#19 - Jesse Pollak
Episode publishedPodcast: The Network State PodcastThe Network State Podcast
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Jesse, welcome to the New York State podcast. Thanks
for having me. You
and I have kind of had an ongoing sort of philosophical discussion for many years on how, libertarians can learn from progressives and progressives can learn from libertarians. And it's it's funny because I went so far libertarian that it became like a progressive, and I'm like, you know, I need to do community building. I need to do community organizing. Go ahead. No.
Yeah. It's exactly right. I mean, this is when I think back to our time at Coinbase, I I feel like so much of the the fun that we had was thinking about how are all of these different political philosophy is gonna be kind of rewritten in this new world where the Internet defines all of us. And we're actually all looking for kind of new frameworks to think about how the world can come together and how the world can be better than it has been in the past.
So let's go through Base. It's it's really funny how Coinbase was so well named that it managed to not just be, like, easy to pronounce and pass the bar test, but it was also based later on. Like, you managed to launch base when base go ahead.
Yeah. No. I mean, I think that one of the things I always felt about base is that, we just got incredibly lucky in having a name that we could borrow from Coinbase that kind of brought over the trust that had such a metaphorical meaning in terms of being this platform that everyone can build on that was associated with the cultural phenomenon, like, based. That was four letters, really easy to pronounce, totally globally accessible. You know, I think I think there's probably a lot of things we could have gotten wrong, and the name still would have been really, really great. But luckily, over t
You know, one thing I think about, and let's go into details, is base is interesting because it's a coinless chain in the sense of there isn't a native asset on the chain, but it is, it is still useful. And one way of thinking about it is that coin, the stock, is, like, sort of the quasi native asset of base, so it's not, you know, directly there. Or another way of thinking about it is it actually takes aspects of blockchains that we didn't think you could take you know, you didn't think people didn't think you could run a blockchain without a coin, but you can. You can run as like an open sta
I mean, from the beginning of Base, one of the thesis that we had was, if we just focus on building a really great product that solves problems for developers and creators and consumers, that was gonna be a way higher leverage way for us to bring this to market than what we kind of seen for the last few years in terms of people really focusing on the coin and token side of things. And I I think that's proven out to be true. It's been a really good forcing function for us. Right? You know, whereas I think a lot of folks who who'd been building chains otherwise, they said, hey. We're gonna have
Alright. So I wanna go, like, kinda top to bottom. So start with the technical parts of Base, and then I wanna get to why I think Base and and tools like it are Base for building new societies, startup societies, network shades and so on. Okay. Great. So what is the problem that Base was created to solve? I I know this is super basic, but, you know, go.
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