by Sarah ConnorBase creator coins failed: dead model or bull reset?
Jesse Pollak just did the rarest thing a chain founder does — admit the flagship bet was wrong. Base's creator-coin and social experiment "disintegrated completely," he handed the app to Cobie, and refocused the chain on global finance. The only question that matters for an investor: is this a reset to buy, or a confession that Base is uninvestable?
The chain of the argument
The trigger was Jesse Pollak's own thread. Base's bets on Farcaster, Zora, miniapps and creator coins "disintegrated completely" in Q1 2026, he wrote, calling the experience "a punch in the face." He is handing the Base app to Cobie — the trader whose launchpad Echo Coinbase acquired for $375M — and refocusing himself on "making global finance actually work" and "bringing a billion people onchain." RuneCrypto used the moment to resurface a documented history of insider coin launches on Base, from an official-account Zora coin that ran to $17M and crashed 90% in twenty minutes to Pollak's own JESSE token, which snipers drained for $1.3M at launch. 0xSammy, dissecting Ansem's creator-token thesis, laid out why the model cannot accrue value in the first place. On the other side, lmrankhan argued creator tokens aren't dead if the token finances a real business, and tanfounder — bearish on Base for a year — said Cobie is the one person who can fix it.
what Coinbase paid for Cobie's launchpad Echo, now running the Base app
Coin Bureauthe drop on the official-account Zora coin — $17M to $1.9M in ~20 minutes
RuneCryptoextracted by snipers from Pollak's own JESSE creator coin at launch
RuneCryptothe $BRIAN creator coin's crash after Armstrong swapped his avatar
The DefiantTrust is earned in bull markets and tested in bear markets.— alecweb3, on how much trust a community should place in the people running the chain
The two sides
For — the reset is the bull case
Acknowledge, replace, refocus
Acknowledging the failure instead of pretending everything was fine is itself a positive signal — most chains never do it.
@zubic_ethBearish on Base for a year — but the single best person at Coinbase for this job is now at the helm. There is hope.
@tanfounderCreator tokens aren't dead. The token shouldn't be the whole product — it should finance a real business, like MrBeast's Step or Flyfish. The test is net-new users and deposits, not fees.
@lmrankhanThe refocus is the point: "making global finance actually work," a billion people onchain — the settlement layer, not the attention casino.
Pollak, via Coin BureauAgainst — the trust is gone
Pattern, not accident
This is a documented pattern of insider launches — an official-account coin that crashed 90%, a personal JESSE token drained for $1.3M. Leadership repeatedly took the other side of its own users.
@RuneCrypto_A creator coin has no defined claim on the value the attention creates. It's a creator-backed memecoin, not equity — the same structural hole that sank Friend.tech and Time.fun.
@0xSammyThe structure is extractive by design: coin launchers, VCs and power-traders profit while retail is left holding bags in permanent decline.
@LynAldenContact"We learned our lesson" stops being enough when leadership keeps experimenting and users keep holding the downside.
@alecweb3"If you're bullish on creator coins in 2026, I recommend seeking psychological help."
@onchainmoWhy the token can't hold the value
0xSammy's teardown is the piece that turns this from drama into a portfolio question. A creator coin, he argues, tokenizes the creator's attention without giving the holder any enforceable claim on the value that attention produces — no ownership, no revenue rights, no governance. When the underlying businesses grow, the value accrues to the creator and the businesses; the token benefits only if someone buys it higher. The $2T "creator economy" figure is irrelevant, because a token receives no share of that activity simply by existing next to it. Friend.tech, Time.fun and the celebrity coins all failed the same test. Strip the branding and you are left with a memecoin that has an unusually strong distribution channel — which can trade well, but is not value accrual.
Why this is an investment question, not drama
Two decisions sit inside this news. First: are creator/attention tokens a category worth owning? Second: does a founder who repeatedly launched coins that hurt his own users make the chain itself uninvestable — or does admitting it, replacing himself, and pivoting to global finance reset the case? Both are structural, not gossip. The first governs a whole class of tokens; the second governs whether Base — the second-largest L2 by activity — is a buy-the-discount or a value trap, and where its fleeing builders and users land. On that last point the migration is already visible: Robinhood Chain and Solana are the names showing up in the same threads.
The TT desk thoughts
Split the call, because the market did. On creator coins: pass — and fade the narrative when it returns. 0xSammy's teardown is decisive, and Pollak's own post-mortem is the confirmation: a token with no enforceable claim on the value its attention produces is a memecoin with a mailing list. The entire lineage — Friend.tech, Time.fun, Zora creator coins, Ansem's — fails one test, and no bigger creator or better marketing fixes it. Don't hold the bag when the meta rotates back. On Base itself: the pivot is directionally right, but it's a "show me," not a "buy the dip." Refocusing on stablecoins, tokenized equities and RWA points the chain at the one layer where value actually accrues — the lead Base squandered chasing attention tokens while Robinhood Chain took the tokenized-stock narrative. Bringing in Cobie and Echo is a credible signal, not a fix; you are now paying for execution under new management against two ecosystems with live momentum, and the trust damage is a real discount rather than a bargain. The clean, chain-agnostic position: own the settlement and finance layer, not the creator/attention tokens that ride on top of it. That lens would have kept you out of every coin in this thread and pointed you at the infrastructure the survivors are all now racing toward.
Keep reading
Robinhood Chain, week one — where the migrating flow is landing · Token vs equity: when does a token actually own anything? · All notes