Unchained - Base Will Likely Have a Token: Why Now, Who Wins, and How Big It Gets - Ep. 904

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Base just crossed its own Rubicon. After months of saying “no token,” Jesse Pollak now says Base must decentralize and is “exploring” a token. What changed?  On this episode, Proof of Play��s ICO Beast and former Coinbase Ventures investor Ryan Yi unpack why “exploring” is the operative word, how policy (the Clarity Act) could shape the rollout, and what a points-driven airdrop might look like.  We dig into governance realism (what Coinbase will and won’t give up), token utility and valuation math, and how a Base↔Solana bridge could ignite a fight for DeFi liquidity while Solana keeps winning Gen-Z consumers. Mantle is pioneering "Blockchain for Banking" — a revolutionary new category at the intersection of TradFi and web3. Thank you to our sponsor Mantle! Follow Mantle to learn more. Guests:  Ico Beast, Merchant of Narratives at Proof of Play Ryan Yi, Ex Coinbase, Coinbase Ventures, and CoinFund Links: Unchained:  Base Starts to Explore a Native Token LayerZero Fought the Sybils and Airdropped Its Token. Did the Team Win? Why the War Over the USDH Ticker on Hyperliquid Is Bullish for Crypto Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 😲 1:32 Why Ryan says this step feels right but is also “shocking” 🧐 3:21 Why Base announced it was exploring a token rather than just launching one 🛠️ 5:19 How Ryan views Base’s decision to stay committed to Ethereum 📊 7:43 What Ryan thinks a fair token allocation would look like ⚖️ 13:43 How the Clarity Act could shape a Base token rollout 🎁 16:23 Will Coinbase distribute through an ICO, an airdrop, or something else? 📈 23:32 Why ICO Beast has a different take on the right allocation 🛡️ 26:10 Why sybil filters will be critical for Base 💡 27:50 What the Base token’s utility could be—and how to value it 🌉 37:24 What the announced Base ↔ Solana bridge could mean ⚔️ 42:08 Whether Ethereum and Solana are heading for a DeFi liquidity war 🔥 45:25 How competition across crypto companies is heating up Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let's say base token came out today. Like, what would it trade at? I would probably conservatively think that it could probably come out at like $20 billion. I think it could probably run to like $40 or $50. It will definitely renew more interest in days, especially when mine share across blockchains is, you know, it's a very hard thing in capturement. That does that, like, open up questions of, do coin shareholders get some kind of claim to it? Because there is, I believe, revenue numbers that are shared on the Coinbase balance,

sheet based off of the base sequencer. And so you get into some like weird, weird areas of understanding whether or not there is some sort of claim to shareholders and they have like a fiduciary duty there. I have no idea, but that's a complicated angle. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchanged, your no-hip resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Mantle is pioneering blockchain for banking of revolutionary new category at the intersection of Tradfye and Web3. Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. Today's topic is the updates from Basecamp.

They're exploring a token, which that, you know, sent shock waves throughout the system, even though, interestingly, I'm sure most people, if they had to bet money, they would have bet that that was going to happen at some point. But here to discuss is Ryan Yee, most recently of Coinbase Ventures and prior to that coin fund. And in a little bit, we'll also be joined by ICO Beast, merchant of narratives at Proof of Play. Welcome, Ryan. Hey, Laura. Thanks for having me. So at Base Camp today, Jesse Pollock said that base has to become decentralized, and he also announced that they're exploring a base token for the first time. This is big news,

because for so long, they had said that they were not interested in doing that. It's even in the ex-bio. So what was your first reaction to hearing that they're exploring having a token? Yeah, I think it's a very exciting development. I think that naturally as base has grown a lot, it's obviously grown without the use of a token or a gigap token, which kind of goes to show you how much sort of fundamental growth on the user side and builder's side. That base has been able to track without it. And, you know, obviously it sounds like the base team now feels that for their next leg of growth, they have sort of a critical mass, at least of building. and liquidity on the chain that to kind of supercharge and to really compete at the largest levels, they're now explored a token to be able to do that. So it feels like a natural evolution,

but it's still a pretty shopping thing at year, especially from a company like Coinbase, who is centralized in public. And I think this is a their big move for that. Yeah. Yeah. And for them being the first crypto company in the S&P 500, there's just a lot of, you know, regulatory things that they have on them that, you know, kind of make it just something a bit more challenging. I mean, he kept emphasizing that they're going to do this in a regulatory compliant manner. But obviously, the path for that has not been charted yet. I was curious, why do you think they're announcing that they're exploring doing a token rather than just launching one? I think that there's probably a lot of unanswered questions on their side, too.

like, you know, as you know, launching a token is no small thing. There's a lot of details that goes into it. Allocation, utility, how do we sort of talk about this thing in public? I think there are kind of two things, right? So one is that now that users and builders are aware that there is going to be a base token, I think you're going to have just a surge of activity that's happening. That's going to happen over base at this time. A lot of users pay for transactions.

It's going to attract a lot more builder teams to actually deploy on top of base. And then I think on top of that, they just released the new base at TDA, which has a waitlist. And I would imagine that that weightless is only going to want to grow even bigger and bigger. So I think by announcing this, it will definitely renew more interest in base, especially when mine share across blockchains is, you know, it's a very hard thing. capture mine share. So I think it kind of serves that purpose. Yeah. And then secondly, I think there's just a lot of complex details that they're probably still trying to iron out right now. And I think the big thing too here is there is obviously regulation and legislation that's

passing through the U.S. Congress right now related to how to classify certain tokens. And so I'm sure that's an important input that they're probably waiting to see how that's going to pan out before they finalized the details of what they want to do. Yeah, yeah. But I don't know. I still feel like, I mean, they could have just launched one. But I guess maybe it's more like controlling the narrative because even if they had just decided to launch one at some point, somebody might have leaked that this was going to happen.

So one other thing is, you know, he said that to kill the fud, they were committed to building on Ethereum. And I found that interesting. I mean, it's a very short clip, but the rationale he gave was something like, we benefit from being part of a connected global economy. And I wondered what you thought about that decision. Like, you know, I could argue it both ways.

I could see, you know, Ethereum, obviously, is not going to be going anywhere anytime soon. It's extremely decentralized. But at the same time, crypto hasn't really gone mainstream. And so, you know, there's this. competition amongst similar blockchains. And it's, I feel like the, you know, the end result of that isn't necessarily like decided. So I wondered what your thoughts were about how, you know, they committed to building on Ethereum.

Yeah, I think it shows alignment that, you know, I think Ethereum is definitely on its path now. It's becoming institutionalized as an asset and a chain, right? And so if you ask any, you know, buddy on Wall Street right now and you'll ask, What are the three, what are the three things that you know about crypto? They're probably going to say that coin, stable coins and Ethereum at this point. And so, you know, base has been built on EVM. That's been a decision that they've made early on. And I think as Ethereum, as basically the settlement chain for all types of assets,

begin to start to really take form on the Wall Street level of institutionalization. I almost see base as kind of like the front front. footed, sort of like institutional and retail BDR of the theory of in a way, especially like in the American side of things, right? So yeah, I think the benefit is obviously that, you know, they can grow with the theory. I was going to say, I don't know if you remember on the chopping block, Tarun, he basically said at one point, he was like, oh, it's B&B for for white people. But anyway. No comment.

But keep going. cut you off. No, just to say that, you know, I think Ethereum has continued to have critical mass among developers. And so, you know, base is obviously contributing to that. And so, you know, it's more of like, we might as well align on the thing that's already working. And, you know, with us now, this, this thing becomes bigger collectively. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm curious how you think they're going to launch. Actually, before, no, before we get there, how, what do you think the token allocation will look like? Or what do you think it should look like? So two questions. What do you think it will look like and what do you think it should look like? Yeah. So I think at the very least, you know,

if you look at a typical token projects allocation, it's really divided between three people. So one is the team itself. The second is the early backers and the treasury. And then the third is a community. So I think if you were to take that analogy to, its base token. It's pretty one to one, right? I would expect that a large portion of it would probably be held by Coinbase on their balance sheet. Define large. Is that? I'd probably say anywhere between like, yeah, like 20 to 40 percent, I would guess. I would say that there's probably an additional, you know, 20 percent held by like an independent treasury, which is managed between, you know, the base team, Coinbase and the other participants in the community. And then I think the rest

will go to the broader community, whether that's through a public sale, whether that's through air drops, whether that's through sort of a continuous distribution method. But yeah, I would guess that over time you basically build enough ownership to, especially my Coinbase's side, to incentivize Coinbase to continue to, you know, provide value and provide flows on top of base. And so when you say, because initially you started by saying like the team and then the investors and the ecosystem. So, like, are you putting Coinbase in the investor bucket or the team bucket? So it's basically both. I think it all depend on kind of like how the base team actually ends up spinning about spinning out whether as like an independent entity or not.

I think the way that I would probably think about it in the first way is that there's maybe formally there is like some spin out that happens at the entity level, uh, particularly potentially that entity will probably continue to be a subsidiary under Coinbase in some capacity. And then Coinbase will probably have some internal compensation plan related to the base tokens that Coinbase owns. And then they basically are able to distribute that to the team. So when I use the word Coinbase here, this is more all-encompassing because that also includes the team allocation as well. That's probably how I think about it. And I guess like when, so you're saying like base might be spun out.

So like what do you think that could look like? And if that were to happen, you still feel like coin base would keep like some portion of the tokens or yeah, just talk about that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you know, up until this point, Coinbase has been, you know, funding the team of of base, right? Whether that's their salaries and tech costs and all these things. You know, they're basically treated as like another internal product group at Coinbase.

So I would imagine that that continues in terms of the relationship between, you know, base as like a product team or like as a team in general, in relation to playing base. It's just that, you know, there probably goes, instead of thinking through traditional like, you know, gang pay for point base equity or something like that, that probably changes to something that's more in line with, you know, distributing base tokens. And so I think there's that angle. there's also another angle here where maybe the base team actually does spit out as like an independent entity fully. And then, you know, maybe Coinbase does own them 100% as a separate entity.

And then they still have this like formal relationship between, you know, you guys are building on base, helping hit certain KPI's, helping hit certain, you know, metrics that we hold you to. And that's related to the amount of budget that we're willing to give you from a cash. perspective or like a token perspective. But, you know, I think like the details like TDD, but I think at a very high level functionally, you should just think of this as like, you know, the base team continuing what they're doing right now. But, you know, then kind of being treated as this arm's length project related to Coinbase. Okay. And basically you think that that's how they'll quote unquote decentralized base. Like they'll make it sort of like the uniswap labs of base or something, like the front end. Is that what you're saying? Okay. Yeah, probably. Probably.

And you're just, you're just like, like why is it that you're saying that that and are you saying that you think that's likely or just like a possibility? Like how, you know, where is this coming from? I mean, it's just based on looking at how most startups, I think in the crypto space are effectively structured today. Right. So I feel like at most startups, especially the US startups, they have, you know, what is like an offshore foundation that actually issues the token and manages the community. And then you have the onshore team, which is usually some equity company like a Delaware, like C-Corp or something like that. And that is the entity that owns all the IP. That's the entity that all the team is employed under. And they're the ones that are actually building

products and the roadmap. Right. And so I would imagine that this probably has something that looks very similar where, you know, the base team as is, is like the base labs or base equity entity, like whatever we want to call it. Like, that's probably still, you know, has a formal relationship in terms of ownership to Coinbase, the parent organization. But then the actual token, how that decides to get issued, I don't know, but, you know, that might be through like some offshore entity, but that offshore entity would probably be issuing tokens of which that allocation would be going to Coinbase and that pointix manages, you know, how those base Hopkins are distributed internally.

And okay, but why are you saying offshore entity? Like, at least the way that I was interpreting some of just your remarks about how they want to do this in a compliant manner and everything is like, I thought they were basically saying, we're going to be lobbying for, you know, like the Clarity Act is coming up, right? So like, I assumed that they're saying like, you know, because like Coinbase has a huge presence in D.C. Like we all know, they're very influential there or recently influential. they haven't always been. But the point is that like, you know, my thought was like, the rules around all of this are not being, they haven't been hammered out, but they are being hammered out. And they could be hammered out in a way that would enable Coinbase to spin out base in this way.

And potentially, then that would be how base would decentralize. What do you think of my hypothesis? Yeah, I think that's completely right, right? Like, I don't think this token launches until clarity I've decided to walk. I think that is the big, if I could think about like from a timing perspective, that's probably one of the biggest capitalists. I know that right now, clarity got passed in the House, but, you know, it needs to go through the Senate. And it's also like unclear, even if this does become legislation, there's probably sub-buffer period after that in which, like, these laws can actually start to be enacted. But, you know, just as a TLDR of like the high-level drop about, you know, lawyer or regular or anything, but just based on my,

I read of it, it effectively establishes, hey, like, what is, you know, there are tokens, and on one side there are commodities and there are securities, you know, where in that spectrum, this is token basically why. And I think based on the different rules or the different sort of guidance that clarity might give for those goalposts, that should be able to give a much better sense of, you know, what type of token do we actually want to launch at space? And therefore, what does that actually mean in terms of the set that's required around the rules of decentralization, that might then basically impact how we would actually go about, you know, the entity structuring or the allocation structuring or like the token structuring, right? So my feeling is that

they want to make this token as we all quote, quote, decentralized as possible, which means they want to make this token as the furthest away from what would be traditionally called like a security token, like, you know, so like a tokenized security or, like a tokenized thought, they definitely probably don't want this to be in that side of the spectrum. They definitely want this to be more in the spectrum of, you know, what we would call like a traditional like utility token, like ETH or these other tokens like L2 tokens, L1 tokens that are out there. Right. Yeah. I mean, that it makes a lot of sense. So let's now also talk about, you know, how we think they're going to launch this. You know, you kind of mentioned like the base

staff, which, you know, obviously would be a great way to then design some kind of air drop. And I see Obest, who's going to be on the show in a little bit, said, and this is, this is not something I have been able to confirm. So, you know, he basically said that this is a quote unquote leak that he got from base camp and X.com. So, you know, TBD on the rest of that. But he's saying, and this is not out of the realm of either possibility or even, you know, just common sense. He said, base is going to be launching a points farming campaign in Q4, 2025, including Base Blue. He also said hearing rumors of NFT stats, bringing back his prediction arc for value estimates. So anyway, so what do you, what do you think would be, what do you think

would be the optimal way for Coinbase to launch this token, you know, whether AirDrop or ICO or something else? Yeah, I mean, it's probably going to be a combination of, those two things, right? So there's like three aspects of this. I think one is how do you distribute, how do you distribute tokens to builders, right? And I think that'll probably be measured by some amount of like transactions or the amount of gas consumed by your application on top of base.

And, you know, we could probably run stats as to like which those projects are. And they will probably be given some allocation. for being early to base and building out the ecosystem. I think the second is, you know, I'm just going off of what you're saying in terms of this report. I have no knowledge of this, but it does make sense to me that their goal would probably be to really make TBA and the base app,

the sort of, you know, the consumer front end of base. And so they're likely going to use that as like the main consumer and user funnel to really grow and own the relationship that they have with the consumers. And then, yeah, points campaign completely makes sense to me, like, through that interface. And so, you know, that's probably more of the user side of things. And then lastly, I think the way that I would think about this one is, you know, I think lately, at least like on a public sale aspect, I do think that's probably going to happen. So the, you know, if you think about a lot of people have been comparing Coinbase of Robin Hood to each other.

And if you look at Robin Hood, you know, they have this product where you can basically go earlier in the life cycle and invest in IPOs now. All right. So when IPOs come out, like as a user, you can basically join that and fundraise through that mechanism. I think they also now like are announcing stuff or like you can even invest like pre-IPO like, you know, in the sort of secondary rounds like late stage UC rounds. I would imagine, you know, if you look at projects that exist today in crypto, that's beginning to happen, right? Like that ICO sort of crowdfunding platform that is kind of back now with projects like Legion and Echo. Yeah, and I think Echo is like a pretty big project company. Yeah, and then I think they have like Sonar.

Yeah, exactly. So I would imagine that they take that product in order to run, you know, what would be like, the biggest, like, ICO sale for base tokens through a coin base or something like that. And that would be their answer to like a Robin Hood style product. But in a way that is crypto native and coin base native. And because it's base token, like, you know, you want to come out with a bang. And this obviously would be like the biggest, like, race or the most interesting race. So like actually want to be a car.

Yeah, I love this. So ICO Beast has joined us. So we are going to take a very quick word from our sponsors. But I'm sure he will have a lot to say about what Brian just said. So we will hear from him in a moment. Mantle leads the establishment of blockchain for banking as the next frontier. UR is the access layer that transforms Mantle network into a purpose-built vertical platform, the blockchain for banking, that enables financial services on chain.

UR unifies and vertically aligns Mantles focus on payments, trading, and assets, MI4, MEath Protocol, Functions of BTC, supported by developer grants, ecosystem incentives, and the industry leading distribution platform through the UR app, reward station, and by bit launch pool. All economic activity within UR will be captured by Mantle Network to further drive value to token holders and establish its significance in blockchain for banking. Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. All right, so we're back now and ICO Beast has joined us.

Welcome, ICO Beast, and I'll just remind everybody, he is the merchant of narratives at Proof-F Play. Welcome. Hey, Juan, thanks for having me. Pretty big day for the base ecosystem. I know. I said at the beginning of the show that this was, you know, quote-unquote big news. And yet I'm sure if everybody had a bet money, they would have all bet that this was going to happen. So, you know, I'm curious like what, so, you know, obviously we're just talking about all these details around like, how are they going to sell it? What's the allocation going to be, et cetera?

But I'd be curious just for your, you know, like initial reaction when you heard this news. Yeah. So my initial reaction was I knew. it, which I think a lot of people probably, they were kind of that same. But although I posted a little bit about it back the end of 24 and early 25, just because I was really active on base trading virtuals and a whole bunch of other tokens there. I was like, I bet you that we'll have like really great wallets for this air drop. And a bunch of people were like, there's never going to be an air drop. Why would they do it since they have a stock?

And it's not really like understanding a base and Coinbase are not the same entity. But I was excited to hear it. I think it's really interesting. I am a little bit curious that they like gave themselves a lot of wiggle room by saying, no, we are exploring the idea of a token, which I think everybody wants to read between the lines there. But they have like tons of wiggle room to like delay or if they really felt like they had to at some point, they could even pivot away from and never do it because they're exploring. And so it's an interesting thing.

I think the announcement was crafted well just to give them the flexibility to operate how they want to going forward. Yeah, you know, so I have not been following super closely what's going on with the Clarity Act, but, you know, in my head, I was like, oh, maybe it's just that the negotiations are going well enough that they feel they can at least use this language. Like they have more than 50% confidence that they will be able to actually launch this. But because it's not a done deal, clarity hasn't passed that that's why, you know, they chose this word exploring. That was sort of how I read this sort of like split the baby, you know, way of announcing. So we're, you know, we're going to get to the question that we had been discussing with Ryan. But I did also want to ask before we get there, just do you have any thoughts on like what you think the token allocation should look like? Because Ryan and I were also discussing that before you joined. And I was just curious to hear, you know, what you thought that should look like. That's such a tough one because air drops are really hot topic right now. There's been a lot of discourse, especially on crypto Twitter the last week or so about what AirDrops purpose are and kind of what they should look like.

I would hope that it would be largely to users, but also, like, we know that if you give too many tokens have to users, then your chart looks really bad because everybody wants to sell it. So I don't know. I think it probably, if it's following the base ethos that I feel like we've all kind of watched play out over the last year or so, it'll be heavy towards builder incentives.

So people are actually building things on base or using the base app, many apps, or like really generating a lot of people showing up in the base ecosystem. The virtual has brought a bunch of people in. You've got an aerodrome, obviously, a huge protocol on base. Like, I imagine there will be pretty solid allocations for people that have brought users into base and are going to continue doing that going forward. Yeah.

Ryan's guess was Coinbase would retain maybe like 20 to 40% of the tokens. Like, what do you, do you agree with that? Or if you don't have like a number, what do you think of Ryan? number that he was thinking. I think that's a totally reasonable amount. I mean, I've been thinking today just how exactly, like, what a network token even means for them. And so I have to assume that in some ways it's going to benefit from sequencer revenue or other network effects. And if that's the case, you'd expect them to retain a decent chunk of the token just have claimed to a large amount of the sequencer revenue. So, I mean, that seems entirely reasonable. Also, like, if they are

allocating a good chunk for themselves. In my opinion, that signal is a pretty good thing for the token price because you wouldn't expect Coinbase to get a huge chunk of this thing and then just immediately nuke a chart. So I'd feel more comfortable with them having a decently large supply than say giving 40% of the community because you know it's going to happen if you do that. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about how they might launch it. You know, you have this name ICOBC. we were just talking about the airdrop as well. But I was wondering, like, what you thought would be the optimal way for them. And it doesn't even have to be just like this initial, you know, sailor or whatever it is that they end up, that they end up doing.

But like over time. And then we can talk about things like the utility. Like, what is going to be the utility of this token? But first, what do you think would be the optimal way for them to launch this token? I kind of wish that they hadn't even announced it and then just did the arbitraud. of saying, all right, here's a token today. At the same time, I think that ultimately the most successful air drop, in my

opinion, is going to be one that aggressively civil filters. And that's either voluntary or done via bounty. So you either let people link all of their wallets together and what that enact as a single entity under all those wallace. We've got so many privy wallets these days and other, like, burners that are set up for various applications.

Everybody's got tons of wallets on these networks. Or do you end up out a bounty for catching civil clusters like layers Euro did and a few others have and incentivize hunting people that are doing that to maybe increase your share or get a bounty. Basically just because you really do want like really widely distributed tokens, especially if it's to increase a network effect or to like help give ownership of the network or really do centralize it. And so Sybil's while they're like very clever and good at what they do, it ends up kind of confounding that purpose. So I think it's going to have to be something that really cleverly deals with

the fact that we've all got a bunch of wallets operating on these networks. Yeah, that's such a good point. You know, like my mind was blown because, you know, Brian Pellegrino came on the show during that period. And he basically said that they were finding, you know, like these civil operations of, I forget the number. It was, I think he said, like, 50,000 or 75,000 wallets that were all like one person's opera or, you know, one entity's operation.

And I was just like, wow. Okay, that's insane. And hopefully I didn't get those numbers wrong. Anyway, okay, let's, so now we've kind of caught up, like, because now you've answered the same questions that Ryan did. But I'd be curious for both of you to talk about, like, what do you think the utility of the base token should be? My guess is that I think Ethereum and Eith and the properties that that token has

are very similar to the types of things based token will probably do, right? And so there's probably some level of, you know, basically the amount of profits that you're generating as a chain through fees and in basis case it's sequenced revenue. I'd imagine that there's some percentage of that that's basically being burned in real time in basically as like a ratio or relation to the amount of like fees that base is actually generating. So I think that basically gives almost like a baseline on how to value base token just in terms of like a productive asset. I think the second thing that we'll probably see with base token if it ever launches is it'll likely take on a lot of similar properties

as the main sort of defy liquidity asset on top of base. So if you look at sort of how USDC has been treated by Coinbase on top of base, you'll notice that there's a lot of perks that come with it. So if you hold USCC on base, I believe like, or it's sped USC, you actually don't have to pay any gas who is right now with USC. The other thing too is obviously it's like one of the largest assets and liquidity pairs that exists on top of base defy. And then lastly, I believe there's like some opt-in where I think you can receive like rewards, like 4% interest. If you hold USCC on top of base as well. So, you know, when you look at something like that, that basically shows you the types of benefits that come with a token that this is effectively

behind response. Right. Even though USC is a stable coin, I effectively view it as, a token that is by coin base, right? And so then if you just take that analogy and you apply it a base token, you can pretty much see like a lot of the similar strategies that they probably employ on top of here. Right. So I would imagine like the largest, all the tokens that end up listing on base, I'm sure like it just makes more sense to just pair that with like a base or like pair that with like a USC over pairing it with like a EAP or like a wrapped EAT asset, for example. So you're viewing it more like a rewards. token, but then do you feel like, because, you know, how Jesse hinted that they wanted to

centralize, do you feel like then at a certain point in the future, it might even be used for governance? Like, I didn't know if there was any connection between the fact that he was saying that at some point they planned to decentralize. And if you think the token might be related to that or not. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure governance is within the realm of possibility here. My feeling, though, is, you know, even if you look at the governance of like the largest sort of blockchain ecosystems, it's still a very messy thing. Right. And I think, genuinely speaking, what you're thinking about governance, what part of the roadmap are you actually opening up to the community? Right. And I think that's a very core question. My sense is that because something like base is extremely integral to how Coinbase is thinking about its on-chient future, you know, I would know. never imagine that like plane base or base wants to open up extremely important product or engineering

decisions to the community. Right. Like that's things that they want to own and they want to basically control. And so yes, they probably will be governance, but I wouldn't expect there to be governance over extremely material product or engineering decisions. Yeah. And I only meant like potentially years down the road or something. Like I could see it starting as a rewards thing and then evolving over time and especially if they do, you know, end up truly decentralizing it. But I agree. Like right now, it's mostly decentralization theater. Yeah. Let me mention two other things too. So, okay. One is, I think when you have a token that, you know, let's say base token came out today. Like, what would it trade at? I would, I would probably conservatively think that it could probably

come out at like $20 billion. I think it could probably run to like 40 or 50. When you have that, you can now do all sorts of like crazy growth campaigns. You could do investments. It's, you can even do M&A of token projects, right? And so it opens this entirely new balance sheet strategy per base. And then I think the other thing, too, is that for the governance aspect, you know, one thing that's very interesting in the draft of the Clarity Act is I think it basically labels no one person can own more than like, I think the number is like 20%. I need to read the draft again, but no one person can hold more than 20% governance power

within like an ecosystem. And so I would imagine that, you know, even though, let's say, coin base collectively might own more than 20% of the token, they probably will be trying to delegate that across different actors across the ecosystem in order to basically pass that centralization tests. And so, you know, there's probably going to be like big community members,

like, you know, whether that's the base team, point base team, the biggest base builders, like the biggest DFI projects, all those kinds of things. like they will have to open the community up and like have that actually represented in terms of the governance power. But as to whether or not that actually ends up impacting big decisions on product roadmap from a governance perspective, it's still very too. Okay. I see. Yeah.

This one's a really complicated question because there's a number of ways they could go about it. Like if they end up influencing like where revenue goes from the secrets or any case, that does like open up questions. of do coin shareholders get some kind of claim to it because there is, I believe, revenue numbers that are shared on the coin-based balance sheet based off of the base sequencer. And so you get into some like weird, weird areas of understanding whether or not there is some sort of claim to shareholders and they have like a fiduciary duty there. I have no idea, but that's a complicated angle. I saw A16C crypto kind of quoted themselves an article they wrote a couple months ago about

token autonomy today. mentioning network tokens and app tokens in the same same classification so app tokens are an interesting angle because you end up basically using those as kind of vouchers or in app or just in network tokens specifically don't necessarily have extrinsic value but they're used as it's basically trading chips inside the things that you're developing so that like that doesn't seem quite as appealing to me as an air drop recipient because I want something that they could go to 20 or 40 billion but that's an interesting way of looking at as well if they want to do some sort of capture and basically turn into their own version of base USD, but again, that doesn't make sense because of other

Coinbase interests. So I don't know. They may actually really just be in the early stages of exploring it and are kind of feeling everything out. I would be interested to see it function similar as like a liquidity token like Ryan was saying because that is pretty interesting. I don't know how they would do it without cannibalizing some of the other D-I protocols necessarily. So there's a lot of question marks here for me to where at like day one, not sure if I have a good handle on what they really could do to make this a valuable token without also like going against other competing interests. I mean, hmm, yeah, I don't know if this is like something too far afield like if they would feel like they're screwing over their own users. But,

you know, you could even imagine them like, you know, it's sort of like this protocol need of stable coin issue that like, you know, obviously we saw that with, you know, hyperlook at the competition for just a certain ticker became so fierce. But you know, Mega-Eath, they also announced a protocol native stable coin and Shuiya was just on the show saying like she thinks this is going to be the future that like everybody's going to do this. And so you could see, yeah, them potentially wanting to like bake in sort of certain things to the base protocol that are sort of native, not only a stable coin, but use the base token to to facilitate that. I don't I know, I'm just spitballing. But I was also wondering because, like, you know, it's not only that. So, okay, at the same time, and this is something that Ryan and I also discussed, but we didn't ask you, ICO yet. You know, Jesse also said that they're going to commit to building on Ethereum. And I just wondered what your thoughts were about that. Yeah, I mean, I hope so. I'd like to think that all the L2s are aligned and they all are going to end up being valued creative for Ethereum. I,

In fact, I don't know if that actually is going to happen in the long run, but I do believe that, like, the core ethos of base is aligned with Ethereum right now. That is part of the question about token, too, is like if it ends up being a gas token or something of a substitute there, or like even a validator style token, you have to stake it or something, that it does start to bring up questions of so is the revenue from the sequencer that normally would, like you would hope in the end state be going back to help basically pay rent for living atop of Ethereum. Like, are those things aligned? I don't know. But it's good to hear them affirming with their new planning to do that. I think that's kind of the gamble that if you and took when it went on this roll-up scaling journey was that the L-2s wouldn't actually end up just like spinning off and doing their own thing later on. So hopefully that's the outcome. That's at least what they're verbalizing at the stage. All right. And then let's also now talk about the fact that so they also announced at the same time that they're integrating with Solana. Apparently, they've already

done this in test net. And I wondered, you know, do you feel like, yeah, what do you think of the fact that they're doing that? Like, I don't know how good of an experience it will be. And I was just curious what you thought it meant for this sort of like Ethereum Salon a competition that we've been seeing play out for a while. Yeah, it's, I mean, I have to see how it feels in practice. I think that we're all like acutely aware of the issues of liquidity fragmentation and the complication of having things spread out across a whole bunch of different chains and layers. And eventually somebody will have some extremely useful, very smooth, unified liquidity layer

where you're doing something on chain, whatever that means exactly. And you don't know which chain you're using. It's all abstract away from the end user. We haven't gotten there. And I don't really know how soon we're going to get there. But I feel like I haven't seen a ton of cross chain EVM to SVM scenarios. second. Like normally you have to push funds across Vs and apps or relay or one of these these other protocols and there's no like real native integration between the two. So that's interesting and I'm

very curious to see what the user experience is like. The second and third order effects are hard to know until you see like how good the user experience. If it really is like super seamless, then it ends up being interesting to see which chain the value actually ends up occurring to. And I think that depends on which chain is actually exporting their native token more. I think totally seems to think that Sala is going to be. be the one doing that. They'll be shipping it to Ethereum, Mainnet, and various L2s. I don't know if that's the case or not, but that ends up being, I think, the operative question, the more interesting place to focus if the experience is truly seamless.

Right. Yeah, I think my view of that is it's just base admitting that Solana is its biggest competition. You know, if you think about like seriously, if you talk to any of like the biggest projects in the space, especially those are the client on base. you know, they admit that like, Salada is the only other chain that they would actually consider like building on top of it. Which is a big step for a lot of these projects because, you know, these are two extremely different tech stacks. And that's,

that's a big cost to actually like think about as a project. But projects are like willing to entertain that because, you know, that's kind of with it. That's like a positive ROI decision for them because that's just how strong slas. I think my view here is, there's like liquidity slash defy on one side and there's consumers on the other side. I would actually say that Salana probably has a better consumer aspect and a user aspect right now and a user culture.

You know, if you look at everything that's happening on pump and, you know, anything that has like a more normy, like Gen Z. Like if they're using any crypto app, it's probably on Salana. Like that's what's happening right now. And if you compare that to base, I think base obviously has users, but it's definitely more defy and liquidity century. And I actually think that that's the best part of base is all the defy and liquidity projects. And it makes sense because Coinbase is a financial services company. And that's why all the core products that would be popular on base would naturally result of that.

So whether that's like the Bitcoin lows that are on Morpho or like the dex trading that they're thinking about doing on Aerodrome or, you know, Chets are channeling to base on chain, that makes sense. So I think in a way, it's like, you know, if you think about liquidity today, yes, like Solana has 12 Bill and TBL and base has five Bill and TVL, right? So Salon is leading. But I think in like three, four years, I could easily see bases like, you know, defy liquidity, probably matching Solana or even out competing because they have the introduction and the en rep that Coinbase brings to it. Now, what base doesn't have compared Salana is as strong of like the user and

consumer culture. And so I think by doing this, what they're really saying is like, hey, like, you know, if you're a project that's considering deploying on Solana, now you can deploy on base if you want to access more liquidity or considering like growth from a GDM perspective. And I think vice versa, if there are projects on base that are considering leaving to Solana, which has happened in the past, now they don't necessarily have to leave base completely. They can sort of tap into Solana as a second option. But I think, like, at a high level takeaway, when I saw that, it's like, oh, like, yeah, base is paranoid to Solana and, like, Salana is the biggest competition for them. And so I think this is their way of basically being able to get the builders and the developer funnel and access both Ecos systems at once.

Yeah, I'm sure you guys saw. I can't remember who tweeted this, but this tweet went around where someone was like, oh, if you remove the L1s and stable coins, then, you know, all the biggest apps are on Solana. and so, you know, that points to what you were talking about, like just the user experience. But then what was interesting was, you know, because like obviously if you look at defy, then obviously Ethereum dominates in defy. But Kyle, somebody, and I think like at some point in the Twitter conversation, like somebody pointed that out or I forget. But like Kyle Simani wrote back like, oh, you know, with my debt, we're going to be deploying our Saul into defy to boost Saul defy and bring more liquidity there. So I was like, ooh, we could see a lot more competition between Ethereum and, you know, Salana DFI coming up, which, or maybe, I don't know, what do you guys think to, you know, do you think that's possible or likely or? Yeah.

So I think it's for right strategy. But the problem is that I think Ethereum right now is just so much more ahead when it comes to DFI and liquidity. Right. Look at the two other biggest players that are entering EBM. It's Robin Hood and Stripe. right like and so my question is what is the robin hood for salana who is the striped player for salana who is the coin based player for salana i don't think they really have that yet right and so that's why you have the dvc's that aback salana obviously you know putting together these structures or wall street

liquidity to enter solanio that's great but that's not cropped right like product is like you need an actual front end that is bringing users and new liquidity into your ecosystem and so far i haven't seen that happen for Solana yet. That's mostly happened on the Ethereum side. But what I do give Solana credit for is like they've gotten this far without that at all, which is actually like really, really impressive. And like they deserve acclades for it. And the community is like, okay, well, if we're not getting like institutional liquidity, like let's just make our own liquidity, right? Like, let's make our own pump tokens. It's like, you know, let's just figure this stuff out by ourselves. And that's awesome. But I do think in like a five to 10 year horizon, I think my question is, you know,

who is that centralized player and that is really bringing that new liquidity into salon right now. And that's a big question mark. I don't actually know what that is. I think I super agree with that take because, I mean, you've got Coinbase utilizing things like Morpho for free yield on CBBT. And you've got AVE that lives on Ethereum, obviously, it has been like battle tested and there's some serious deposits there. I think that I saw there up to like 77 billion TVL or something, which is crazy.

And so you have, you have these institutional partners and math. massive, massive liquidity that has been built up over years on Ethereum. And like throwing liquidity in the system is part of the solution, but it's not the only solution. I mean, like on Solano, you've got things like Meteora, which I love as a D5 product.

I don't expect to see institutions LP and meme coins on DLMs. That just doesn't make much sense to me. But so like it's a great product. I don't know if they have the institutional champion yet to like really fully utilize it. Or if it even scales up to that, that style of usage. Because it's great for what the primary use case on Salon is right now. But will that be the primary use case to attract like real top-tier blue chip players?

I don't know. Okay. So I'm so curious about this because I sort of feel like we're seeing this big competition. It's like some kind of like huge competition is about to start. And we're seeing all these players line up, right? So there's so many different ones here that I could throw in the mix. So, you know, some of the names that we've discussed are like obviously Coinbase. base, and I'm talking about the on-chain competition.

So, you know, Coinbase via base, Robin Hood, who we mentioned. There's Solana and all of its sort of user-facing apps. There's, you know, I don't know, like finance, telegram, even the stable coin issuers, Tether, Salana. And then there's also hyperliquid, which has just, you know, skyrocketed to a very, very important position. and everybody can kind of see like it's, it's not even on the verge. It's like already doing it. So I'm curious, like, you know, how do you think this big competition where, you know,

you see all these players lining up with their different strengths? How do you think that will play out? And I'd be interested to hear from both of you and either one of you can go first. Oh, man. I think if I knew the answer to that, I would be perfectly positioned for the next five years of crypto. And I definitely don't know the answer. So I've got exposure to all of it. I think that like crypto as a whole is only going to continue expanding.

Like my thoughts are we're not going to see salon of companies or Ethereum companies or even crypto companies in the next three years or so. It's just going to be companies and they're going to be using crypto reels for pieces that make sense and not using it for pieces that don't. So I think that for me at least it just means having exposure to everybody that is lining up and then let the chips fall because I think that like having exposure is how you win in this situation. Ryan? Yeah, ultimately, I think, you know, crypto's financial technology and the core product of

crypto's tokens at the end of the day. And so I think as long as you're in the business, we have the most tokens being generated on our chain and we have the most volume and flows on those tokens as a result. I think the combination of those two things basically would determine what this race, right? You know, Salana's version of that is, yeah, the mean coins, and that's great. And base's version of that is all the coin is liquidity that's coming on to base. And so, I think, and hyperliquid, obviously, is all the, you know, the, the, the on-chain

purpose markets for the broader crypto space. And so this is ultimately, like, the two sort of vectors I would consider as, like, the most important things going forward. I think the question then remains, like, what identity do you want to take across this two vectors. And I think I've used a lot of very much as let's increase just a number of funnity of tokens that we have. And then let's bet that eventually over time, like we can produce a lot more sort of volumes with scale over time. Whereas I think in the base aspect, it's like, okay, like, I think we can bring tokens that have a lot of volume scale, like, you know, the wrapped Coinbase,

Bitcoin or like USC or something like that. But how do we create an economy where there are a ton of tokens being issued on our chain right now. And that's why they're experimenting with things like creator coins and all this other stuff right now that's happening. And so, yeah, this is, you're in the business of tokenization. If you're a chain and, you know, those are the two ways that you probably get to win. All right. Ryan and ICO, thank you so much for joining this conversation.

Thanks, Ma'am. Thank you. Unchained is produced by Laura Shin with help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Aranovich, Margaret Curia and Pam Majumdark. Thanks for listening. Thank you.