Unchained

Jesse Pollak on ‘Base Is for Everyone’ + Guy Young and Carlos Domingo on Converge - Ep. 820

On Wednesday, Coinbase’s layer 2 network Base posted a tweet that read: “Base is for everyone,” followed by a tweet: “Coined it.” That second tweet linked to a page where the post had already been turned into a coin.
Within an hour, the coin hit a $17 million market cap, then dropped to under $2 million, then went back up to over $13 million. Crypto Twitter exploded. Some called it a rug. Others accused insiders of sniping the launch. Coinbase later issued a statement saying that Zora auto-tokenizes content, but Jesse Pollak, head of Base, tweeted that he personally greenlit the post.
So what really happened?
In this episode, Jesse sits down with Laura to discuss:
Whether this was a memecoin launch or a media experiment
Why he thinks the crypto community overreacted
Whether insider trading occurred
And why he believes coins, not NFTs, are the future of creator monetization
Plus, he explains why he’s okay being the “punching bag.”