The plan proved a miserable failure. Bank-backed blockchain projects like R3 raised large sums of money, but failed to take off, as critics—correctly for the most part—dismissed them as glorified databases that would give preferential treatment to whoever owned them. As it turned out, Bitcoin-style decentralization mattered a lot.
Pollak says that this era of corporate blockchains, or at least Base, is different. He has a point in that Pollak is a true crypto native, not a blow-in from the corporate sector, and that design choices for the Base chain reflect a decentralized ethos.
“We don’t want to re-create the old systems with new tech. From day one, we’ve focused on decentralization. Not just talk—we’ve taken real steps. First, we built Base as an Ethereum L2, not an isolated chain. Second, we built on the OP Stack, an open standard. Third, we moved from stage 0 to stage 1 decentralization earlier this year in collaboration with Optimism and others,” he said, describing technical aspects of Base.
Coinbase began floating the idea of a token last month, and if it goes forward, it will attract significant interest from both builders and speculators. So how and when will the Base token arrive?
Pollak was careful in his answer, saying that Coinbase is determined not to rush the token deployment, and that it is not planning to announce a release date anytime soon.
He did, though, acknowledge that token launches have a troubled history, and that they have often served to enrich their backers at the expense of the broader community tied to the blockchain. In response, Pollak said Coinbase is treading carefully, while also working with projects on Base that have issued tokens of their own in a responsible fashion—including one called Aerodrome that had a “fully fair launch.”
