锐评Base联创的「罪己诏」

Early yesterday morning, Base co-founder Jesse Pollak posted a lengthy thread on X, reviewing the strategic successes and failures of Base over the past two years.

It was a candid thread for both himself and the public. Admitting one's own mistakes is inherently difficult. Jesse believes that his bet on Base focusing on the social sector, expecting native on-chain social experiences to drive mass adoption of Base and even cryptocurrency, was wrong. However, his other bet—that application developers on Base would also drive mass adoption by producing good applications—was correct.

Now, he has handed over Base App (Base's super application, not the Base chain) to Cobie, while he returns to focus on developing the Base chain. From the perspective of an on-chain user, looking back at some of Jesse's actions over the past two years, while I highly commend the honesty of his "self-criticism," I also feel that some of his understanding is still debatable.

Betting on Social: 0 Points

Native on-chain socialization cannot enhance the social experience for the masses; in fact, it makes things more complicated. Honestly, I wish Jesse had thoroughly analyzed in his "self-criticism" what new social enjoyment or novel social content a new social application like Farcaster could provide users, or what innovative path for forming social networks it offers, making him and the entire Base team believe it could challenge traditional social media to drive mass adoption of Base...

If it's for the ideal of decentralized social networking, this move might score some points. But if he thinks it can drive mass adoption, it deserves a solid 0 points.

Let's continue. Regarding social aspects, Jesse also mentioned creator tokens and the recently popular $ANSEM on Solana, expressing uncertainty whether his push for Zora was poorly timed or if the concept of creator tokens was fundamentally flawed from the start.

This understanding also gets 0 points. Firstly, pushing the "creator token" concept itself is strange. As seen in the debate between Jesse and Toly back then, Jesse believes "content" has value, and a creator as a personal brand has value, so unlike meme coins, it has fundamentals, and he wants to promote things with fundamentals.

But who is this logic supposed to convince? After all, Jesse himself launched a token, $JESSE. Nearly 240 days later, the situation is as follows:

Content and personal IP do have value, but is issuing a token a unique monetization channel? What caliber of creators can you attract? How do you ensure a logical chain for the value you emphasize? There are too many issues to resolve, but the impression Base gives is, "We built the stage, so people will come and perform."

In this regard, Jesse's understanding is thoroughly beaten by Toly, who at least can say things like, "Meme coins have no value, but in-game items and skins in mobile games also have no value, yet people worldwide still spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually on valueless things."

$ANSEM is also not the "creator token" Jesse promotes. Firstly, it wasn't issued by Ansem, nor was it created to monetize his personal IP. It simply doesn't fit the description at all.

In short, Jesse, you were wrong about the social sector, but you haven't fully grasped why. In reality, the best reference model for Crypto + Social so far should be the social trading application FOMO.

Lagging in Perp DEX and Other Areas: 80 Points

Actually, the score could be higher. Looking horizontally, Solana also hasn't demonstrated significantly stronger competitiveness than Hyperliquid and Polymarket in the Perp DEX and prediction market sectors, not much better than Base.

Jesse feels quite frustrated because "we over-invested in social, and fell behind in these two areas." This might be setting the bar too high for himself. After all, with the benefit of hindsight, Hyperliquid is a competitor that fully understood this track. Without it, Perp DEX would probably be like GMX or dYdX. As for prediction markets, Polymarket had a first-mover advantage, and it's not a major competitive failure.

Moreover, Base has been quite successful in the AI sector, possessing a leading on-chain narrative segment in the entire market. In terms of specific assets, there are major market-attracting tokens like $vvv and launchpads of Virtuals' scale. The x402 protocol is a leader in Agent payments while also positioning USDC as the stablecoin with the dominant share in inter-agent payments.

Base's success in the AI narrative has also spilled over into other tech narratives related to AI. For example, projects in the robotics sector that perform well are often found on Base. In terms of RWA, before Solana dominated on-chain US stock token spot trading with $SPCX, on-chain users would also think of Base more frequently, such as $LFI, which previously handled on-chain trading of property tax liens.

If Jesse has done poorly in this area, I think it goes back to the beginning of the article, where he mentioned "betting that application developers on Base would also drive mass adoption by producing good applications." Actually, Base's support for its own on-chain developers isn't as good as he claims. From an on-chain user's perspective, when selecting projects on Base, it's crucial to see if the project team has connections with the Base team; you need to operate within the "circle." Cases where a developer suddenly creates a hot project outside of Base's key focus areas and receives rapid support from Base are very rare.

Earlier this year, a developer complained about this, in an article titled "Three Years a Developer Wasted on Base". I believe the lack of deep engagement with the developer community and the market might be why Base is as weak in innovation competition in new narrative sectors as it was due to overemphasizing the social sector.

Jesse's Reflection: 60 Points

Does cryptocurrency need social elements to drive mass adoption for a billion people? Jesse previously thought it was a necessity and the only path. Now he believes that stablecoins, prediction markets, Perp DEX, and RWA can all drive it, not just social.

Therefore, he stated that Base will now focus on winning the competition in three areas: trading, payments, and AI Agents. Base aims to become an indispensable part of global financial on-chain infrastructure.

Jesse realized one thing: painstakingly trying to onboard users and being a costly vanguard for crypto education is less effective than a single policy shift that becomes friendly or even supportive towards stablecoins, RWA, prediction markets, and similar sectors. No matter how much you promote Bitcoin/stablecoins for real-world payments, you might only win over users from countries like Venezuela or some African nations who have real needs to hedge against inflation. This is a national-level direction, not something a company can easily achieve.

But the reason I give only a passing grade is that neither Jesse, nor Solana's Toly, nor Ethereum's Vitalik, have realized that, for many years, meme coins have been an important path to driving mass adoption.

They have regressed from "having a mission to actively push cryptocurrency to dominate the world" to "national forces are already entering the space favorably, so we just follow the trend." Jesse says he no longer believes social is the only path to mass adoption, but he still doesn't understand that cryptocurrency obviously relies on word-of-mouth and active discussion among billions of people worldwide. However, providing an on-chain social platform isn't the way to achieve this.

When people use Polymarket to bet on World Cup matches, they don't discuss what the stablecoin used for betting actually is. Similarly, when people use Agent payments or trade US stocks on-chain, they don't care about stablecoins or the underlying blockchain. After all these years, the level of mainstream discussion concepts like NFTs and the Metaverse once enjoyed is only currently matched by the much-maligned pump.fun, which persists in promoting the rags-to-riches story of lottery-like meme coins, managing to re-enter the public's consciousness.

Whether it's Jesse, Toly, or recently Robinhood's Vlad, everyone knows that meme coins are an excellent tool for attracting users, but they mostly discard them after use. Everyone pays lip service to liking meme coins, but no one has stepped up to guide them into a more regulated industry.

This reflects a very intelligent and rational business mindset and choices. However, the retreat from idealism and the insufficiently grounded thinking about mass adoption lead me, from the perspective of a small on-chain player, to give Jesse's reflection on the past two years only a passing score.