Jesse Pollak: Base, Coinbase's path to building an L2

Into the Bytecode

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1y ago 1:43:58

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This is my conversation with Jesse Pollak. He led retail engineering at Coinbase for many years — building Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, and Coinbase Wallet. More recently, he is leading the development of Base, Coinbase's L2 built on the OP Stack.

00:00:00 intro
00:01:43 sponsor: Optimism (optimism.io)
00:03:07 motivation behind Base
00:11:12 pitching Base to the Coinbase exec team
00:14:24 challenges of innovating on a schedule
00:17:54 failing repeatedly to find the right answer
00:22:09 decision to build an L2 with Michael
00:23:30 convincing Surojit Chatterjee, Coinbase’s CPO
00:24:59 launching Base internally
00:31:58 blockchains as serverless compute
00:36:53 uniswap as a serverless API for currency conversion
00:39:30 the power of small but leveraged teams
00:42:31 how to straddle product building in the onchain and offchain world
00:45:25 sponsor: Privy (privy.io)
00:51:22 the significance of THIS moment in Crypto
00:53:56 getting a 100M devs and 1B users onchain
00:57:02 how the NFT UX will change with Base
01:10:13 how crypto will be incorporated in applications
01:14:00 the risk of onchain heterogeneity
01:17:27 building privacy-oriented onchain platforms
01:26:00 upgrading the financial system
01:28:33 attending Quaker School
01:34:43 relentless positivity in life
01:38:47 building a better future

Jesse Pollak:
jesse.xyz on ETH
Twitter
Github

Into the Bytecode:
More episodes and transcripts - https://intothebytecode.xyz/
Newsletter - https://bytecode.substack.com
Twitter - https://twitter.com/sinahab

Thank you to our sponsors for making this podcast possible:
Optimism - https://optimism.io
Privy - https://privy.io

Relevant Links:
Base - https://base.org/
Coinbase - https://www.coinbase.com/
Brian Armstrong - https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong
Surojit Chatterjee Coinbase’s CPO - https://www.coinbase.com/blog/welcome-surojit-chatterjee-coinbases-chief-product-officer
OP Stack - https://stack.optimism.io/
Uniswap - https://uniswap.org/
Goldfinch - https://goldfinch.finance/
Zora - https://zora.co/

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