Fireside: Base's Jesse Pollak | Austin Griffith - BuidlGuidl & Jesse Pollak Base

All right, we're going to need some more energy for this next one. Are you guys ready? The bean bag. The bean bag crew right here. Oh, yeah.

Here we are. We're ready for it. All right, no introduction needed, but I will do it nonetheless. We have Jesse Pollock from Bass. Welcome him on the stage.

[applause]

Thank you. And I'm joined by Austin Griffith.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hearts, hearts.

Hey everybody. Happy Friday.

It's not Friday. Feels like a Friday. So much energy in the room with all the builders. We got a lot of builders in there. There's a lot of hackers.

Yeah, it's looking good. So, first question right off the bat. What is the broad base vision? Let's kick it off there first.

Yeah. Well, hey everyone. I'm Jesse. If you don't know me, I've been working on Bass since it started four years ago, three and a half years ago. Um, and from the beginning, we've we've said a pretty consistent line about Bass, which is that our vision is to build a global economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom.

And you know what makes up a global economy? Well, it's all kinds of people doing all kinds of different things. Uh whether they're building or they're creating or they're trading, it's people producing things and consuming things um all around the world. As we think about our work and the base core team's work, we break that economy down into three things. First is the chain which we kind of think about as the home of that global economy.

It's the underlying platform where people can build apps, they can write software, they can issue new assets, they can trade those assets. Um that is this incredibly diverse ecosystem. Everyone from all different backgrounds are building on the chain. Um and they're all participating in the kind of economic marketplace that is the chain. The second part of what we do is on the consumption side.

So if you think about the chain as being this way of kind of creating all this energy in the economy, we then need people to actually engage with that. We need them to trade the content or the trade trade the assets. We need them to um uh use the apps. We need them to deploy their capital. And that's where the app comes in.

That's the base app. You can kind of think of it as a front door to this economy and really to the entire crypto economy because it doesn't support just base. It also supports Ethereum and every other L2 and Salana too. Our goal is to bring as many people into this economy as humanly possible. And then all of that fishes together with this lens that we have of growth where it's about how do we take the chain and how do we take the app and then how do we take all of these people who are using those two things in different ways and accelerate them in a repeatable and scalable way so that we can move from the world being 99% offchain and 1% onchain to 99% onchain and 1% offchain over the next decade.

And so it's now been three years of pushing that forward in 2025. We learned a lot. Um, and we're we're fired up for 2026 because it feels like it's never been closer that we could actually accomplish that.

Hell yeah. Awesome. Okay. And speaking of users using the chain and uh this economic activity, something that's recently uh kind of gone pretty viral on base is this AI agent meta. Uh I I got to be kind of part of it and see some some of my thoughts.

I [laughter] feel like you were leading it.

I think the first bot was Cloudbot. My my bot. Yeah. It went viral and it's building a bunch of things on chain. Uh but what do you think of the AI agent meta?

Um it it's so good to see this kind of economic activity happening on base. We see banker and clanker fees in the millions every day. Just really cool to see that kind of like hockey stick up. But how do you feel about the AI genetic?

Yeah, well I feel like as an industry we've kind of been circling this intersection of crypto and AR for a while. And last year at about this time or a little bit before there was kind of a lot of hype around it. Um, but I think at the time it felt like AI wasn't quite there where like there was this idea, oh, we would have autonomous agents and they'll have wallets and they'll start to do things, but the the reality on the ground was like the the software is not good enough. I think the thing that feels different this time and really this feels like it changed in December with the release of Opus 46 or 45 and uh Sonnet 45 is it feels like the models have kind of crossed the chasm, you know, and and you know, I'd say it's not that these models are now operating entirely independently. Like I I think that that is probably a step too far for where we are today, but what's shifted is maybe before it was like 80% human with a little bit of model like helping you go faster.

Now it's like 80% model with a little bit of human curating the model and helping the model get smarter and helping the agent get smaller smarter. I think what that's unlocked is it's basically the unlock this kind of almost new class of builder who are saying hey what if we create agents and give those agents capabilities to like to build products or to create content and then let those agents monetize and let them tokenize as a way of generating revenue for themselves. And just in a few weeks, I think we've seen that that's really started to take off. And it's not just, you know, Ethereum natives like you who are doing that. I think one of the things that's been most exciting for me is that we've actually started to see people kind of outside of crypto come in, right?

You have people like, you know, Austin and Nalison who who have built agents like Kelly and are actually like building little businesses. Like the agent is a business. the agent is tokenizing upfront to get funding for its own compute and to to operate its business and then it's generating revenue which is then getting reinvested back into the agent being reinvested into this capital structure that's being created there and so I think that that is that's a new thing and it's happening on base and it's happening on Ethereum and I think one of the reasons why it's happening on base and happening on Ethereum is because of the investment in the infrastructure that we spent the last couple years building when you look at things like you know a ERC88 8004. Um, you look at the EVM, like these are some of the the battle tested pieces of software where when agents are thinking where do we want to deploy, they're like, well, we want to deploy on a fast, cheap EVM chain that has every stable coin in the world, is connected to every exchange, and that every user has assets on because that's what's going to be the best place for us as an agent. And so, I think what we've started to see in the last 3 weeks is that we've crossed that chasm.

The agents are starting to come, the technolog is ready, and there's a network effect starting to be built of 8004, x42, EVM, where agents are proliferating, and that's leading to more builders seeing, oh, I can build an agent here. Then those agents are collaborating. They're finding ways to sell services to each other. And that's starting to build this little core of real economic value and creation. And I think that that's going to balloon in a big way over the next couple years.

Great. Hell yeah. Let's go AI agents. Let's go builders. And that leading to my next question kind of in my morning talk this morning I was talking about uh there's sometimes this black and white like trenchers are bad and I think that like we need to look at this gray area of the trenchers and the builders and I kind of quoted you saying something along the lines of we uh need to look at this tension differently and we need to look at the the builder and the trencher more like a flywheel between the two.

Can you talk about that?

Yeah. Well, you know, honestly, I think one of the biggest, you know, misses of Ethereum's ecosystem over the last few years, I think that there has been a almost um kind of like cultural negativity towards trading and traders. Um, and I think one of the places that comes from is Ethereum has always had a very long-term perspective. And at times when people are trading, things can feel short-term and there's almost this feeling of like a value tension there. Um, and I think what that's led to is when you look at where most of the kind of fast high velocity capital is, it's been off Ethereum, right?

It's it's been on Salana. Uh, Bass has done, I think, a pretty good job building some of that. Um, but I think that we've honestly been slowed down by that cultural bias in Ethereum. And candidly, I'll be the first to admit that I actually started with a similar bias. Like, I've never been a trader.

And I think that that caused me to almost like lack some empathy of, you know, what do traders want? What are they seeing? And then not just what do they want and what are they seeing but also what value are they bringing to the economy. And I think when you take a step back and you look objectively the most important innovation of crypto's entire life cycle is tokenization. You know it started with Bitcoin which was like tokenizing a pure proofof work blockchain that can be digital gold.

It's progressed to tokenizing Ethereum which allowed Ethereum to fund raise and become what it is through the ICO phase through NFTTS like at every single phase of crypto where you had a boom of excitement and and and resources investment it was always around tokenization and I think what we're seeing with this fast trader capital is that when you have high velocity capital and you combine that with tokenization it leads to economic output and so the prime example of this is agents right what's happening right now on base is that agents are tokenizing and then traders are trading the agents and that's spinning off fees and then those fees are being used by the agents for compute. The fees are kind of this economic like offflow that is funding innovation. And my intuition is that the the thing that gets a billion people on chain is at that intersection. It's at the intersection of builders creating value and traders and investors allocating capital into that and that creating this flywheel that leads to really really aggressive growth. And I think on both sides you can make a case you know I hear from traders they're like oh we need better better builders who are bringing better speculative assets so that we don't be short-term.

And I hear from uh builders oh we need better traders who are going to hold longer term. You know there there's kind of like both sides of the aisle where you can point fingers and say it's the other person's fault. And then I think there's also cultural differences where you know like what I described on Ethereum, you can almost have cultural bias against one of those groups. I think my perspective is we need to like we need to solve that. We need to bridge the gap and this is the focus for base in 2026.

I think we underfocused on traders in 2025. I think that builders have always been our focus. It's been the P 0. We've always had bases for builders and builders remain a P 0. But I think the opportunity for us is to elevate the traders to bring in more capital and to really get into the substance of how do we solve this?

How do we actually make that flywheel work really well so tokenization can work for both the capital side and the labor side and create this new generative emergent like almost innovative soup that all of the innovation that ultimately is going to bring billions of people on chain is going to come from. And so this is my talk was about like doing the uncomfortable thing of journeying into the gray area between these two. And there are some gnarly things in my DMs, right? Like I have people like, "Bro, put the CA in your in your bio." And and worse.

And it kind of there there are these parts that are just like weird for me. Same same as you like when the dog the Dogecoins the dog coins came along, you know, a few years ago, I didn't know what was going on, right? And now I feel like I understand a little bit more. Uh, but there there are hard parts as a builder to deal with the trenches and and this this flywheel is important and you've been getting kind of beat up in particular about like trading and focusing on trading,

but there is a gray area and you understand the gray area. How how do you approach that or think about that?

Yeah. Well, I I think the the first place I approach it from is like we don't have it figured out and no one has it figured out. And so like starting from a place of trying to be curious about what's going on and trying to be curious about, you know, if someone's in your DMs or replying like where are they coming from? And not just where are they coming from individually, but like what are the structural failures right now that are leading to this behavior? Like that's the first thing for me is like just be curious.

I think the second thing is always just like empathy and like trying to understand and I think that's connected to curiosity. But the the thing for me is I think that in figuring out this builder creator relationship, there's a part of it that's like cultural where it's we need to like both like reorm a little bit around what to expect like if you're a trader, what can you expect from builders? If you're a builder, what do you expect from traders? And I think it's pretty clear that like the expectations may be a little bit out of whack on both sides. And we need to like gradually culturally norm expectations that are more realistic.

Like maybe if you start something, it isn't going to go from zero to everything overnight. Like it's going to take weeks or it's going to take months. I I think that's one part of it. I think the other part of it and I think this is the thing that's frustrating both sides and honestly is the backdrop for so much negative sentiment period right now is that we just still have a lot of work to do to get from the speculation into the products that are like repeating value like creating value in a repeatable way making money in a repeatable way and then having that money and value flow back into the token and the tokenization and I think those three things like if we can start from a place of curiosity and empathy and try and understand each other and then we can work together to reorm on both sides about acceptance and figuring out like how do we make this relationship between builders and traders work and then we can both push towards building products that have longevity that generate real value for customers and that generate real revenue that's going to converge into this place where I think over the next couple years what we'll see is that um traders will actually start to evolve into investors because they're going to kind of move up that Maso hierarchy of needs where it's like Oh, now that I'm seeing more and more of these projects that have, you know, repeated skin in the game and repeated track records that are good long-term investments, I want to allocate my capital more slowly and I want to be holding for longer periods. And so, I I do think that it's not just going to be one side or the other.

It's going to be about understanding. It's going to be about kind of culturally norming and then it's going to be about focusing on building substance so we can both benefit from this flywheel on both the trader and and the builder side.

Great. Great. And I and I think we you got something out there.

Oh, I was going to say and I think like the backdrop to all of it is just be patient. I mean and and try and keep our cool. I mean, man, it can be hard on crypto Twitter. Like it can feel painful and

then you just got to take a deep breath and like for me, you know, showing up at ETH Denver, it's like a good reminder of like, wow, like it's not always that interface that we have to interface with people. we can actually come and talk about it and we can like figure it out face to face and that's going to be another really productive kind of context in which we can do the work which is really important work which is going to be core to bringing the world on chain and like my agent is doing something that I don't think any other agents are doing like it's like building deploying auditing QAing putting like onchain apps out there where people are putting money in and using it like that just it's just not happening and then it's like put the CA in your bio bro like no no no we're changing the world here. We're like pushing boundaries. Like

it's it's it's all about the balance. But I will say the a you know AI and and just generally agent-driven development um has crossed the chasm. I mean I I had a long weekend last weekend for you know folks we we were in the US. Um we have a long weekend because it was President's Day and Coinbase had Friday off as well and I spent the whole weekend writing code. It was the first time I'd written code seriously in um a few years.

Not actually writing code.

A few years. Not writing code. Purely prompting like purely prompting with Claude. Um, I've, you know, built a whole, like I've built a whole team of people that are now writing this codebase that are all agents. And in four days, I was able to like build something that was probably like 10x bigger and and like more meaningful than I expected when I started at the beginning.

So,

and it's like increasing in the velocity, which I can ship as one person who is also the full-time leader of base and like has to do other things, you know? It's like it's crazy. And I think anyone who hasn't like really gotten in the tools and been like what does it feel like to do this like you probably don't quite understand just how far we've moved on this spectrum and also just like how quickly it's accelerated really fast.

It's addictive. Like when you start shipping things it's like oh my god.

My wife is like why are you on your computer? [laughter] I'm like I just need to get this one prompt right so that my agent can run for the next hour so I can [laughter] hang out with you.

Okay. So, this is kind of the civil war, maybe we would call it, between the trenchers and the builders. Uh, what about like the open claw guy and his negative experience with crypto? Is there is there something we can do as an ecosystem to kind of make it look better to the outside world or is it just like again like patience probably?

It's it's it's a hard question. Um, and I do think it it does come back to those three things. It's like about empathy. It's about like trying to culturally norm so that you don't have people like attacking people

because like they're not engaging with the thing that they created for them to trade which like they didn't really tell them what it was or educate them like we have to norm around that too and then I think we also need to have more connection of the tokens and substance like why are like he didn't tokenize his project like we we should want builders to tokenize their projects and to to opt into tokenizing their projects and then do everything they can to make the token for their project valuable. And if we're not yet getting that from builders, then I think that that's on us. And the exciting thing for me is that again, in the last few weeks, you have seen people who've been outside of crypto actually come in and be like, "Holy crap, I am getting value out of this. Tokenization is useful. I am able to do a bunch of things I wasn't before."

And I think for me it's all about okay how do we take those people talk to them understand their perspectives understand what their experience was and then how do we normalize that whether it's by telling their stories or creating better documentation or culture whatever it is like that's the work that we have to do

there we we got 20 seconds left [laughter] but the base stack there's a lot of stuff going on with bass you you take it it's all yours

oh we got 20 seconds left um I mean today was was a big day we announced that um We're, you know, building a dedicated stack for base, which I'm super excited about. That's going to let us ship hard forks six times a year. It's going to let us scale more aggressively. Um, and all of this is going to feed back into the agents and the trading because it's going to let us offer more block space that's cheaper, that's equally secure, secured by Ethereum, um, and just deliver more value to our customers. And if I had if I had one theme for 2026, it would be a year of like focusing on our customers and and like zeroing in on like we've had this technology.

It's been around for a long time. In the last few years, it feels like we've really gotten it to mature where we now have fast block fast cheap block space. We have great stable coins. We have great wallet infrastructure. We have incredible tooling.

And we're seeing big institutions and small companies starting and we're seeing assets of all kinds both, you know, more emergent like Asian coins and creator coins and more serious and off-chain like stocks all come on chain. And it's up to us as builders to figure out how do we put all those things together and then find customers who need that thing that we've built with it and solve their problems. And whether that's a builder building an agent or someone try trying to buy stocks in another country or someone to trying to build their first company in a new way, like we got to zero in on focus and there's going to be so much noise and the sentiment is going to be bad because it's going to be a bare market. But if we can just tune that out and we can build, we're going to do a lot of good and we're going to change the world.

Hell yeah. Keep bringing the world on chain. Thank you.

Awesome. Thank you everybody.