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]

我越来越觉得一把手必须对赚钱与商业竞争这件事本身上瘾。 我们过去会把很多重点放在能力结构上，谁懂产品、谁懂技术、谁懂用户，但这些二把手都可以补上。 我们也很希望支持有情怀的founder，可最终如果一把手对商业竞争没有天然的兴奋感，公司迟早会卡住。 不是不能有情怀，而是商业世界不是靠"做对的事"赢的，而是靠"赢"本身。 所谓"狼性文化"，其实是对结果的饥渴感。这种东西是装不出来的，商业社会里，它来自于创始人本身对"赢"和"赚钱"的真实快感。

If AI succeeds: 中产阶级的劳动力价值归零, 全面不可逆的通缩，商品和服务的供给无限丰富，就算有UBI但有效需求被摧毁。外加现在市场大量net flow都是passive 401k/pension flow .. 一旦reverse big tech 估值画面太美不敢看🫣 If AI fails: 连Google这种超级现金奶牛的连百年债都发完, 忍痛咬牙做股权稀释融资也做了，但如果 token economics UE转正的速度追不上 capex扩张, 基建折旧和能源成本，big tech估值也是画面太美不敢看🥹 横竖看都是大家一起梭哈死了算了🤣

CLOBs are not going to take us to the RWA promised land. Today Hyperliquid owns the liquidity for a handful of RWA macro names. But outside the top 10 traded assets (which are ~90% of volume) liquidity falls off a cliff. When there's enough retail demand, order books can work. But "perps on everything" is a different problem, and TradFi solved it decades ago. The answer isn't every venue rebuilding its own order book. That's not what Robinhood does, it's not what Schwab does, and it's not what DeFi should be doing either. Building your own book for every asset means bootstrapping demand ticker by ticker, renting liquidity with subsidies, and ending up with thin markets that blow out 200x the moment news hits. It's like sucking the ocean of TradFi liquidity through a straw. Variational skips all of it via the RFQ model. RFQ is how institutions like Dragonfly actually trade. In RFQ, dealers quote just-in-time and hedge on the primary venue as orders come in. This lets Variational mainline TradFi liquidity directly and mirror it on-chain. Margin in smart contracts, settlement in stablecoins, liquidity aggregated from the people who already trade on the biggest underlying markets, like the CME and NYSE. It makes it permissionless to access the same depth and spreads the big boys get. With the cold start problem gone, new markets can ship at the speed of software. By next year I expect RWA perps to be the biggest contract class on-chain, bigger than BTC and ETH perps combined. That's how crypto truly becomes the market for everything. I believe the platform that wins that won't look like a traditional exchange. Proud to lead Variational's $50M Series A. Watch this space.

We’re excited to co-host an intimate VVIP dinner with @OndoFinance and LTP @LTP_primebroker in HK this week, bringing together deep pockets capital allocators & leaders across TradFi, DeFi and RWAs trading and issuance If you’re in town and building at the frontier of institutional-grade finance onchain, join us: