#18 - Jesse Pollak

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

Jesse, welcome to The Network State Podcast.

Jesse Pollak (0:02)

Thanks for having me.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:03)

You and I have kind of had an ongoing sort of philosophical discussion for many years on how libertarians can learn from progressives and progressives can learn from libertarians. And it's funny because I went so far a libertarian that it became like a progressive, and I'm like, you know, I need to do community building, I need to do community organizing. Go ahead.

Jesse Pollak (0:22)

No, yeah, it's exactly right. I mean, this is when I think back to our time at Coinbase, I feel like so much of the fun that we had was thinking about how are all of these different political philosophies going to be kind of rewritten in this new world where the internet defines all of us, and we're actually all looking for kind of new frameworks to think about how the world can come together and how the world can be better than it has been in the past.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:46)

So let's go through Base. It's really funny how Coinbase was so well named that it managed to not just be like easy to pronounce and pass the bar test, but it was also Based later on. You managed to launch Base when Base was... Go ahead.

Jesse Pollak (1:02)

Yeah, no. I mean, I think that one of the things I've always felt about Base is that we just got incredibly lucky in having a name that we could borrow from Coinbase that kind of brought over the trust, that had such a metaphorical meaning in terms of being this platform that everyone can build on, that was associated with the cultural phenomenon like Based, that was four letters, really easy to pronounce, totally globally accessible. I think there's probably a lot of things we could have gotten wrong, and the name still would have been really, really great. But luckily, over the last two years of building, I think we've got a lot of things right. And today, for those who are maybe listening to this for the first time, Base is one of the largest change in the world. It's an Ethereum layer too. There's thousands and thousands of builders all around the world who are choosing to build on Base to help us build this global on-chain economy that we think is going to massively increase economic freedom, innovation and creativity around the world.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:55)

You know, one thing I think about, and let's go into details, is Base is interesting because it's a coinless chain in the sense of there isn't a native asset on the chain, but it is still useful. And one way of thinking about it is that coin, the stock, is like sort of the quasi-native asset of Base, so it's not directly there. Or another way of thinking about it is it actually takes aspects of blockchains that we didn't think you could take. You know, people didn't think you could run a blockchain without a coin, but you can. You can run as like an open state database, right? Maybe you have some thoughts on that, and let's get into the details of how Base works.

Jesse Pollak (2:32)

Yeah, I mean, from the beginning of Base, one of the theses that we had was if we just focused on building a really great product that solved problems for developers and creators and consumers, that was gonna be a way higher leverage way for us to bring this to market than what we kind of seen in the last few years in terms of people really focusing on the coin and token side of things. And I think that's proven out to be true. It's been a really good forcing function for us, right? Whereas I think a lot of folks who'd been building chains otherwise, they said, hey, we're gonna have a coin, and then we're gonna use that coin to pay people to come and build with us, and we're gonna kind of use that as a shortcut to try and kind of jumpstart the network effects that's required to be here. We didn't have that luxury. Instead, we had to go and say, hey, we're gonna go fight for every single customer, every single developer, every single creator, every single user, we're gonna go have to win them on the merits of using Base because it's faster, because it's cheaper, because it's easier to build on, because it's more connected to create on, because you can do things that you wouldn't be able to do anywhere else. And I think that that's been a really good forcing function for us to just make sure that we're always building the right product.