Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news. This week, Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak talks about the ambitious goals of Base, the new Optimism–based blockchain from the publicly traded crypto giant. With the viral success of Base-based Friend.Tech, Jesse discusses the Base team’s ambitious goals to onboard “a million builders, a billion users.” Is this the long-heralded path to scaling Ethereum?
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Show highlights: 

why Jesse says it’s still “day one” for Base

the reason behind Base’s “one million developers, one billion users” slogan

what the advantages of Base are compared to other layer 2 blockchains

how Base accounts for the fact that it doesn’t have a token to incentivize developer activity

how MEV bots represent a big part of the transactions on Base, especially with the emergence of Friend.Tech

why Friend.Tech found early success despite being similar to previous efforts 

Jesse’s response to the fact that fault proofs are not live on any of the OP Stack chains

how much of the revenue generated by Coinbase’s sequencer will be distributed to Optimism

whether Base and Optimism Mainnet compete with each other 

how layer 2 chains are choosing different design paths and how that differentiates them


Hosts


Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly 


Robert Leshner, founder of Compound


Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly 


Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures


Guest

Jesse Pollak, lead contributor at Base
Disclosures
Links

Unchained: Coinbase Launches a New Layer 2 on Ethereum


CoinDesk: Social Platform Friend.tech Gains 100K Users in Days Even in Depths of a Bear Market


TechCrunch: Friend.tech hype is skyrocketing, but will it actually reach the stars?


Decrypt: Base Daily Transactions Outpace Ethereum on Friend.tech Frenzy
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