Base creator Jesse Pollak has handed the Base App to crypto trader Cobie after admitting that its push into creator coins failed.
Jesse Pollak, the Coinbase executive who created and still leads Base, the company’s Ethereum Layer-2 network, has handed control of the Base App (formerly known as Coinbase Wallet) to Jordan Fish (also known as Cobie), a crypto investor and podcaster who joined Coinbase after the exchange acquired his fundraising platform.
The change came after Pollak admitted in a Wednesday post on X that his bet on social networks and creator coins didn’t pay off, prompting him to step back from Base App and refocus Base around three strategic pillars, which are trading, payments and AI agents.
Base spent much of 2024 and 2025 betting that developers and new social products would bring more people into crypto. He wrote:
“imo we made the right bet on builders, but obviously the wrong bet on social. […] I was wrong – whether it was timing wrong […] or fully wrong, only time will tell, but regardless, i was definitively wrong.”
Read also: Coinbase Uses AI to Write 95% of Its Code — AI Agents Replace 1,200 Employees
Why Base Pivots Back to Finance
Pollak explained that Base’s social detour left it trailing scaled competitors in prediction markets and perpetual future, though he didn’t name names, but Polymarket and Hyperliquid are the obvious benchmarks, while tokenization and payments still needed work.
Coinbase is now filling those gaps with products developed elsewhere. Its prediction markets launched with market flow supplied by Kalshi, while its new route to global perpetuals sends orders to Deribit, the derivatives exchange Coinbase acquired in 2025.
Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong, again without naming Hyperliquid, had already complained that offshore platforms spent years serving Americans through VPNs while Coinbase followed U.S. rules, calling the lack of enforcement “frustrating for us as an American company following the rules.”
Now, Pollak returned his attention to the blockchain itself, including writing code again, while Base’s 2026 priorities shift to trading, payments and AI agents.
Read more: Coinbase Stocks Trading Gets Green Light in the UK
