BlockBeats News, July 16th, Base co-founder Jesse Pollak published a lengthy article, candidly reviewing the strategic gains and losses of the past six months. Acknowledging that the dual-track strategy from 2024 to 2025 was a misstep, stating that "betting on developers was right, but betting on social was wrong" — the entire on-chain social sector including Farcaster, Zora, MiniApps, and creator tokens has completely collapsed. This miscalculation has caused Base to fall behind in critical areas such as perpetual contracts and prediction markets compared to scale competitors, and has also shown significant weaknesses in tokenization and corporate payments.

Jesse described the first quarter of 2026 as "taking a punch to the face," with the community reminding him of his mistakes every week, stating, "It feels bad, and it still feels bad now." However, the core lesson learned from a decade of crypto entrepreneurship is that "when you feel at your worst, the best option is to focus on the work" — following this, Jesse retracted the focus from the application layer back to the chain layer, personally wrote code, and launched a series of projects such as Azul, Beryl, B20, privacy features, and Ledgers, while reflecting on three core assumptions: whether crypto needs social interaction to grow, whether Base needs its own applications, and whether Base can surpass Coinbase.

Jesse came to a clear conclusion: a better currency itself is enough to drive growth, stablecoins, prediction markets, perpetual contracts, and tokenization are proving this point, and will focus on "making global finance truly work and bringing a billion people onto the chain." With this goal in mind, Base in 2026 will focus on three main pillars — Trading (covering tokenized stocks, Meme coins, and app tokens among all asset categories), Payment (global stablecoins for individuals and enterprises), and Smart Body (crypto is the native currency of computers, AI will create tens of trillions of new economic entities).

On the organizational front, Jesse has handed over the Base application back to the Coinbase parent company, with Cobie taking over to build a cross-ecosystem on-chain application; at the same time, he admits that developing a decentralized network within a large public corporation is "extremely difficult," and CEO Brian cannot post a Meme in an open timeline, but is actively promoting Base's decentralization.

Jesse emphasized that builders are the backbone of Base, and will continue to fully support builders through initiatives such as Base Layer, Base Batches, and the ecosystem fund, stating that "when builders win, Base wins."