distribution advantage through Coinbase's user base and fiat on-ramps differentiated it from other rollups competing primarily on technical merits, and what success would look like for onchain adoption more broadly if a mainstream exchange could meaningfully lower the barrier to using Ethereum applications. The episode offers an early look at the thinking behind one of 2023's most closely watched blockchain launches, from the person most directly responsible for building it.