Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak, Head of Protocols, lately sat down with Cointelegraph’s Andrew Singer at Messari’s Mainnet convention in New York Metropolis on 20 September 2023. The interview lined a variety of matters, together with Coinbase’s comparatively new blockchain, Base, the potential of decentralized functions (DApps), and the way forward for blockchain expertise.
When requested about Coinbase’s imaginative and prescient for Base, Pollak acknowledged that the main focus is not only on Base however on bringing a billion customers into the blockchain ecosystem. He sees this occurring inside the present decade and believes that Base will play a vital function in attaining this imaginative and prescient. Pollak outlined three key areas that want enchancment for mainstream adoption: lowering prices, enhancing pockets experiences, and establishing higher on-chain identification techniques. Particularly, Base has already diminished the price of utilizing sure apps from $5-$10 to only 5-10 cents, however Pollak believes additional reductions are vital.
Pollak additionally touched on the speculative nature of the crypto market. He argued that hypothesis is a pure a part of technological innovation and has been instrumental in attracting capital to the sector. Nonetheless, he believes that the trade has reached some extent the place it must transition from hypothesis to utility.
On the subject of Ethereum, Pollak revealed that Coinbase had thought-about constructing its personal layer-1 blockchain however in the end determined to construct Base as a layer-2 on Ethereum. He cited Ethereum’s giant and energetic ecosystem as a big issue on this resolution. Pollak acknowledged that whereas Ethereum’s scalability points haven’t been fully resolved, progress has been made by way of initiatives like EIP-4844, which Coinbase supported.
Pollak additionally mentioned the preliminary success of Good friend.tech, a social media DApp on Base that generated over $1 million in charges inside 24 hours of its launch. He defended the significance of social apps within the blockchain house, stating that they provide customers extra management over their knowledge and creativity.
One other DApp that caught Pollak’s consideration is Blackbird, a buyer engagement platform for eating places at present working in New York Metropolis and shortly increasing to California. Pollak believes that such DApps have the potential to revolutionize varied sectors.
In conclusion, Pollak doesn’t imagine there will likely be a single “killer app” for blockchain. He sees a number of functions, like stablecoins, which have the potential to considerably impression individuals’s lives. Pollak is optimistic that the blockchain will see many such transformative functions within the years to return.
Featured Picture through Coinbase