Morning Minute: Base Hands Its App Over to Cobie
Base’s consumer app is being handed back to Coinbase and placed under Cobie, while Jesse Pollak shifts focus to the Base chain itself. Pollak said his 2024-2025 thesis had two bets: builders would drive adoption and onchain social would fuel growth. He still believes in builders, but admits the social bet failed, saying Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and creator coins “disintegrated completely.” He publicly apologized for backing content coins and said Base fell behind rivals in trading, prediction markets, tokenization, and payments. Pollak now wants Base to become “the blockchain for global finance,” centered on crypto, stablecoins, perps, prediction markets, and tokenization, with trading, payments, and agents as 2026 priorities. Cobie will oversee Coinbase’s trading-related products and faces stiff competition from exchanges, memecoin apps, Robinhood, and prediction market platforms.
