The people shaping Base after October 2026

Jesse Pollak and the Wallet integration

Jesse Pollak leads both Base and Coinbase Wallet, steering the network toward a goal of 1 billion users. The acquisition of the Utopia Labs team accelerates the onchain payments roadmap within Coinbase Wallet. The team brings experience building onchain payments products and a track record of moving the ecosystem forward. Base facilitates over $100 million in daily spot trading volume for 1:1-backed tokenized equities such as Nvidia, Meta, Apple, and Google. I see this move as a transition from consumer applications to financial infrastructure. The 2023 Onchain Summer event saw users mint over 700,000 NFTs. While the network maintains 1.3 million weekly active users, the strategy aims for 1 billion gigagas of scale. Pollak targets a 30-40% loan-to-value ratio for users borrowing stablecoins against tokenized equity holdings. This movement places Base in competition with Robinhood and Kraken. The network is an Ethereum Layer-2 that processes transactions on its own execution layer before publishing data to Ethereum. Stablecoin transaction volume reached $8.5 trillion in Q2 2024 across 1.1 billion transactions. Coinbase is using Base to put more of Coinbase onchain, making the platform a hub for the onchain economy.

The Superchain dispute and liquidity problems

The Optimism Collective disputes the proposal to align the $OP token with Superchain success. Many stakeholders reject the buyback plan because the Optimism Foundation lacks the ability to manage the ETH treasury effectively. In early 2025, the Foundation miscalculated yield on a staking agreement, showing poor asset management. The proposed use of OTC partners for buybacks causes concern because liquidity on decentralized exchanges remains insufficient. For instance, the Uniswap V3 pool holds $645,000 while the Velodrome pool holds $425,000. I find the reliance on OTC deals a poor substitute for building actual onchain liquidity. The community prefers reducing supply pressure through sequencer fees instead of issuing new tokens while avoiding new issuance. One proposal suggests entering agreements with lending protocols like Aave, Morpho, Compound, or Fluid to ensure favorable conditions for those borrowing stablecoins against OP. Current liquidity depth in the main pools provides no reliability for wealthy investors or buyback programs. If the Optimism Foundation allocates even a small fraction of sequencer fees to pools in WETH, it could support the $OP price. The community also aims to reduce emissions and improve liquidity on the Superchain. They want to reduce the Foundation’s discretionary power over the ETH treasury and entrust it to Governance. Why would developers trust a chain that cannot support its own token trades on local DEXs?

Centralization and the creator economy

Centralization issues define the Base experience because Coinbase operates the network sequencer. L2Beat classified Base as a Stage 1 optimistic rollup in July 2026, but the network faces a potential downgrade to Stage 0 because the proof system fails certain trusted-setup criteria. This control structure creates risk. In 2025, bribed support agents in India leaked the private information of 69,461 users, including bank accounts and transaction histories, which led to an extortion attempt demanding $20 million. Coinbase estimates total remediation and reimbursement costs at $400 million. You should understand that a single breach at a centralized sequencer could compromise the entire ecosystem. The creator economy expands with 207 million creators worldwide and 52% of them monetizing content. Most creators, including the 12% earning over $50,000 annually, still treat creation as a side income. In 2024, 30% of social media adults bought items after seeing influencer posts. 53% of followers for those creators also made purchases. 63% of independent creators are under 40, and 53% are male. The industry counts 2 million professional creators alongside 46 million side-hustlers. 29% of American kids would rather become a YouTube star than an astronaut. The NYDFS fined Coinbase $50 million in 2023 for failures in KYC and cybersecurity controls.