Base Creator Says The Coinbase-Incubated Blockchain Is Prioritizing Creators Over Traders As Fallout Of 'Contentcoin' Debacle Continues

• Base creator Jesse Pollak does not appear to be afraid of offending traders in his quest to defend a controversial token experiment by the project.
• A Pump.fun co-founder has pushed back against Pollak’s statement.
• Base says it wants to drive an on-chain content revolution.

Over the past few days, the team behind Base, the Coinbase Global-incubated COIN Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain, has come under fire over a supposed token experiment that briefly left some market speculators holding the bag. But instead of making concessions or apologizing, the Base team, particularly its lead developer Jesse Pollak, is doubling down. 

Creators Over Traders

Pollak does not appear to be afraid of offending traders in his quest to defend Base’s controversial token experiment. As part of an X post storm he has whipped up to defend the Base team’s actions, the blockchain developer said on Monday that creators, not traders, are the priority of the blockchain.

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“Trading is downstream of creativity. volume is downstream of creativity. growth is downstream of creativity. my #1 priority is growing creators and creativity onchain, everything else will take care of itself,” he wrote.

Unsurprisingly, the statement has sparked pushback. Reacting to Pollak’s statements, Alon Cohen, co-founder of popular Solana memecoin launchpad Pump.fun, argued that traders trumped creators and developers in crypto.

“If traders don’t see value, creators & devs don’t eat and go elsewhere. so if you’re tokenizing anything, traders come first,” he wrote 

But Pollak doubled down.

“I love traders, but our north star is helping creators and developers build their dreams – everything else is downstream of that,” he responded.

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The back and forth culminated in a one-month wager on the prospect of Base’s success with this philosophy.

happy to – i'll still be focused on creators and developers!

— jesse.base.eth (@jessepollak) April 21, 2025

‘Contentcoin’

Last week, Base’s official X account shared an image with the caption “Base is for everyone,” following up a minute later with another post stating “coined it,” linking to Zora, an on-chain social network backed by Coinbase that tokenizes content, where users could purchase a token based on the post.

Unsurprisingly, many did. The token’s value quickly soared to $17 million. But just as speculators started to ride the high, the token quickly crashed 96% to around $720,000, leaving many holding the bag. 

The crash came as early buyers dumped en masse as Base continued to create new tokens, splitting attention and triggering confusion.

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In the aftermath of the chaos, the Base team said that the token launches were part of an experiment to encourage people to put their content on-chain. 

“Someone has to normalize putting all of our content onchain. and i’m not afraid for it to be us. why? because in the wake of the chaos, we’ll normalize the behavior and create a better future for creators,” Pollak said, linking to a series of posts explaining how the tokens launched by Base differed from memecoins.

Pollak defined the so-called contentcoins as representing a single content with singular value and no expectations. But these arguments about intent did not stop many from bashing Base’s execution. 

For example, Now Media founder Matthew Medved said that Base’s approach hurt user trust.

“Base could’ve more obviously framed this as an open experiment. Instead, the post dropped without the proper context, and the ‘content coin' explanation came only after the crash. The stunt succeeded in capturing attention, but it came at the cost of trust. What could’ve been a meaningful test of media infrastructure ended up looking like just another rug pull,” he wrote.

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