The Signal
Jesse Pollak frames Base's 2025 job as distribution: make onchain builders capable of reaching hundreds of millions of people, not merely thousands. His case for the next phase of crypto is that open, composable rails can turn memes and creator work into both culture and economic activity—provided products are built for people before their price becomes the point.
Key Takeaways
- 01
DISTRIBUTION IS THE BOTTLENECK
Pollak says the underlying experience has become fast, cheap, easy and secure enough; the harder problem is helping useful onchain products escape the walled gardens of existing internet feeds.
- 02
MEMES ARE A CONTENT FORMAT
He treats memecoins as an extension of a much older internet mechanism: ideas and communities spreading through memes, now with native ways to connect value and money to them.
- 03
ORIGINATION CHANGES INCENTIVES
The Pump-versus-Zora comparison is about sequence. A token that starts trading immediately invites price-first behavior; content that is minted first can give creators and participants a different starting point.
- 04
OPENNESS MATTERS FOR AGENTS
Pollak argues that readable, verified smart-contract interfaces make it easier for people and AI agents to understand and call capabilities added to a chain.
- 05
NO TOKEN, FOR NOW
Base's lack of a token is presented as a way to keep feedback focused on whether builders and creators receive real value, rather than on a volatile financial incentive.
On the Record
“2025 is the success if we help Builders go viral.”
“The technology is now finally ready, but the biggest challenge developers and Builders are facing now is: how do we actually go get people to use them?”
“The meme is content and then there's a price associated to it.”
“Talk less, build more. Build now.”
The Breakdown
A day spent synthesizing
Pollak describes a role split between working with the Base and Coinbase Wallet teams, meeting builders, and making time for deeper technical or product thinking. By early afternoon he has already met five builders. The point of those conversations is not just to help them; it is to collect the on-the-ground inputs that let him decide what Base should do next.
The 2025 distribution problem
His stated measure of success is helping builders go viral. He thinks infrastructure used to be the limiting factor, but says the experience has recently crossed a threshold on Base and Solana. The remaining obstacle is distribution: an app cannot simply become native, viral content inside Instagram or TikTok. Farcaster Frames and Telegram mini apps suggest a more open surface, though Pollak says the loop has not yet been driven to scale.
Why Solana reached younger users
Asked about Solana's cycle, Pollak names memecoins and a culture that speaks to a younger, more terminally online audience. He does not reduce the difference to speed or fees; in day-to-day use, he says the two chains can feel similar. For him, Solana's first-mover advantage was cultural: microcultures could form around things builders made, and streaming itself signals a different audience than the podcast-led crypto world.
Price first or content first
Pollak's longest distinction is between a speculative vehicle that later accumulates content and a piece of content that later gets financial upside. He calls memes an internet-native format rather than a novelty. Pump begins with a fungible token and immediate trading; he contrasts that with Zora's mint flow, where a work begins as content, reaches a mint threshold, then after a 24-hour period becomes an ERC-20. Both may end with a trading token, but their incentive systems begin differently.
Base, agents, and open contracts
The conversation shifts to AI agents. Pollak explains Base as an environment where a newly uploaded smart contract can expose a capability—his simple example is an agent being able to send a friend pizza. When contracts, ABIs, and verification are open, people and agents can inspect what they do. He thinks that accumulated openness can matter as many more capabilities and agents arrive, while declining to make a specific commitment about where the next 100 million onchain users will come from.
Creators as the go-to-market
For Base's consumer strategy, Pollak says the focus is creators rather than paid marketing to everyday users. His thesis is direct: make products creators love and let them earn more, and they will bring their existing audiences over. He points to open feeds, onchain mints, and livestream tools with prediction markets or other onchain functions as areas for experimentation; the immediate advice is simply to try the tools.
Earning the right to scale
The no-token question returns the conversation to the same content-before-price idea. Pollak says Base has been able to ask whether the product works and whether people love building on it without injecting a large financial incentive. He credits Coinbase's political mobilization with changing a difficult regulatory moment, praises Brian Armstrong's calm and receptiveness to feedback, then ends on a builder's prescription: find the overlap between an opportunity and your own skills, community, and resources, and start.
Distilled from the episode transcript · Counterparty Recap Desk
