Jesse Pollak: Base Is Winning Trading, Stablecoins, And Payments (The Numbers Prove It)

Base TVL is up 35% since the start of 2025 while every other ecosystem is down, and Jesse Pollak claims Base is now the second largest financing market in the world for borrowing and lending and growing faster than any other ecosystem. Bitcoin and Ethereum trade more on Base than on any other chain in the world from a spot perspective, and approximately 90% of X402 agentic HTTP transactions are processed on Base, with agents buying inference, data, consumer goods, and services. AWS has enabled X402 monetization in CloudFront, allowing customers to convert bot-overrun content into a revenue stream.

On financing, a customer who found both CeFi and internal crypto-backed loan systems too expensive and too slow is now rolling out a financing product on Base that is instant and offers lower rates than anywhere else in the world. Pollak argued that every financial institution will eventually move to crypto rails because they are cheaper, faster, and more global, and he expects Base to eventually host millions or billions of economic agents conducting payments, trading, and accessing credit.

Pollak described Base's long-term vision as becoming an internet exchange where every asset, including stocks, crypto majors, commodities, and long-tail attention assets, is traded. He sees Base as the backend powering financial services for Coinbase, Phantom, eToro, and other brokerages coming on chain. Aerodrome is now one of the largest exchanges in the world and originated on Base, and Virtuals and Bankr also originated on Base before expanding elsewhere.

Venice is doing approximately 90 million dollars in annualized run rate and invented tokenized inference by creating markets where people price and consume inference on Base, which Pollak described as probably one of the biggest consumer apps in crypto today. Avantis is a perps venue on Base that has been growing but lacks the scale of billions of dollars in volume, and Pollak identified building a scaled perps venue as a big priority for the second half of the year, calling its absence a missing piece preventing better financial products on Base. Kobe joined Base and continues to actively weigh in on strategy, and his background as a decade-long crypto trader has directly influenced Base's prioritization of perps and spot market foundations.

The Genius Act stablecoin bill created regulatory certainty that Pollak credited with contributing to dramatic growth in stablecoins month over month and quarter over quarter, with approximately 500 million people around the world currently holding stablecoins. The Clarity Act has bipartisan support and passed out of committee with votes from both sides, but prediction markets put the odds of passage at only 15 to 18 percent, with Kalshi showing increased odds of passage in 2027 or 2028 rather than sooner. Pollak argued that crypto adoption will continue regardless of whether Clarity passes because the technology is inevitable, pointing to remittance costs of around 40 dollars today as an example of the burden stablecoins can reduce.

Base announced in September of the prior year that it was starting to explore a token, shifting from a previous stance of not thinking about it for the first two and a half years, though Pollak said no immediate update was available at the time of the interview. He stated that Base's long-term goal is to be a decentralized global network and that decentralization is the only way to achieve that goal.