Coinbase exec Jesse Pollak on the coming Base token—and why we can trust corporate blockchains

To understand why Pollak’s project is a fraught one, it’s helpful to go back to 2015 when, in the depths of a crypto winter, some began rallying around the phrase “blockchain not Bitcoin.” The idea, popularized by an emerging corporate faction of the crypto industry, held that it was best to leave blockchain technology to banks, IBM and other established players.

The plan proved a miserable failure. Bank-backed blockchain projects like R3 raised large sums of money, but failed to take off as critics—correctly for the most part—dismissed them as glorified databases that would give preferential treatment to whoever owned them. As it turned out, Bitcoin-style decentralization mattered a lot.

Pollak says that this era of corporate blockchains, or at least Base, is different. He has a point in that Pollak is a true crypto native, not a blow-in from the corporate sector, and that design choices for the Base chain reflect a decentralized ethos.

“We don’t want to recreate the old systems with new tech. From day one, we’ve focused on decentralization. Not just talk—we’ve taken real steps. First, we built Base as an Ethereum L2, not an isolated chain. Second, we built on the OP Stack, an open standard. Third, we moved from stage 0 to stage 1 decentralization earlier this year in collaboration with Optimism and others,” he said, describing technical aspects of Base.

Pollak stressed that Base’s code is open source and that the chain aspires to be a Linux-style eco-system used by many different crypto builders. He said that it is a big reason Coinbase plans to launch a token on Base—as a way to align incentives and token decentralization.

Coinbase began floating the idea of a token last month and, if it goes forward, it will attract significant interest from both builders and speculators. So how and when will the Base token arrive?

Pollak was careful in his answer, saying that Coinbase is determined not to rush the token deployment, and that it is not planning to announce a release date anytime soon. 

He did, though, acknowledge that token launches have a troubled history, and that they have often served to enrich their backers at the expense of the broader community tied to the blockchain. In response, Pollak said Coinbase is treading carefully, while also working with projects on Base that have issued tokens of their own in a responsible fashion—including one called Aerodrome that had a “fully fair launch.”

Tokens are unique, so there’s no one-size-fits-all,” he observed. On the vodcast, Pollak also discussed three of the most popular applications to emerge on Base, and how some of these have begun to fill the long-time promise of crypto being used to help creators make a living. You can watch or listen to the whole conversation on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.