Pickle Cat(@0xPickleCati):Reading this brought back a very specific feeling. I’ve been in crypto 13 years, long enough to watch things arrive looking like the future and leave without anyone announcing they were gone. Late 2017 I was flipping cryptokitties almost every day while eth went straight up. I explained them at dinner, to grown adults, and I probably sounded insane, but I wasn’t talking about cartoon cats. I thought I was looking at the beginning of digital ownership, culture moving onchain, and a new kind of internet where users could actually own the things they created and collected. I didn’t think I had caught a mania. I thought I had seen the future a little earlier than everyone else. Then 2018 came and robbed me blind… the money disappeared fast. But the belief took years to die. And even then, it didn’t really die. It just kept coming back wearing new clothes. NFTs, creator economy, socialfi, onchain social, creator coins. Not all of them were the same, obviously, but somewhere underneath them was a future I had already wanted to believe in once. That’s why the ideas that hurt the most when they die are rarely the obvious scams. Nobody mourns those. It’s the BEAUTIFUL ones, the ones that made sincere people think, “if this works, crypto actually changes the world.” You don’t just invest in those ideas! You build your life around them! You make friends through them, attach your name to them, spend years defending them, and start living inside a future that hasn’t arrived yet!! Then one day the market goes somewhere else. Usually there’s no dramatic ending. The users stop showing up. The group chats get quieter. The people who used to post about it every day slowly move on. The thesis still sounds beautiful when you say it out loud, it’s just that nothing is walking toward it anymore. You’re the last one standing in a room explaining what it was supposed to become. That’s a hard thing to admit, especially in public. Because you’re burying years of conviction, relationships, reputation, and a version of yourself that genuinely believed you were helping build what came next. Reading @jessepollak’s post today reminded me I’ve watched this happen over and over again, to other people and to myself. People outside crypto think the hardest losses are financial. After enough cycles, you realize some of the hardest losses are the stories you had to stop believing, and the futures you had already started living in. I still don’t know if I’ve fully let go of all of mine. Probably not.

2026.07.16 02:33

Reading this brought back a very specific feeling. I’ve been in crypto 13 years, long enough to watch things arrive looking like the future and leave without anyone announcing they were gone. Late 2017 I was flipping cryptokitties almost every day while eth went straight up. I explained them at dinner, to grown adults, and I probably sounded insane, but I wasn’t talking about cartoon cats. I thought I was looking at the beginning of digital ownership, culture moving onchain, and a new kind of internet where users could actually own the things they created and collected. I didn’t think I had caught a mania. I thought I had seen the future a little earlier than everyone else. Then 2018 came and robbed me blind… the money disappeared fast. But the belief took years to die. And even then, it didn’t really die. It just kept coming back wearing new clothes. NFTs, creator economy, socialfi, onchain social, creator coins. Not all of them were the same, obviously, but somewhere underneath them was a future I had already wanted to believe in once. That’s why the ideas that hurt the most when they die are rarely the obvious scams. Nobody mourns those. It’s the BEAUTIFUL ones, the ones that made sincere people think, “if this works, crypto actually changes the world.” You don’t just invest in those ideas! You build your life around them! You make friends through them, attach your name to them, spend years defending them, and start living inside a future that hasn’t arrived yet!! Then one day the market goes somewhere else. Usually there’s no dramatic ending. The users stop showing up. The group chats get quieter. The people who used to post about it every day slowly move on. The thesis still sounds beautiful when you say it out loud, it’s just that nothing is walking toward it anymore. You’re the last one standing in a room explaining what it was supposed to become. That’s a hard thing to admit, especially in public. Because you’re burying years of conviction, relationships, reputation, and a version of yourself that genuinely believed you were helping build what came next. Reading @jessepollak’s post today reminded me I’ve watched this happen over and over again, to other people and to myself. People outside crypto think the hardest losses are financial. After enough cycles, you realize some of the hardest losses are the stories you had to stop believing, and the futures you had already started living in. I still don’t know if I’ve fully let go of all of mine. Probably not.

jesse.base.eth@jessepollak

2026.07.15 16:17

lots of conversations about base over the last week. wanted to share my candid take after a week of listening and a lot of reflection over the last 6 months. first off - in case it’s not obvious, the first quarter of 2026 was a punch in the face. I spent 2024 and 2025 making a two pronged bet to bring base to the world: (1) builders would unlock the next wave of crypto adoption; (2) adoption would be driven by new onchain-native social experiences - creators, content, messaging. imo we made the right bet on builders, but obviously the wrong bet on social. builders did drive the next wave of crypto adoption - prediction markets, perpetuals, stablecoins - but social was not at the center of it. in fact, the entire social side of the market that many of us had been building towards - farcaster, zora, miniapps, and yes, creator coins - disintegrated completely. I was wrong - whether it was timing wrong (is $ansem a creator coin?) or fully wrong, only time will tell, but regardless, i was definitively wrong. the collateral damage was pretty bad! and this year has been an exercise in eating shit. we realized how our focus on social had meant that base had fallen behind in key areas that were now increasingly critical - we had perps (shoutout avantis!) and prediction markets (shoutout limitless!), but both were well behind scaled competitors. and we had a lot of room to improve in unlocking base as a platform for tokenization and payments that really worked for enterprises. people lost confidence, and CT spectators reminded me weekly of all of my mistakes as often as they could. it felt bad man, still feels bad. but if there’s one thing i’ve learned from the last decade of building in this space, it’s that when things feel the worst, the best thing to do is just put your head down and build. so that’s what i’m doing. I refocused my time and attention back to the chain away from the app, started writing code again, shipped a bunch of stuff (azul, beryl, b20, privacy, ledgers) and questioned a bunch of my assumptions: does crypto need social to grow? does base need an app? can base be bigger than coinbase? I thought for a long time that social was the only thing that could drive the sort of viral growth to get crypto to a billion people. unsurprisingly, I now believe that’s wrong. It’s clear that better money is more than enough - we are seeing this live with stablecoins, predictions, perpetuals, tokenization and i only expect it to accelerate. I am now focused on bringing a billion people onchain just by making global finance actually work. on the app, my focus is on building base into the blockchain for global finance. to that end, i’ve handed the base app back to the coinbase mothership, where my now good friend @cobie will be taking it from here to make it the best damn app for onchain you’ve ever seen, including expanding beyond the base ecosystem in ways that tbh i won’t love as the leader of base. it’s incredibly hard to grow a decentralized network inside of a big public corporation. and i feel like much of the discourse on CT over the last week is downstream of this. the following things can be true: (1) base (and i) love memes and (2) brian probably won’t ever bullpost memes on the tl (this activity is illegal once you’re over 40 years of age). it’s weird and we’re working through it as we continue to decentralize base, which has been our commitment from the beginning. we’re going to build base into the blockchain for global finance and do everything we can to be the place that the world’s money settles over the next century. we will surely have formidable competitors (welcome robinhood and stripe!) and people may abandon our cause, but we welcome the competition and believe it’s our duty to win the respect and commitment of those who rally to our banner. in 2026, this concretely means three things: winning trading, payments, and agents. [continued in the reply]

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