Bitcoin Is Coming For The Banks | Jesse Pollak

Jesse Pollak’s central claim is that crypto has found product-market fit in global, 24/7, low-cost financial services, beyond Bitcoin as a store of value and speculation. After earlier product attempts stalled, his team built Base as fast, low-cost, trusted infrastructure for Coinbase and other businesses to bring financial activity on-chain. Pollak says Base has $6 billion in total value locked, has passed Solana, and is the world’s second-largest financing marketplace after Ethereum. He also describes it as crypto’s largest spot marketplace for major-crypto trading and the leading chain for USDC money-movement volume.

Pollak expects blockchain rails to carry a much larger share of financial activity: currently, less than 1% of the world’s dollars and equities move on-chain, but he anticipates 10%, 50%, and eventually 90% over the next five to ten years. He calls institutional adoption a form of mainstream adoption, even if retail holders do not benefit immediately. Consumers may continue to use banks and brokerages, while Base operates underneath as the settlement and financial-services infrastructure. Coinbase is working with JPMorgan on deposit tokens for 24/7 transfers and settlement, and with Citi on stablecoin deposits and payouts powered by Coinbase that let customers move USDC in and out of bank accounts. Pollak says Coinbase has had a good business relationship with JPMorgan for a decade and calls the bank almost crypto-native.

Base aims to make financial rails ten times cheaper, faster, and more globally accessible than legacy systems, while smart contracts enable products beyond payments. Shopify uses Base for on-chain payment capture, refunds, and escrow, with tens of millions of dollars in volume. Pollak says emerging customers include neobanks, neobrokerages, agentic finance platforms, banks, and traditional brokerages. Coinbase Developer Platform also makes Coinbase’s internal infrastructure available to outside builders, enabling financial firms to create products using a copy of Coinbase’s feature set. Pollak sees the opportunity as still less than 1% realized.

Base is also intended to make Bitcoin more useful through smart contracts and financial services, including Bitcoin trading, loans against Bitcoin, and Bitcoin lending. Pollak says Base has the world’s biggest Bitcoin borrowing and trading markets, alongside rails for instant, free, global Bitcoin payments. He expects these services to make Bitcoin more valuable, useful, and accessible, while treating its role as a global store of value and “digital gold” as already established over 17 years. In his view, inflation and instability could make Bitcoin more integral to society.

Tokenized equities launched on Base with Coinbase about eight weeks before the discussion. Pollak says the previous day’s volume was about $100 million, including roughly $15 million in Google shares; after Google’s earnings, its tokenized shares traded around the clock. At the time, these products were globally accessible but unavailable to US customers, and international brokerages and neobanks were using them to offer US stocks in places including Indonesia, Nigeria, Korea, and Japan. Coinbase and Base structure the products as fully backed securities, not derivatives or debt, with holders receiving stock, voting rights, and dividends. Pollak says this avoids pooled voting blocks and debt arrangements that could harm a company’s stock. More than 30 companies had reportedly opted out during a 30-day innovation-exemption period, though the exemption had not become a rule; some companies may be waiting rather than opting out permanently.

Tokenized shares can also be used in DeFi borrowing and lending, including borrowing USDC against stocks or lending shares for carry-trade and short-selling strategies. Those markets had launched about two and a half weeks earlier and held roughly $20 million, with borrowing rates around 3–4% and potential annual lending yields of 2–3%. Pollak expects tokenized equities to reach US markets through the SEC’s innovation exemption. He says long-tail stocks have sometimes traded more on Base than on traditional venues and that Base demand has driven price appreciation on venues such as the NYSE; he expects education, data, and issuer-friendly examples to persuade companies, potentially creating a cascade.

Pollak says AI agents already drive a large share of some Base transactions, including through x402, although agent payments remain small relative to total payment volume. Grokbot, using Coinbase for Agents, accounts for about 60–70% of that service’s volume, which Pollak says is growing into the hundreds of millions of dollars. He expects 2026 to bring emerging agentic payments and 2027 to bring agentic finance, but says trust and tooling gaps still prevent agents from managing finances at mainstream scale. His own agents handle tasks such as bookkeeping, budgeting, investment updates, trading on Coinbase, and accessing yield; he sees an opportunity for Coinbase to provide trusted AI-native infrastructure through which agents can trade across an “everything exchange.”