Welcome to Chain Reaction.

A show that unpacks and dives deep into the latest trends, drama and news with some of the biggest names in crypto breaking things down block by block for the crypto curious.

For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Jesse Pollak, the lead for Base and head of protocols at Coinbase. Base is an Ethereum-focused layer 2 blockchain launched by Coinbase in February of this year.

Pollak previously led all retail engineering at Coinbase, including building Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, and Coinbase Wallet. In a past life, Pollak started Clef, a 2FA mobile app and was an engineer at BuzzFeed.

A number of crypto businesses, platforms, marketplaces and infrastructure firms have committed to building on Base. Those that plan to be involved include Blockdaemon, Chainlink, Etherscan, Quicknode, Aave, Animoca Brands, Dune, Nansen, Magic Eden, Pyth, Rainbow Wallet, Ribbon Finance, The Graph, Wormhole and Gelato, to name a handful.

Of course, we talked a lot about Base and where it’s headed in the future, as well as how regulation could affect the blockchain and the timeline for its Mainnet launch; Pollak shared it’s aiming for 2023.

We also dove into:

Decentralizing Base
Blockchain inspiration
Coinbase’s role in Base
Advice for developers

Chain Reaction comes out every other Thursday at 12:00 p.m. PT, so be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the action.

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Mentioned in the show:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/23/coinbase-launches-blockchain-base-to-help-developers-build-dapps-on-chain/

Chain Reaction comes out every Thursday at 12:00 p.m. ET, so be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the action.

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