Jesse Pollak Departs as Base CEO
What's next for the L2 blockchain?
On today’s menu:
🟦 Jesse Pollak leaves Base, admits wrong strategy
🙅♀️ Polygon Labs Cuts Staff Amid Coinme Acquisition
Base creator steps down, Cobie to take over
Jesse Pollak, the creator of Base, stepped back from leading the Base app on July 15 — and didn't sugarcoat why.
"The first quarter of 2026 was a punch in the face," he wrote, conceding he was "definitively wrong" about social products driving the next wave of crypto adoption.
His entire thesis — that Farcaster, Zora, mini apps, and creator coins would bring millions of users onchain — disintegrated completely in Q1 2026 and actively slowed down infrastructure development.
To his credit, the builders thesis held: stablecoins, prediction markets, and perps all exploded.
The social side just didn't.
Taking over is Cobie, who joined Coinbase after the exchange acquired his investment platform Echo for roughly $375 million (we covered his rise here).
His mandate extends beyond Base itself, with ambitions to push the app into broader on-chain territory rather than just serving as a frontend for a single L2.
The new Base is trading, payments, and AI agents.
Pollak stays on to build the underlying infrastructure — the blockchain for global finance, as he put it.
The honest admission is rarer than it should be in crypto, and the pivot is probably correct. But handing the keys to Cobie — a trader, not a builder — tells you everything about what Base thinks will actually matter next.
Expect some drastic changes by Cobie to set the tone for his stewardship — a Base token announcement or new incentives for builders.
Polygon Has Laid Off People Four Times in Three Years
Polygon Labs' second round of cuts in 2026 marks at least its fourth round of layoffs in as many years — 20% of staff in 2023, 19% in 2024, 60 people in January 2026, and now another undisclosed number in July.
CEO Marc Boiron framed this one differently though: the cuts accompany a transformation "from operating as a blockchain foundation into operating as a blockchain-enabled payments company," timed to the final stages of closing its $250 million acquisition of Coinme and Sequence.
Coinme is the critical piece — a U.S.-licensed crypto on/off-ramp with a 50,000-location retail cash network, giving Polygon something most L2s don't have: a physical presence where regular people already buy crypto.
Together with Sequence (wallet infrastructure), these acquisitions feed into Polygon's Open Money Stack — a vertically integrated payments platform designed to move dollars from a bank account to on-chain settlement in one flow.
Polygon logged 743 million transactions in Q2 2026 — an all-time high, up 160% year-over-year — and settled $79 billion in stablecoin transfers in May alone.
The protocol is genuinely busy.
But now, we have to see whether the payments pivot turns network activity into token value.
In other news
Visa Introduces Visa Stablecoin Platform (Visa)
1inch Co-Founder Anton Bukov Reveals He Was Fired, Launches New DeFi Project (Anton Bukov)
MoonPay Has Acquired Glide (MoonPay)
Degens Only
Thanks for the update. Curious to see how Cobie adapts to his new role. He created some impressive pieces on tokenomics here on Substack, so even if we see a new token launched by Base, it could have some real value/utility, and solid economics behind it.