• Pollak announced a change in the strategy of the Base app.
• It will now become the main platform for trading any assets.
• In addition, the Base app will keep its focus on finance-oriented UX.

The founder of the Base L2 solution, Jesse Pollak, announced a strategic shift in the focus of the Base app, stating that the team is betting on trading as the key use case. According to him, this should stimulate demand and distribution for all types of assets in the onchain economy.

“Tl;dr: We’re focusing the Base app to be trading-first to drive demand and distribution for every asset and to be the best app for whatever you do in the onchain economy,” Pollak noted.

He recalled that since the announcement of the Base app in July 2025, hundreds of thousands of users have already used the app to create, trade, save, spend, and build. At the same time, the team received clear feedback from the community, which boils down to three key points.

First, the app seemed too focused on social features and “too close to Web2,” without demonstrating support for the full spectrum of assets that users want to trade.

Second, users expect more “high-quality assets,” since trading such instruments is the main opportunity against the backdrop of capital markets moving onchain.

Third, the activity feed should reflect everything that is happening in the onchain economy: apps, stocks, predictions, and different asset classes, where social tokens are just one of the elements.

Pollak emphasized that in a world where “everything is tokenized and tradeable,” the greatest value lies in creating demand and access for all market participants.

“That’s exactly what the Base app is going to do. We’re going to make the Base app the best place to trade and use every asset,” he said.

In practical terms, this means several changes. First, the Base app will be built as “trading first,” which, according to Pollak, will help attract capital to all fast-growing asset classes. 

Second, the team plans to bring more high-quality assets onchain and make it possible to trade “protocols, apps, stocks, predictions, memes, and, yes, creators” in the app. 

Third, Base will focus on a finance-oriented user experience (UX), layering social features on top of finance, rather than the other way around, with experiments such as copy trading, feed trading, and leaderboards.

Pollak believes that this approach will be “highly accretive” for the Base economy, as it will bring more users and capital to every asset and app. 

He emphasized that the Base app should become the best non-custodial wallet for global trading and using any assets with simple and fast onboarding, while the Base network will remain the core platform for developers, but with enhanced distribution.

These statements came against the backdrop of the growth of the Base ecosystem. In August of last year, the L2 network built on Ethereum and connected to Coinbase marked its second anniversary of operation with almost USD 4.5 billion in total value locked. It surpassed one million active users, and its average fees decreased by 97.7% over the year.

At the same time, Jesse Pollak also announced the launch of his own token, the “creator coin” jesse. After criticism for supporting low-cap assets, he stated that such tokens play an important role in connecting creators with their audience, while also urging users to beware of phishing. 

Meanwhile, Messari analyst AJC called the BASE token “the world’s first token from a public company.” In his view, an airdrop of such an asset should increase value for shareholders, not just for users, and the token itself should stimulate consumer activity, not only DeFi metrics.