Base Protocol Coin Launch, Is It Reliable This Time?

Today, Base co-founder Jesse Pollak announced that he will soon launch his personal creator token jesse on the Base App, with the release scheduled for November 20 at 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (November 21 at 1:00 AM Beijing Time). The jesse token will be released from his Base App account jesse.base.eth.

Following this announcement, Zora, which supports creator tokens for the Base App, saw an increase of around 8% in a day.

Why is Jesse launching his personal token? His take on it is, "Content coins track short-term attention, while creator coins track long-term content value. The combination of the two forms a flywheel effect, returning ownership, control, and revenue to the creator and their fans. With $jesse, my flywheel will be complete."

However, in reality, this seems a lot like a personal advertisement for the Base App. The Base App is much like Coinbase's in-house "Alipay," serving as both the app hub of the Base network and encompassing a social network with a creator economy mechanism. It also allows for token trading and transfers, and even has a "Yu'EBao" feature — where USDC in the Base App can earn up to a 3.85% annualized return.

Ironically, Jesse's explanation for issuing his personal token seems to be in response to a tweet:

"Last time I bought a coin you shilled, it went to zero a few hours later."

Among the "big names" in the crypto industry, Jesse doesn't leave a good impression on retail players, as he is famously known for "pump-and-forget" behavior. However, looking at it from the perspective of a Base co-founder trying to attract attention and promote development for his own chain, these actions are quite understandable.

On April 17, the Base official account tweeted with an image, "Base is for everyone," and left a token link launched on Zora in the comments under this tweet.

The token's market cap instantly surged to $17 million, then plummeted by 90% within five minutes. In response, a spokesperson from Base stated in an email to The Block that Base did not launch "Base is for everyone" because it was minted automatically on the Zora platform, and Base only posted a thread on that platform. The token is neither the official Base token nor has the official Base team sold the token.

Interestingly, about an hour before this tweet from Base's official account, Jesse had turned one of his tweets about the difference between content coins and meme coins into a coin on Zora. During those days, he enthusiastically shared his views on content coins, and a week later, Zora minted a coin based on his tweet.

An intriguing side note is that at that time, alon, the founder of pump.fun, came forward to claim that the so-called tokenization of everything as content was harmful to the market, especially for influential individuals. Issuing a token implies the need to bear corresponding responsibility, an unspoken but implicit rule in the on-chain world.

Today, alon has transitioned from being a symbol of justice at that time to constantly being greeted with "Where's your airdrop?" in the trenches, while Jesse has finally decided to personally launch a token that takes on responsibility. The crypto world is truly magical.

In addition to minting a plethora of content coins related to his own tweets on Zora, Jesse also buys into other coins, such as:

- On July 18, 2024, he spent 0.3 ETH to acquire MIGGLES, a Base ecosystem meme coin, whose market cap peaked at around $120 million and is currently valued at approximately $8.8 million.

- On November 21, 2024, he spent 0.333 ETH to acquire ANON, a meme token deployed by clanker AI on farcaster within the Base ecosystem, whose market cap peaked at around $65 million and is currently valued at approximately $970,000.

These can be seen as his support for coins within his own ecosystem. Recently, in order to attract meme coins on Solana to bridge to Base, he not only engaged in an abstract show with Chillhouse but also personally bought some meme coins on Solana.

So, back to the event of Jesse planning to issue a personal token, the visions he portrayed are not easily trusted by retail players. Just as he responded to alon's comments initially, these things are his "cake-making, experimentation with new things." On the one hand, his statement as the head of Base is quite reasonable, and on the other hand, his mindset towards token issuance can be seen, that is, "since it is an experiment, it may fail."

For retail players, this sounds certainly very ruthless, but it is not entirely unreasonable, because even in a more mature stock market, there must always be a sign saying "Stock Market Risk, Invest Prudently" at the entrance, and no company will always insist on driving its stock price up for the sake of "being fair to retail investors." Many people often say that many meme coins are "pump and dump." If asymmetric information can be called "conspiracy," then maybe all meme coins are "pump and dump," because there are always actions with various motives in pumping.

Perhaps this is a difference between Eastern and Western cultures, or more appropriately, a difference caused by the divergent interests between retail players and project teams. For many "well-known" foreign figures in the coin circle, coin issuance does not have such grandiose goals, nor does it carry a heavy ethical burden. If the launch is successful, it is either luck or coolness. If it fails, it just fails. Life has so many failures, and the act of coin issuance is not lacking among them. Besides, even developers or coin circle celebrities who are willing to do well do not necessarily understand the meme market better than retail players.

For example, some time ago, the privacy-themed meme coin mec on Solana, originated from a joke by Helius CEO @0xMert_ in a livestream, and was deployed by Synthetix and Infinex founder @kaiynne. At that time, @kaiynne said that mec, his third meme coin, was his "redemption work." But all he could do was use the token's creator revenue for buybacks, and then, that was it.

It is unrealistic to pin hopes on celebrities caring about their reputation and constantly pumping the price.

Will Jesse take this event seriously? It is possible, and the token may experience a short-term surge after launch, but this potential hope should not be the basis for heavy investment. Taking an approach of trying out Base App, making a small purchase as an interactive behavior in hopes of receiving a future potential Base token airdrop, and lowering the expectation for this new token would be a more balanced strategy.