"If you want Jesse or me to pump your bags or shill certain coins, we're also not going to do that."
But that denial is contradicted by Jesse Pollak's documented promotional history.
As The Coinformer reported, Pollak directed followers to buy a Zora creator coin tied to former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan and later launched and promoted his own JESSE token.
JESSE briefly reached a roughly $25 million valuation before falling, while two early traders reportedly extracted $1.3 million.
Just days after publicly admitting that Base, Coinbase's Ethereum Layer-2 network, had "messed up" its creator coin experiment, Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and chief executive of Coinbase, a U.S.-regulated crypto exchange, found himself at the center of another very Base-style mess.
- Users on X mocked Armstrong for using a profile picture resembling a CryptoPunk, one of 10,000 pixelated collectibles on Ethereum, because, according to them, he didn't even own the matching NFT.
- Armstrong quickly ditched it for "Coinbase Man," a comic book-style illustration depicting him as a crypto superhero, and wrote, "New profile photo - who dis."
- Plenty of degens apparently did.
A community-created memecoin called BRIAN quickly showed up on Base, and Armstrong's new avatar was enough for traders to treat it as a signal and pile in, even though he didn't create the token, endorse it or claim any connection to it.
At one point, BRIAN's market value climbed above $30 million and attracted more than 10,000 holders. But the frenzy lasted about as long as Armstrong's new profile picture, per data from DEX Screener, a dashboard for tracking tokens launched on blockchains.
Then, on July 18, Armstrong bought a genuine CryptoPunk for about $200,000 and changed his avatar again.
And that second switch appeared to kill the entire story traders had built around the BRIAN memecoin as speculators rushed for the exit.
BRIAN memecoin price. Source: DEX Screener
BRIAN memecoin price. Source: DEX Screener
BRIAN memecoin price. Source: DEX Screener
- The memecoin plunged by as much as 95%, wiping out most of its value after generating about $13 million in trading volume.
- As of press time, the BRIAN memecoin has less than $2 million in market capitalization, the data shows.
- The crash quickly turned into another fight over Base as many accused Armstrong and the network's leadership of hyping crypto culture when it suited them and then abandoning users once the joke was over.
- Others, though, were less sympathetic, arguing that anyone buying an unofficial memecoin tied to a billionaire's temporary profile picture was knowingly walking into a casino.