"We messed up, time to turn the page." Coinbase CEO admits content coins on Base failed

Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, formally put creator coins — tradable tokens tied to individual people or their social posts — at the center of the Base App in July 2025.

The redesigned product, which combined a crypto wallet, social feed, trading platform and payments app, relied heavily on Zora, an on-chain social platform that automatically turns posts into tokens.

The pitch was that nearly every post could become a coin, giving creators a way to earn whenever people bought and sold their content.

• And the push was hardly small. By mid-December, more than 6.5 million creator and content coins had been issued through Zora, according to Crypto Theses 2026, a report from crypto research firm Messari that was recently acquired by Blockworks.

About 6.45 million of them, or 99%, failed to reach even five trades. Only around 17,800 were still being traded 48 hours after launch, the report found. Creators earned a combined $6.1 million from the model.

Now, nearly a year after Coinbase made the strategy central to the Base App, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong has publicly admitted in an X post that the bet failed.

Armstrong walked into the criticism himself

The admission came following a July 13 post from CoinbaseDuck, an X account focused on Coinbase and Base.

• The account predicted that Robinhood Chain, a planned blockchain from retail brokerage Robinhood, would eventually repeat Base's experience with speculative tokens.
• New blockchains can briefly attract attention through meme coins, CoinbaseDuck argued, but that activity often amounts to traders taking money from one another rather than creating lasting value.
• If most of the volume comes from that kind of speculation, the post said, the exchange's own customers ultimately become the losers, potentially damaging trust in its core business.

Base, the account argued, had already gone through that cycle. It suggested the network should now steer users toward "positive sum crypto use case[s]" and treat its customers, liquidity and existing community as its strongest defense against rival blockchains.

Armstrong highlighted that line in an initial reply. "This part is key," he wrote.

And that response opened him up to an obvious question. If positive-sum products were so important, then why had Base spent much of the previous year promoting coins tied to posts, creators and internet personalities?

Armstrong didn't explain what convinced him or Coinbase to pursue the strategy in the first place or what ultimately pushed the company to abandon it and move on to another hot trend in the form of AI agents.

Damage control and controversies

Jessie Pollak, Base's founder, was one of the loudest supporters of content coins on Base.

In June 2025, even before the redesigned Base App was formally announced, Pollak pushed back against what he called the "hatred" filling his X replies over creator and content coins. He pointed to Zora's download figures as evidence that ordinary users were interested in the product.

Two months later, Pollak told his followers that they could use Coinbase to buy a Zora creator coin tied to Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase.

Then, in November, Pollak launched JESSE, a creator coin tied to himself, arguing that the launch was partly intended to reduce the stigma around tokens representing individual people.

Instead, the launch illustrated one of the model's central problems.

• Two fast-moving traders bought more than half of the tokens placed into the initial liquidity pool in the same blockchain block in which trading began, according to a DL News report.
• They later made a combined $1.3 million, while JESSE fell 36% from its peak market value of about $25 million after they sold.

Base had already received an early warning in April 2025, months before Coinbase formally made content coins central to the Base App.

• That month, a post from Base's official X account titled "Base is for everyone" was automatically turned into a token through Zora.
• Its market value briefly climbed to about $17 million before collapsing by roughly 95%.

Coinbase quickly distanced itself from the coin, saying it hadn't launched or promoted it as an official investment product.

Base pivoted without calling the old strategy a failure

The whole retreat from content coins on Base began in January of this year, when Pollak said in an X post the Base App would become "trading-first" after users complained that the product placed too much emphasis on its social feed, resembled a conventional social network and promoted too narrow a selection of assets.

• Under the revised approach, financial products would come first, with social features layered around them.
• That effectively reversed the earlier model, which had started with a social app and inserted token trading into almost every post.

Base made the change clearer in a strategy document published in March. The network listed three broad priorities for 2026.

Global markets, payments and stablecoins. Creator and content coins were no longer presented as a central goal.

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