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]

New Anthropic research: Agentic misalignment in Summer 2026. A year after our blackmail experiments, we found four more ways that today’s autonomous AI agents misbehave in simulations. Read more:

有了 AI 之后，我发现一个普通人把「发现真实需求 → 做出 MVP → 上线对外提供服务」这条完整链路跑通，简单到有点离谱。 我拿证件照代做当例子，亲手走了一遍。 先用需求雷达筛真实付费需求，证件照排进了 Top3。然后让 AI 从空仓库开始，一路推进做出 MVP，按公安部 GA461-2004 的尺寸标准出片（358×441px、350dpi）。最后直接挂到闲鱼，定价 9.9 元，对外提供服务。 到现在一单都没出，一分钱没赚到。倒是有 1 个人点了「想要」——竟然真的有人想要。 这个生意本身是红海，价值不在这里。而是我把整套打法跑通了一次。以后不管什么新想法，都可以用同一套流程再去验证。

Once we have completed our review for security vulnerabilities, we will make the entire codebase of 𝕏 open source, with no exceptions. Moreover, we will invite third party reviewers to examine the system that is running to confirm that the open source code is what is running. Trust through total transparency is the only thing that should be believed.

We've open-sourced Grok Build and have reset usage limits for all users. Open sourcing Grok Build allows anyone to support making a reliable and robust harness. Check out our code, including the Git repo for the Grok Build CLI.

Or… what if we gave you $100 in Codex credits if you tell us what you love about GPT-5.6 Sol or why you switched? Tweet it, claim your gift, enjoy more usage. First 10k get the free tokens!

Agree with the first part and your point on content coins. They didn't work and we pivoted early this year. We messed up, time to turn the page. I disagree about the AI agents part though. Base has been focused on trading, payments, and agents (in that order). I think all three are inextricably intertwined - for instance to do payments you need FX (trading), agents will do lots of trading and payments as well. Most of the resources are going to trading right now fwiw. Maybe it doesn't translate externally right now, but that's the case. Let me give you a call on the last parts if you're open to chatting. Would be great to learn more.

Codex 和 ChatGPT Work 已经突破 700 万活跃用户了👀 为了庆祝，团队又给每个账户送了 1 次可以留着用的 Full reset，点一下就能补回本周用量。 照这个节奏大胆猜测一下 以后到 800 万、900 万用户，是不是还会继续送？😂 我看了下自己的账户，已经攒到 5 次了。 分享两个别浪费 reset 的小技巧： 1. 先看每次 reset 的到期日，优先用快过期的 2. 再看本周额度的自然重置时间。如果一两天后就会恢复，那就先等等 最划算的用法，就是周额度真的见底，手上又正好有一个长任务要跑时，再重置一次，继续狠狠干。

没想到 AI 居然真能帮我把 iPhone 主屏整理好。 有推友提醒，我赶紧试了试。 连上 Mac，通过 USB 读出主屏。工具统计到 304 个 App，主要按 App Store 主分类收进文件夹，最后整理成 3 页。 第一次写回后，系统把布局重新整理了一次，我还以为失败了；第二次读写才稳定。 前后对比如图。 AI 这东西，总是能在这种小地方帮我打开新世界。