Look, I obviously don’t agree with Jesse on everything, and he himself may tell you that I am pretty annoying with my dissents inside CB. But to answer your question, I think it was because it was earned. Jesse willed Base into existence from nothing. In fact, Base sort of created the category that Stripe, Robinhood etc have followed into. Robinhood and Johann are doing a great job btw, very impressive and good to see trenches eating again, but hard to say if their chain would even exist today if Base didn’t exist. Base was created before the major Solana memecoin wave (6 months or so before WIF was created in 2023) which means Jesse fought to ship this through the post-FTX bear market. Obviously Jesse made some mistakes last year. Building stuff is really hard, and building it inside a big public company is even harder. I wouldn’t have made all the same choices he did, and not defending those choices either. But one thing I respect a lot about Jesse is that he still turns up and continues to put the work in every day despite all of CT treating him as a punching bag. Not sure how many other ppl I know that are willing to do that.

@underwaterwux I have been responsible for trading products here for ~1 month, I would request a little more time to make the apps good before judgement, there is a lot of stuff to do and not possible to change everything overnight

I took over the baseapp a few days ago yeah (as well as trading products in Coinbase - the Coinbase app, Advanced trading, etc). I don’t run Base chain. I think that typically CB has been a little bit in an ivory tower and a little bit distant from users, particularly crypto natives. I don’t think I will be able to fix that in a week, or maybe even a month. I can try and capture the voice of ppl onchain more and try and align ppl building things more closely w users. Obviously CB/Base has burned a lot of user goodwill w those users thru some unforced errors, including today. Obviously I could simply not do any of these things and have a nice life instead. Lots of ppl, including og base supporters/trenchers, rly hate base rn - throwing myself into the middle of a hatred pile-on is clearly not the most optimal life choice. I am aware I am setting myself up to be blamed by association. So, I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought it were impossible. I’m going to try and ship stuff that ppl like to use. Maybe ppl will hate what I do w the baseapp too, we will see how it goes.

I decided rather than chilling to instead make my life incredibly stressful and busy so now i am responsible for trading products at Coinbase (CB app / Pro / Baseapp / etc). I cant explain why I did this except I like the opportunity to make something actually good more than I like playing Factorio. So ye maybe I’m an idiot, let’s find out

Yes obviously, that was the plan all along, I just thought it would be a funny way to announce the acquisition I don’t think anyone believes Coinbase really paid $25m for 8 episodes of a defunct podcast but if they do think that’s reasonable then, well, I have a podcast to sell them