Written by: Eric, Foresight News

In the early hours of January 13, Beijing time, tuna, a user on X and co-founder of the game studio Pandemic Labs, published a post criticizing Base for its inaction.

In the post, Tuna expressed that the "application-first" philosophy articulated by Jesse, rather than a focus on infrastructure, attracted him to develop products on Base. However, after developing 10 products including games, AI Agents, and prediction markets like zkTLS over a span of "3 years" (the Base mainnet has only been live for about two and a half years), the promised support from Base has yet to materialize.

After launching the hit game Infected and gaining 50,000 followers in a month, Base proactively contacted tuna and promised support, but ultimately nothing came of it. Tuna stated that prior to Infected, they attempted to reach out to Base officials through X, Discord, and Telegram but received no responses.

Disheartened, tuna switched to Solana and developed the game Addicted, which generated $4 million in revenue within 48 hours of its launch on Solana. The stark contrast of $4 million in 2 days compared to nearly 3 years of nothing made tuna lament that compared to Base, which constantly promotes Farcaster and Zora, they finally found an "organization" that treats developers like people.

Shivam Tandon, founder of zkCross Network, had a similar experience. He initially believed in Jesse's narrative of prioritizing products and builders, but after developing Surf on Base, their efforts to contact Base through emails and direct messages also went unanswered. Shivam Tandon expressed that he doesn't see any issue with Base wanting to support projects invested in by Coinbase, but he hopes they can be straightforward and not waste developers' time.

While some very pragmatic users believe that Base has its own preferences and that project failures cannot solely be attributed to this, most people still expressed support for tuna.

The developers' outcry against Base did not start this year; in February 2025, a user named Lamboland on X noted that Base's style seemed insufficiently "degen," pointing out that Coinbase had provided no support for high-traffic projects like Virtuals, yet launched the VVV token on the same day. Lamboland stated that many projects are considering migrating to Solana, with the core reason being Base's marketing disconnect from reality and the lack of "old hands" who understand CT culture to build a good community environment.

Coincidentally, just two weeks ago, Jacek, a member of DEGEN who once airdropped $50 million in tokens to Farcaster users and whose market cap once exceeded $1 billion, also published a long tweet expressing disappointment with Base.

Jacek stated that developers choose Base largely because of the backing of Coinbase, hoping to gain support or brand endorsement from Coinbase. However, as mentioned by the previous two, Base has focused a lot of energy on projects including Zora, while projects like DEGEN, which brought significant traffic to Base, received no attention or retweets from Base's official Twitter. Jacek remarked that for Base, anything that doesn't belong to the mainstream narrative seems to be treated as if it doesn't exist.

Additionally, DEGEN's proposal for a $1 million airdrop on Base and Base App was also ignored. Jacek noted that when DEGEN expressed a desire to cross-chain to Solana, they immediately received attention and support from Solana. At offline events, Solana officials were eager to interact with ecosystem projects and even gave away Bonk keychains, reflecting the respect the officials have for developers and participants. In contrast, Jacek mentioned that while he doesn't mind promoting Zora, the complete disregard for other projects is disappointing.

Interestingly, in the face of such severe public sentiment, neither Base nor Jesse provided any explanations or solutions in response to these tweets. On January 9, Jesse retweeted a post from Base product Nick, expressing Base's willingness to assist developers, but the comments section was filled with skepticism, with the most common question being: how exactly do you plan to help?

Over the past year, Base has indeed been a gold rush, but it almost "suddenly died" after the flagship projects fizzled out. Unlike Solana, Base is part of the Coinbase ecosystem, an extension of the exchange, and its inception inherently carries the attribute of serving stakeholders. Clearly, the unhealthy practices existing within the established Coinbase have also affected Base's operations. Perhaps Base's brief success was indeed bolstered by Coinbase's powerful resources, but the core contributors to its short-lived success remain the talented developers within the community.

Coinbase's plans for Base in 2026 mainly revolve around asset tokenization and the Base App. Coinbase plans to gradually evolve into a comprehensive exchange, with aspects like stock tokenization and commodity tokenization primarily handled by Base. Furthermore, the Base App is also planned to be developed as a Web3 traffic entry point that integrates trading, social interaction, and wallets. This indicates that in the future, Base may continue to adhere to its recognized "mainstream narrative," with its functional significance in supporting Coinbase likely to outweigh the open community itself.

In the past year, Base has attempted to leverage its influence to push projects like Farcaster and Zora, which have capital backing and a "legitimate" narrative, but misjudged the mainstream style of the current market cycle's "madness." For Coinbase, it needs to clarify whether Base is merely a tool for serving the exchange and Coinbase Ventures or a truly open network aimed at the world. If it is the latter, it must follow a principle similar to Solana's: "from the masses, to the masses."

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