Jesse Pollak, Coinbase’s head of Base and Base App, announced that the Base App will shift its product focus to trading after mixed user feedback on its social-heavy features.
In an X post on Wednesday, Jan. 14, Pollak said the centralized exchange is now refocusing the Base App “to be trading-first,” signaling a shift to a finance focus for the web3 app after months of debate over its direction.
Base is the Ethereum Layer 2 developed by Coinbase, while Base App is the rebranded version of what was Coinbase Wallet, the CEX’s self-custody web3 wallet app.
After the company positioned the rebranded product as a “super app” in July of last year — combining crypto wallet, trading, social, and other functions — Pollak said “hundreds of thousands” of users indeed tried it for creating, trading, and building. But, as Pollak revealed this week, the response to the Base App’s social features was mixed.
“The app felt overly focused on social,” he wrote, adding it felt “too close to web2” and didn’t reflect the range of assets people want to trade. Pollak also wrote that users are asking for “more high quality assets” and a feed that shows not only social tokens.
Finance-First UX
“We’re going to lean into a finance-first UX. We believe it makes more sense to layer social features on top of finance, than the other way around,” Pollak wrote on X.
The shift follows a similar move by Farcaster, a prominent SocialFi protocol that recently stepped back from its original social-first model to focus more on trading.
Commenting on Base’s refocus, Dragonfly Capital partner Rob Hadick said in an X post on Jan. 15 that the move reinforces the view that blockchains work best for moving money, saying that “Base may have been the last meaningful hold out” of the social-first approach in web3.
The change also follows Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s public request for feedback late last year, in which he questioned whether the Base App should prioritize trading, social features, or a mix of both.