During this period, the popularity of the Robinhood chain has stirred up quite a wave in the entire Ethereum Layer 2 expansion ecosystem.

BASE, which has consistently ranked first in TVL metrics, is now feeling a bit restless. Coinbase co-founder Jesse Pollak recently posted a lengthy article online (see reference link at the end) reflecting on his experiences and lessons learned while building the BASE ecosystem over the past few years.

After reading this article, two main points left a deep impression on me:

First, the social applications that Jesse has invested heavily in (including content tokens and creator economy) have basically failed to produce the results he expected.

Second, applications that Jesse overlooked, such as prediction markets, perpetual contracts, and asset tokenization, have instead gained significant popularity.

The social applications that Jesse strongly supported had their first wave of excitement during the ICO in 2017, followed by a brief resurgence in 2021.

During those bubbles, I also observed related applications but was never convinced about whether such applications could give rise to new ecosystems and models in the Web 3 ecosystem, which gradually diminished my interest in them.

As for the later popular applications mentioned by Jesse, such as prediction markets, perpetual contracts, and asset tokenization, I find their surge somewhat surprising.

Because these applications have already existed for quite a long time before the current wave of popularity.

Polymarket launched as early as 2020;

the perpetual contract market (dYdX) was launched even earlier in 2019;

and asset tokenization was created as early as when BM established Steemit.

These applications are not new; they have existed for a long time but have been relatively lukewarm.

This situation is reminiscent of the early stages of the internet bubble that erupted in the late 1990s.

At that time, numerous internet applications (including e-commerce, pets, etc.) sprang up. But soon, with the burst of that bubble, most of those projects were wiped out. In this regard, they fared worse than the aforementioned Web 3 projects.

However, later, after entering the year 2000, especially with the rise of Amazon and Alibaba, those internet projects that had been previously tried and failed were revived.

This time they were proven to be viable, with business models, and able to make money.

This is the cost of bad timing.

Perhaps such a story will unfold again in the crypto ecosystem.

Jesse's reflection reinforces my understanding of this point from another angle:

The formation and innovation of a business ecosystem's success is nearly impossible to design and plan artificially. An ecosystem (social applications) driven vigorously by a force like Coinbase can end up so bleak without market recognition; one can only imagine what happens to others.

Thus, for the development of a platform, the best practice is still to treat every project in the ecosystem fairly, to regard each project as a guest, and to create a favorable ecological environment for all guests uniformly.

This is the method most in line with platform development.

This lack of fairness may precisely be what Jesse and the Base ecosystem have done most controversially in the past two years—applications that could bring huge traffic and users to the BASE ecosystem hardly received attention. It was only when these projects turned to Robinhood and received warm welcome there that Base felt immense pressure.

However, although the Base team has had inconsistent attitudes towards ecosystem projects over the past two years, there's one thing I still haven't figured out:

Base is one of the most vibrant Layer 2 expansions.

But why is it so indifferent to many hot projects? Where does its vitality truly come from?

Especially since many hackers and makers enjoy innovating on BASE, and some well-known hackers even compare BASE to a new Ethereum, believing that BASE has strong geek characteristics and charm.

If BASE were the only ecosystem in Layer 2 expansions, it would be difficult to clarify many issues. Now, with a powerful competitor, this is beneficial for the development of the entire Ethereum ecosystem.

Reference link:

https://x.com/jessepollak/status/2077427261586997745

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