The Chopping Block: All About That Base With Jesse Pollak - Ep. 535

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news. This week, Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak talks about the ambitious goals of Base, the new Optimism–based blockchain from the publicly traded crypto giant. With the viral success of Base-based Friend.Tech, Jesse discusses the Base team’s ambitious goals to onboard “a million builders, a billion users.” Is this the long-heralded path to scaling Ethereum?

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Show highlights: 

• why Jesse says it’s still “day one” for Base
• the reason behind Base’s “one million developers, one billion users” slogan
• what the advantages of Base are compared to other layer 2 blockchains
• how Base accounts for the fact that it doesn’t have a token to incentivize developer activity
• how MEV bots represent a big part of the transactions on Base, especially with the emergence of Friend.Tech
• why Friend.Tech found early success despite being similar to previous efforts 
• Jesse’s response to the fact that fault proofs are not live on any of the OP Stack chains
• how much of the revenue generated by Coinbase’s sequencer will be distributed to Optimism
• whether Base and Optimism Mainnet compete with each other 
• how layer 2 chains are choosing different design paths and how that differentiates them

Hosts

• Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly 
• Robert Leshner, founder of Compound
• Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly 
• Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures

Guest

• Jesse Pollak, lead contributor at Base

DisclosuresLinks

• Unchained: Coinbase Launches a New Layer 2 on Ethereum
• CoinDesk: Social Platform Friend.tech Gains 100K Users in Days Even in Depths of a Bear Market
• TechCrunch: Friend.tech hype is skyrocketing, but will it actually reach the stars?

Decrypt: Base Daily Transactions Outpace Ethereum on Friend.tech Frenzy

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices