Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news. This week, Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak talks about the ambitious goals of Base, the new Optimism–based blockchain from the publicly traded crypto giant. With the viral success of Base-based Friend.Tech, Jesse discusses the Base team’s ambitious goals to onboard “a million builders, a billion users.” Is this the long-heralded path to scaling Ethereum?

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Show highlights:

why Jesse says it’s still “day one” for Base
the reason behind Base’s “one million developers, one billion users” slogan
what the advantages of Base are compared to other layer 2 blockchains
how Base accounts for the fact that it doesn’t have a token to incentivize developer activity
how MEV bots represent a big part of the transactions on Base, especially with the emergence of Friend.Tech
why Friend.Tech found early success despite being similar to previous efforts
Jesse’s response to the fact that fault proofs are not live on any of the OP Stack chains
how much of the revenue generated by Coinbase’s sequencer will be distributed to Optimism
whether Base and Optimism Mainnet compete with each other
how layer 2 chains are choosing different design paths and how that differentiates them

Hosts

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly
Robert Leshner, founder of Compound
Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly
Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures

Guest

Jesse Pollak, lead contributor at Base

Hosts

Disclosures

Links

Episode 127: Festive film favourites from the BBFC team