Jesse Pollak I Building Networks That People Actually Use with Base I Pragma Bangkok 2024

[Music] we are ready for our next interview and for this interview I'd like to bring on Jesse from base we're going to talk about a lot of things that they've been up to and we're going to go into what they are excited about so without further Ado please welcome Jesse on [Music] stage hello everybody can we give up another round of applause to georgeos please I feel like georgeos and the team have pushed forward crypto infrastructure ethereum infrastructure more than basically when anyone else for the last few years so super grateful to be working with georgeos in the paradig team we owe a lot to the developer infrastructure here just the amount of acceleration we've gone in the last two years alone throughour initiatives has been amazing um speaking of moving things forward you you as base just crossed a billion transactions a couple days ago that's an amazing Milestone um congrats thank you and the thing I'm kind of curious about is uh do you how do you kind of think about what led to this amazing Milestone this fast uh how do you kind of attribute to what sort of inspired this growth and uh and if you were to kind of reverse engineer this outcome how do you think about this yeah I think three things probably have come together over the last year cuz it's really been just a year since Ben Bas went live um the first is I think timing like the the technology has really matured to the point where it works in the last year and I think we've been you know driving force and helping kind of put those pieces together um but there is just this moment that's happening right now where onchain adoption is growing very fast and we've been able to kind of like push through and make that work uh the second thing is I think we've invested really heavily in developer tools and make it incredibly easy for developers to build apps on base and then that's led to Downstream effects of people actually building apps that people use uh and that flywheel is spinning faster and faster um the third thing is I do think we've had some help from coinbase uh like we we started with a head start around you know brand uh base from coinbase um we also I think have benefited from being able to tap into coinbase distribution um to bring users on chain help them find really meaningful things to do on chain that that actually provide value to to them in their day-to-day life and that's been a big driver of adoption and then the fourth thing which I think is probably the biggest driver is um I and we have just been relentlessly in the trenches I mean I'm just flying around the world right now meeting Builders and I think through that work there's been a culture of builders lifting up builders that it's merged on base that is super self reinforcing and I think we talk a lot about kind of virality of consumer experiences on the internet but I think we're seeing right now with bass virality of Builder experiences where Builders are coming to Bas they're building they're having an experience where they feel connected they feel supported they feel like they're actually able to get things done and make an impact and then they're going to their friends and saying hey come build with me and that's been this kind of ripple effect through the industry where more and more people are choosing Bas every single day that's amazing and and I think uh kind of the thing that I found super interesting about just kind of seeing this was that you usually see virality when you see a consumer app mostly like social apps or just going meme kind of get big and that's kind of where it comes from but this is a really interesting example of virality from a developer app standpoint and that's that's a very unique thing like it's just not a common thing yeah and I think it's you know it there is precedent for it like if you look at the rise of stripe or you look at the rise of other like really really impactful developer tools mongod DB you had a similar Dynamic where um you basically had developers leading adoption developers referring it to other Developers and then that actually driving adoption inside of larger corporate structures because who's going to be there at the end of the day making a decision it's a developer who has to be the one to write the tech doc the one to actually decide to build something and so I think that's what we're seeing happen with base right now and I expect it to happen faster and faster amazing um speaking of only been a year um if you were to reflect on kind of where you are now and what you started off with how have the goals changed in terms of what you wanted to do or have you kind of done any refinements on what the goals are now and the Ambitions are face yeah when when we started bass I think we really started of think conceiving of bass as a developer platform like the first mission statement that I ever wrote for bass was we're going to build a worldclass developer platform that enables people to build onchain apps and I think that's that's spot on and you know this goes back to what we were just talking about in terms of developer virality I feel like we're seeing a ton of traction there um but over the last you know six to 12 months I'd say that our conception of Base has really started to expand and we've really started to think about the developer platform as one of the core components of a a much broader economy that we're really starting to build and this has reanchored us on a new mission statement which is this idea of building a global onchain economy that increases Innovation creativity and freedom and then within that mission of building a global onchain economy I think you can then break it down kind of by strategic pillar and developers is one of them like one of the important things we need to do is we need to build a developer platform that makes it easy for people to build onchain apps but we also need to kind of nurture a really vibrant ecosystem of apps that make it you know give a reason for regular people and everyday businesses to come onchain and we also need to nurture a vibrant 24/7 Capital Market that kind of interconnects the global economy and then we also need to build a decentralized scalable platform that kind of connects all these things together and so I'd say we've really um kind of expanded the aperture of how we think about base which has then I think let us talk to a lot more different kinds of people and bring them into the Bas economy because there's something that resonates more with them than just the pure developer go to market and and you're not even talking about like a prerequisite these are like all things that have to kind of work with each other and it's very symbiotic so this makes total sense but you're saying the focus is now to also pay enough attention to all the other groups so that they can get yeah and it's aligned with this this kind of like meme that we've been pushing which is this idea that everyone's a builder and as we're building this new uh global economy we're going to need people with tons of diverse skill sets to make it happen and so I think whereas before we were speaking really really directly to developers I think now we're speaking to creators who have an opportunity to kind of like build their followings build their creativity on chain we're speaking to communities who have an opportunity to build their communities on chain and I think that that's really you know on this world tour in particular it's a it's a theme that we've heard again and again is people say something about base makes me feel included in a way that crypto hasn't in the past and I think that's because historically crypto has been this thing has that has felt technical that has felt kind of a little esoteric speculative trading Centric and with base and the idea that bases for anyone uh everyone can be a builder I think people kind of see an entry point where they can use use their skill set to contribute to this economy and then once they find one way to show up then they can kind of land and expand because you start creating on base and then you're like oh this economy actually works way better for me and all these other ways let me expand my skill set let me expand how I'm using the tools here and make an even broader impact on the world that's awesome I actually do want to go into a bit more depth on on that one but uh maybe kind of while we're on topic of actually expanding the the aperture here um you you are a super chain member or part of the super chain um how kind of do you think about the role that's played in in your success and just alt together like what does it mean to be part of the super chain for for base yeah absolutely so we decided you know when we were kind of thinking about how we wanted to build base that we wanted to build open source um we wanted to contribute back to the infrastructure uh and we wanted to be a part of something bigger than just ourselves and that's why we built on ethereum as a layer two and it's also why we decided to build with optimism as part of the super chain and so Bas is now a core developer of the op stack and really what we're seeing emerge is we're seeing a collective of people come together and say hey we're going to build an open- Source technology Foundation that allows all of us to accelerate faster and I think this is kind of what George was getting at in the talk right before this like we actually need to accelerate the technology Foundation that we are building on because we are now within Striking Distance of building worldclass products but we're not quite there and one of the biggest ways we can accelerate is by all focusing our energies in one place rather than fragmenting them across many places and so I think our thesis with the op stack has really been about getting that Force multiplier of many teams coming together to make something happen that is way bigger than any one of us I think it's been really successful like if you look at the data today majority of transactions on layer twos are going through the op stack um there's an incredible developer community building around it you know we're making progress on technology we just launched fault proofs we're we're we about to get to stage one um and I expect that um kind of acceleration to continue uh because we have more and more teams coming in to join and build with us um I mean and and obviously you kind of see so many Network effects as part of this too because you're seeing specialization you're seeing just people come in from one Avenue and stick and go to the next one and everybody benefits which is awesome um the thing I'm actually want to know your opinion on is we're seeing and we have seen a lot of chatter on on Twitter especially just around kind of how people either misunderstand or kind of think that the l2s are contentious to L1 ethereum and uh and this fragmentation is actually bad it doesn't kind of make ethereum better or just it creates a world that we don't really want um kind of how do you think about this uh do you kind of really think the l2s are a good thing if so well I know the answer but what should we tell people who think the other way totally go that yeah well first I definitely think l2s are a good thing um uh and and I'd say like the the thing that I observe is that I think especially in the Echo chamber of Twitter we can get into a mode as an industry where we are thinking very shortterm and we're looking at signals like oh the fees that people are paying for blobs and we're taking a short-term data point and then we're extrapolating it in a way that really isn't like doesn't make sense towards a longer term outcome and I think when you when you take a step back and you think about okay we've been executing against the technical strategy for the last three years to scale ethereum and it's working very very well like we've literally scaled ethereum more than 100x in the last year and there's a pathway to scaling in 100x a THX next year that's the lens that I think we should be applying first and foremost and then you know as we're on that scaling path are there uh you know temporary imbalances in the economics sure that's what happens when you're going into growth mode that's why Uber subsidize their rides because it lets Uber expand very aggressively we're letting l2s expand very aggressively and even just in the last couple weeks we've started to see that rebalance as we've hitting the blob Target and we've actually started to have uh l2s paying for for the blob space and so I think the the the the kind of mindset that I always tell my team is like it's Never As Good As It Seems and it's never as bad as it seems and I feel like that's what's we need to be keeping in mind with l2s it's like we haven't solved all of the problems because we still have a lot of work to do we have to solve interoperability we have to make this experience more seamless to users but also l2s are not extractive like antithesis of ethereum l2s in the last year have onboarded tens of millions of users and tens of thousands of developers to ethereum that otherwise would not have been here and they're running massive marketing campaigns around the globe to educate people about ethereum and to provide real value to Everyday folks in terms of apps um financial services and more and so I really think that this is a synergistic relationship and it's the strategy we've been executing on now for three years and the best thing that we can do is continue to learn continue to iterate but be patient and focused and Relentless and keep our eyes towards the horizon which is building this global economy that's going to be so big like it's going to have more than enough room for all of us I think that's a really good way to kind of reset that expectation and and also it's one of those things where we get to see the outcomes immediately uh because the economics are tied to the growth altogether um going just a little bit into the infrastructure side of things uh what is missing in actually making that 100x Improvement here and again especially with you uh pioneering a lot of the the aggressive uh number of transactions go through uh you've been talking a lot about Giga gas tell us what that is and why that's important yeah so when we're thinking thinking about what are the key kind of remaining infrastructure unlocks to enable a billion people to come on chain there are really three big pieces that we're looking at the first is that we need to continue driving down the costs of transaction even as overall demand increases and so on base this year um we've done something like a 15x in throughput and at the same time we've done something like a 100x reduction in cost and that's through blobs as well yes that's through blobs so we've reduced the cost 100x and a median transaction cost is now something like a quarter of a cent at the same time as 17 Xing the number of transactions that we're processing if we want to be successful we need to do that again like we need to THX to throughput and we still need to keep driving down the cost and so that's where a giga gas comes in this is a a kind of Northstar that we have for the total capacity of Base uh you can kind of think about it like the internet going from uh dialup to broadband uh we started the year at 2.5 meag gas which is 0.0025 gigas and right now we're at 17 megag gas which is about a you know 8X um and by the end of next year we want to be at something like 200 megag gas and then get towards a gigas and so that's really the first kind of prong of the strategy in terms of enabling these next use cases it's low cost very scalable highly available chain block space how is that gas getting bigger yeah why don't you just change the number yeah well you can just like you can just change the number and that works until it doesn't because the number is really meant to be kind of a heuristic for um whether the chain is going to be able to reliably scale at that rate for a very long duration of time and so when we're working towards increasing that number we're really working across three things one is we're working across execution which is like literally can we node run the node fast enough um so that I can actually keep up with the blocks and publish them on some sort of Hardware that is not the same kind of low-level Hardware requirements that ethereum has but we still want people to be able to run nodes without super super sophisticated uh kind of like home setups so that's the first thing the the second thing that we have to run into is when you scale the chain that aggressively and you're increasing the target you end up having a lot more state in the chain and so we need to be thinking about how do we give node Runners a scalable way of managing that state either through things like State expiry which is more research oriented or things like changing the overall database or mempool structure so you can actually push more of that state kind of out of the hot path and into horizontally scalable storage and then the third big part of the scaling kind of need is we actually need bandwidth to put that state in or to put those transactions into and that's ethereum data availability where the base team has been working on 4844 and then more recently on pias and in order to keep increasing our Target we need to be making consistent progress across the three of those things now one thing that the B team just in the last 6 months has done which I think is a uh it's kind of like a shift in perspective for us is we've made a commitment to increase our gas Target by one Mega gas per week in perpetuity and what that has kind of enabled for us is it now enables us to just draw the line and project out and be like well by the middle of next year here's where we'll be here's what our estate will look like here's what you know we need to process from a througho perspective here's much how much data availability is and that's not only useful for us it's also incredibly useful for the rest of the ecosystem because now people can start to plan around okay here's the actual bandwidth That Base needs and we found that to be a very useful forcing function for our team where it's like it's not that we're going to like make some changes and then see whether it works it's like no we're going to scale and we just have to do the work to do that um and so we're really excited about the progress we've made there so that's the first big bucket the two other pieces of infrastructure that I think we need in order to bring you know a billion people on Shain I still think we need to make wallets easier and Georgia was just talking about this things like 772 4337 pass Keys we need to combine that with smart wallets to really make it so we have a wallet substrate that's both programmable and secure and I think that has the opportunity to move us from a world where um right now kind of like you onboard a friend to crypto it's expensive it's annoying uh it's complex and you have to sit them down and give them the talk where it's like don't it up or you're going to lose all your money and and then we can actually get to a world where it's like oh no like you can have the same level of confidence in your wallet as your bank account and that's really only possible with smart wallets because we can actually program in Security in a way that isn't possible with EAS and then we can enable a ton more easy user experiences that I think will let more and more people come on chain faster and faster so that's the second big bucket that I think we need to keep pushing on we've made a lot lot of progress in the last year with the smart wallet um but we have a lot more work to do in the year ahead and then I'd say the third thing that uh we really need to keep pushing on is bringing identity and kind of social graphs on chain um the more metadata we can bring to users that we can then allow them to manage in a way that still kind of maintains their privacy but kind of share that information with apps the easier time developers are going to have building apps that are really useful and I think we've started to see this emerge with things like onchain social graphs and forecaster um where uh once you have that social graph you can then start to actually build way way way more engaging apps because you can go into the app and you don't have to do a cold start it just works you have that context you have history and you have reputation that everything and so I think if we can make prog like I I really feel like we finally have a good enough offering across those three axes and in the next six months we'll get to like an excellent offering across those axes and that's what's going to enable these kind of next breakout consumer products to emerge amazing so maybe kind of to to end as my last question you've kind of set the stage on what infrastructure it's going to look like in just a few months and obviously a few few years down the road we kind of make some really good guarantees and assumptions around scale and be ability to handle that uh what do you kind of think are the opportunities for Builders here and just Founders to think about getting in their products in the hand of vill of users like are there obvious things that you think that do this Global Commerce economy unlocks that are Crypton native or what's a good advice for what to build yeah I mean we're really excited about everything in the onchain economy games nfts real world asss all of that um but I will say that as we're heading into 2025 it it feels like there's two segments that are particularly primed to explode the first is payments and this is where we've seen you know I'd say the most product Market fit on chain over the last few years uh and I think with um stable coins and L2 fees coming down um with the proliferation of local stable coins which is actually something we're driving where by the middle of next year our goal is to have the top 50 local currencies all on chain all on base I think that payments has an opportunity to really become like the default standard for payments globally which is going to be a huge driver of adoption now the challenge with payments is that even if we build a really really good product there if you look at the growth trajectories of payments businesses historically it's actually relatively slow like you look at Cash app or you look at venmo in the United States those businesses grow something like 30% 40% year-over-year which is pretty good but it's a linear growth rate and that means that for them to kind of get to the scale they're at now it's taken 10 plus years and I think the bar right now is even higher and so if we're just thinking about payments growth I don't think we're going to go from the low millions that we have on chain today to billions of people on chain in the next few years it's too slow there actually has to be something else that drives that really really exp rapid expansion of onchain utility and that's where I think the second category comes in which is social like if you look at the internet and you look at what has driven growth over the last 20 years in a consumer viral way it is social exclusively how do you tie social with payments here they're deeply deeply interconnected and I think that that intersection of people building social viral consumer products that have money built into them and enable new economics for creators where they earn 10x more that enable new experiences for consumers where they actually get to earn by participating rather than just being kind of these people who are tapping and you know like kind of getting ignored um I think that that section is going to both be viral and it's going to be something that builds a better economy for the people who are participating in it and that's going means it's going to be sustainable and long lived and I think payments is going to be something that kind of comes along for the ride in the messaging experiences and the feed experiences and the other social community experiences that get built over the next year and I think when we are successful in building these onchain social products we will be very surprised at how fast it happens um because I don't think it's going to be another 10 years for us to get to a billion people I think that in the next year we will have consumer social products that start growing and will be at billions of users over the next two to three years that's an amazing prediction Let's uh let's hope it comes true for for uh this entire industry to actually flourish so thank you so much for this amazing conversation for having me please give him a big round of applause thanks everybody [Music]