Jesse Pollak - Onchain Progress: Building the Next Chapter - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Uh, and today I'm here to talk to you a little bit about Bass. And if you don't know what Bass is, uh, it's an open stack for the global economy. That means it's a chain that's this decentralized scalable platform. It's a set of builder tools that make it easy for businesses to build products that are global by default. And then it's a base app, uh, which is an everything app for this new global economy that's growing really, really quickly that all of us are building together.

And I always like to start with the mission and vision, the why of why we're actually here. Why are we showing up at token 2049? And for me and the base team, it is about building a global economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom. And the way we actually measure whether we're successful in that, the the vision is have we brought the entire world on chain. uh a million developers, a billion people, everyone participating in this new global economy that crypto is enabling.

And the exciting thing is we're about two and a half years into the journey of Bass and it's really starting to work. Um we've seen the number of builders be up and to the right. There's now hundreds and hundreds of apps that are built on Bass that people are using on a regular basis. Uh transactions are way way up. Uh we're now up to doing almost 15 million transactions a day, but at the same time fees are down.

It costs 500s of a cent median fee to transact on base. Um we've seen incredible growth in stable coins. Uh last month there were 85 million stable coin transactions on base. This is growing an incredible rate month over month. Um we're also seeing in the creator economy where we now have more than 300,000 creators who are creating on base on a monthly basis.

And all of this, the builders, the creators, the stable coins, it's contributing to the overall growth of the base economy. Uh, today there's a little bit more than $5 billion in protocols on base. And we have more than $15 billion in the chain overall. And there's two big reasons why this is happening. Two big reasons why Bass and this global economy that we're building is growing at the rate that it is.

And the first is that Bass is the best place to build. Uh, it's it's super flexible. So you can pay gas in any token whether it's stable coins or Ethereum or even Salana. Uh it's fast with 200 millisecond block times. It's scalable today with thousands of transactions per second and a clear pathway to hundreds of thousands of transactions a second.

It's low cost. Uh it's powerful and it's global and I'm going to talk about that in a second. And as a result of this platform that's really working today live, we also have seen that you know hundreds of businesses all around the world from the biggest businesses in the world like JP Morgan, American Express, Shopify, Franklin Templeton, they're deciding to build on base as their home because it's giving them the platform they need to scale their business. So that's the first reason Bass is the best place to build. But then the second reason and I think the more important reason overall is all the people.

And this is just a few pictures from the base around the world tour that we've been on for the last few weeks. We were in Korea, then we were in Japan. Uh now we're here in Singapore. Next we're going to go to Indonesia, then India, and then Latin America a few weeks after that. And what we've seen in every single country in Asia and in countries around the world is that the people are showing up to build.

They're building new products for consumers. They're building new products for builders. They're building their creativity with content. Uh and the energy that we've felt and seen in particular in Asia, in Singapore, has absolutely blown us away. My big takeaway from the last 48 hours being here is that we need to be investing more of our time and energy in Singapore, in Korea, in Japan, in China, in the Asian market because this is the forefront of crypto adoption.

And we've we've made a lot of progress on this. So uh just in the last uh nine months, we went from having zero country leads on the base team to now having 15 country leaders, five of which are here in the audience uh in Indonesia today. If if you're here, can you just raise your hand if you're a base country leader? We got I see him in the front row. There's one.

Another one. Uh this is part of us making bass for everyone. We have Angeline in Indonesia. We have Eli in the Philippines, David in South Korea, Nick in Singapore, Samia in India. And our goal by the end of next year is to have leaders in every single country around the world who are working together to bring the world on chain and to build this global economy that we think is going to benefit everyone.

And so with that work, I always like to remind us that it's still day one. We are at the very very beginning of bringing the entire world into this new economy and people getting to experience firsthand why is this actually going to work better for them. And so today I want to talk about two things uh that we see as key drivers of this next wave of adoption. Uh the first is stable coins and how local stable coins are going to help accelerate global adoption and then the second is a super app for the global economy that we've just started rolling out with the base app. So starting with the stable coins, you know, we've seen incredible growth in stable coins over the last five years.

You know, it went from being something that didn't exist to now there being more than $300 billion of stable coins with 3x year-over-year growth. And this is happening across the entire crypto industry, but it's particularly happening on base. Uh like I said earlier, we did all 81 million transactions, stable coin transactions last month. more than a $ 1.5 trillion dollars of stable coin transaction volume.

And we're approaching $5 billion in stable coins alone in the base economy. And this has been awesome. We're seeing so much utility for businesses, for consumers, for creators because stable coins are fast, they're cheap, and they're global, which makes them the easiest way to do anything with money. But as we've seen this gross grow, we've also seen that there's something missing. And what's missing is all of the non dollar currencies.

If you look at the world today, something like 60% of the world uh currency reserves is dollars. But then you have tens of other critical currencies, whether it's the euro or the yen or even currencies like the Nigerian naira that are huge parts of the global economy, but right now they're missing in the crypto economy. It is 99% denominated in dollars. But from the beginning of base, we've said base is for everyone. And we've believed that local currencies are a core part of that.

And there's three big reasons why. The first is that local currencies bring local utility. Instead of needing to onboard people into a new app that uses crypto, but also a totally new worldview about money where they have to understand dollars or Ethereum or Bitcoin, if we have local currencies on chain, we can enable people to do everyday things like payments and borrowing and lending in the currency that they're already used to. They can have the same products that are 10x better enabled by crypto rather than having to have their whole mind blown. The second reason why we think local currencies are so important is because of local sovereignity.

We believe that every single country in the world should have the opportunity to use the technology foundation of crypto to strengthen their economy to help their citizens be successful and to grow their currency as a powerful tool for their growth as a country. And by bringing local currencies on chain, that is exactly what we do. And then the third reason is that we have local currencies that come on chain and they create global connectivity. By bringing all of these local currencies into one global economy settling on base, we are making it easier for countries to access more capital for them to do remittances for them to have easy FX between businesses. This is the sort of global connection that's going to let us build a more connected and more successful world.

And so local stable coins are important. They're a small but growing part of the stable coin story. And the most exciting thing for me is that it's happening on Bass. Right now, Bass is the largest network of local stable coins in the world. There are 12 local stable coins from uh Indonesia and Turkey and New Zealand to Latin America with Brazil and Argentina to of course Europe with EU and Canada and Africa with Nigeria and South Africa and the Kenyan shilling.

And I have some really exciting news, which is today we're launching two new local stable coins, the Singapore dollar and the Australian dollar live today on base and on Coinbase. Yeah, come on. We believe that these are going to be incredibly powerful tools for helping the Singapore economy come on chain, benefit from this new technology platform. With the Australian dollar, we're going to see more connectivity between countries in the region. And what our vision is is that every single country in Asia has their currency on chain so we can have a more connected Asia and a more connected global economy.

And so if that sounds exciting to you, the thing I have to tell you is that we need your help. We need your help in two ways. One is we need your help to build with these local stable coins. In order to deliver those local experiences that people actually use, we need local builders who are solving problems with the Singapore dollar, with the Australian dollar to actually make a difference in their community. And then the second thing that we need is we need more local stable coin issuers.

If you are someone who is thinking about issuing a stable coin in any country in the world, please reach out to us. Our goal is to have literally every single currency in the world on base by the end of next year. It's an incredibly ambitious goal, but we think that if we do that, it is going to massively accelerate the rate at which the world can come on chain. So, that's the first thing. It's how we're building a better global economy with lo local stable coins and how you can be a part of it.

The second thing that I want to talk about is a super app that we've started building over the last two months that we think can help accelerate this global economy that we're talking about. And it felt important to talk about that here because when you look at the rise of super apps around the world, it's places like Singapore and Asia where you've had them at the forefront of adoption. People have figured out that by having all of the things in one place, you can actually make a much simpler experience for end consumers. But at the same time, there's problems. Some of those are closed systems.

They don't actually give people connectivity across countries and they aren't accessible in other parts of the world. And so as we've started thinking about the base economy and how do we grow the base economy? How do we learn from what's working in Asia, we've started working on a super app that we think can accelerate that work. And the the place where this comes from is the observation that when we are growing an economy, we're really serving a bunch of different audiences. We're serving builders who are creating apps that go on to bring people on chain.

We're serving users who actually come in and use those apps to, you know, solve their business problem or to do something that they want to do on a daily basis. Those users uh sometimes they turn into creators who then create content. They say, "Hey, I use this app. Hey, I onboarded my friends. Hey, here's how I'm benefiting from this new economy."

Or hell, they just do knitting content or makeup content. And that's contributing to the economy as well. And then finally, all of this is made to work with investors who are seeing the new assets, seeing the new opportunities that those builders and creators are creating and are actually putting in the capital to make those opportunities work better. And this is a flywheel. And our work with Bass is to figure out how do we spin this flywheel faster and faster.

And so in July, we rolled out the private beta of the Bass app, which is an everything app that does exactly that. And I'll show you a little bit about what this looks like. Um, it looks a lot like apps you might be used to. Uh, you know, it has a Tik Tok style vertical feed. It has a WeChat style mini apps page.

There's hundreds of apps. Uh, you can also swap between any asset, whether it's a local currency, uh, or it's a memecoin or it's a creator coin or it's a protocol coin. uh every single post that you make is instantly monetized where you earn from your creativity because the creativity is yours, not a big web two corporation that you're putting on. And all of this comes into a single experience that's so friendly that your friends, your family, your grandparents, your your little cousin can all use it in a way that just works for them. And so I want to talk you through those three big features to just go a little bit deeper on how this super app actually works.

And the first one is one that I think most people in this audience are probably familiar with which is mini apps. You know if you've used a eastern super app you almost certainly gone through the experience of using a mini app to do delivery or or ride share or chat or to connect with a friend. The same thing exists in the base app except for these mini apps are different. A they're discoverable across the whole app. So they work in chat, they work in the feed.

B, they're built on open protocols, so anyone can build one and anyone can plug into the distribution that the base app builds. And then three, they just work. No more of the messy crypto stuff with switching tabs and connecting wallets. You can just do the thing that you want to do in one simple interface connected to this global economy that's starting to work for you. So that's the first thing.

Incredible mini apps that developers all around the world are building. The second thing is that we're seeing build uh creators use the base app to create and earn. And this is about rebuilding the creator economy which is the largest digital economy in the world to make it actually work for creators. Because right now in the web two world when creators bring their content into the you know walled gardens of web two corporations they don't make money. 95% of the value that creators create is taken by those platforms with less than 5% of that overall value actually going to creators.

Onchain social flips that script where now 95% of the value goes to creators. Everything is instantly monetized and we use coins as a new infrastructure to make it so that creators content is actually valuable and they can benefit from it. And then the third use case that we've seen be incredibly valuable in this super app is the ability to trade or invest in anything. Because if you think about those first two, the the builders building apps, the creators creating content, the thing to know about things in this new economy is that everything is a coin. The app is a coin.

And so as it goes more viral, the price goes up. The content is a coin. So as that goes more viral, the price goes up. And for investors and traders, there has never been a richer market to participate in because there's so much social information, there's so much financial information, there's this millu of global connection and culture. And being able to invest in that at the earliest stages is incredibly high upside.

And so what we've built into the base app is the easiest way to trade all of those assets. Literally millions of assets from stable coins to stocks to meme coins to creator coins to protocol coins to app coins. You can use the base app and everything just works. And the exciting thing about all of this, the creating, the building, the trading, is that people are really starting to love it. Uh we we launched the the beta in July.

We have now uh 1.2 million people on the wait list. Um, creators have earned more than $500,000. People are using the mini apps. We're seeing trading engagement three times higher than the old version of this app, which is Coinbase Wallet.

And we're seeing awesome feedback from the community. And the thing that I get the most excited about with that feedback is the way it's actually helping builders on base. You know, two stories here. One is a builder put their app as a mini app in the base app. They 4x their TVL overnight distribution.

Uh another story is a creator who had been posting in web two social media for a decade and had never earned any money and came onto the base app started posting and has already earned hundreds of dollars. These are the stories of the people who are making it in the new global economy. They are the ones living the base dream and there are going to be millions of them over the next few years who are going to be using this platform, this app to make it in the next phase. And I just want to give a special shout out to the folks in this room. There's a huge trader audience at uh uh a token 2049.

And I think the thing that we're seeing is it's not just people uh uh using this app. It's also the economy growing. This is a chart of the total tokens in the base economy. Ignore the dollar signs. Those are actually wrong.

Um but it's a a raw count of every single time a new asset is issued on base. How many of them are there? And what we've seen is that everyone as people start to issue app coins and as they do protocol coins and as they do creator coins and content coins that number is up and to the right which is leading to more trader opportunities to make money. And so getting to be in the base economy early and getting to invest in and trade in those builders those creators early I think is a once in a-lifetime opportunity to be there from the beginning of a new economy being built. And so with that, I want to close it out with a few asks.

When we're thinking about building base, we need your help. It's not something we can do alone. Uh it's why I flew around the world to be here. Uh because when we are building this future, we got to do it all together. And so if you're a builder, we just launched Batches, which is our program that helps builders go from idea to app to business.

There's two tracks. One for mature startups, another for earlystage builders. You can go to basebatches.xyz. XYZ and sign up.

We want to support you and help you succeed. If you're a creator, we want to see you create onchain. You're going to make more money. You're going to be more connected with your audience and you're going to help us bring people into this new economy which is going to accelerate our overall mission. If you're an investor, now is the time to invest.

There are creator coins, there are app coins, there are protocol coins, there are these local stable coins. You can find anything you want on base. And by putting in capital now, you are both going to accelerate our work and get access to that upside. And then finally, for everyone, we want you to try the base app. It's still very early.

It's still in beta. We're working towards a general availability in the next few months, but we want all of y'all's feedback, and you want we want your help making it better. So, if you want to do that, uh you can scan this QR code. Uh it's just for folks at token249. If you scan the QR code, that will walk you through a little bit of an onboarding.

Uh once you get in, if you DM me, I'm jessie.base.eth. Uh I'll just say what up. Uh say hi.

Uh and I would love to see you create something, build something, share a mini app, whatever gets you fired up. And so with that, I hope folks got to scan the QR code. I want to just close us by saying now is the time to build. We have been building infrastructure for more than a decade, and it took us a little bit of time, but now the infrastructure is finally ready. We have fast chains.

We have global stable coins. We have easy wallet experiences. And the next phase is putting all of those things together into consumer and business experiences that solve real problems and make it so it's a nobrainer for every single person in the world to come into this new global economy. Now, that's something that we can't do alone. It's something that's going to take all of us.

So, I'm excited to do that with all with all of you. So, keep building, keep creating, and stay based. Thanks everybody. Have a great day.