trading means every asset. tokenized stocks, memes, app coins, whatever you want to trade. payments means stablecoins that work globally, for people and for enterprises. agents means accelerating all of it because crypto is native money for computers and artificial intelligence is going to create trillions of new economic actors.  and against these three pillars, builders are the backbone. If there’s one thing i’m deeply proud of since the beginning of base, alongside all the mistakes, it’s betting on builders. base is what it is because of the people who built it. not the roadmap, not the infrastructure - the builders who showed up, shipped, and kept going through every version of this, the good stretches and the hard ones. and we're going to keep backing them: Base Layer, Base Batches, the Base Ecosystem Fund, my time, my teams time, coinbase and base app distribution as much as we’re able to. we will do everything we can to make builders win on base. because when builders win, base wins. if you’ve made it this far and you couldn’t already tell: i don't have everything figured out. we try stuff, we make mistakes, and we adapt in public. the feedback, even the sharp stuff, genuinely makes us better. we see it all, and even when we can't respond to everything, it burrows its way into my brain and makes me better. so thank you.  we are building a global economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom. we will do this by doing the right thing, working hard, staying optimistic, pushing boundaries with creativity, and putting the team over the individual. and it’s working: with QoQ growth in dex share and payment volume, and a renewed focus on products that drive sustainable growth. hopefully we can shut up about content coins now. i was wrong and i’m sorry! (although if someone else builds content coins and they work then i’m going to lose it. and I'm also not going to just let $jesse fade away - when I launch something, I'm in it for the long term) ok thats enough typing, back to work

Now that some time has passed, I can probably talk about this. We had a startup who raised during the 2021/22 bull market, completely lost traction, and burned through all of the company's capital in the bear market. What followed was years of watching someone spiral. He fell into a deep depression fought constantly with his team and cofounders until they all left and eventually became verbally abusive, even threatening multiple people on the cap table, including me, for over a year. At one point, some people involved hired private security. Thankfully we were able to get the authorities involved and resolved the issue. Building and investing in crypto as a good actor is one of the hardest jobs in tech. Unlike any industry your company's value, your net worth, and emotions are constantly tied to the beat of the market 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The psychological pressure breaks more people than most realize. The people who make it through those cycles come out with resilience that's hard to replicate anywhere else. If you can survive building through multiple crypto cycles you can probably build, invest or trade in almost any industry.