Jesse Pollak handed the consumer app back to Coinbase and gave it to the trader known as Cobie, in a candid retreat from his bet that crypto’s next wave would run on social apps and creator coins.
Posted July 15, 2026 at 2:36 pm EST.
Jesse Pollak, the Coinbase executive who created and leads its Base blockchain, said he has handed the consumer Base app back to Coinbase, with the pseudonymous trader known as Cobie taking it over. Pollak announced the move in a lengthy post on X, framing it as part of a retreat from his multiyear bet that crypto’s next wave would be driven by social apps.
“i’ve handed the base app back to the coinbase mothership, where my now good friend @cobie will be taking it from here to make it the best damn app for onchain you’ve ever seen, including expanding beyond the base ecosystem in ways that tbh i won’t love as the leader of base,” Pollak wrote in the post.
Cobie, a widely followed trader and podcaster, joined Coinbase after it acquired his onchain fundraising platform Echo. Pollak said his own focus is now on the chain itself, not the app.
‘I Was Wrong’
Pollak said his 2024 and 2025 strategy rested on two bets: that builders would drive the next wave of adoption, and that the growth would come from onchain social experiences like creators, content and messaging. He said he was right on the first and, by his own account, wrong on the second. “imo we made the right bet on builders, but obviously the wrong bet on social,” he wrote in the post. The social corner of the market he had backed, including Farcaster, Zora, miniapps and creator coins, had, in his words, “disintegrated completely,” leaving Base behind rivals in perpetuals, prediction markets, tokenization and payments. He ended with an apology: “hopefully we can shut up about content coins now. i was wrong and i’m sorry!”
Refocusing on ‘Global Finance’
Pollak now wants to build Base into “the blockchain for global finance,” arguing that “better money” is enough on its own to bring a billion people onchain, pointing to stablecoins, prediction markets, perpetuals and tokenization rather than social apps.
Pollak set three priorities for 2026: trading, payments and agents, and welcomed new competition, name-checking Robinhood and Stripe.
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AI-assisted content: This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and was reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by a member of the Unchained editorial team before publication.
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