Sun 🌊 ⚔️

What went wrong with @base (and what can be improved) from a builder POV building on Base for over a year. I will start by saying for the past year Base was the only EVM chain that had somewhat sustainable motion, app layer, and real community. This is not something to take for granted, it required insane level of grit from the base team and high competence. I also feel like I've earned my right to speak up freely and critically since starting on Base I've never built on any other chain(and I was welcomed in open hands by any EVM team out there) I didn't get any special treatment when I cooked good releases I got attention when it wasn't the case I got nothing. Just pure grind and PVE approach since the beginning while being fully bootstrap. Now what went wrong in 4 simple points: 1. The growing perception of Base being a chain that ran on favoritism and top-down king making 2. Providing the highest level of support to the lowest grit teams 3. Verticalizing the core biz of protocols and apps into the official Base app/chain offerings 4. Misaligned listing strategy The end outcome is seeing how Arb and RH teams masterfully executing onboarding at scale that is largely driven by traders and teams sticking the finger to base or at least aligned around the mutual feeling of being alienated. For (1) the two biggest strategic mistakes base made is king make Aero(good team but very unpleasant PVP energy with Uniswap and many other teams out there also heavily reliant on CB pools) and the deep partnership with Zora. The main reason why we still don’t have any form of token stocks on Base is mostly because of Aero, plenty of ways to onboard teams like Xstocks, Ondo, Backpack that figured out some solution. Even if it’s not pure 1:1 stocks. With Zora it was essentially impossible to break into chain mindshare if you’re not doing creator coins. Distanced heavily traders, forced teams to pivot into low organic traction category and other token teams that felt left out. Including the two undeniably best teams back then (Virtuals and Clanker) For (2) I don’t need to name names Zora was the peak(also wouldn’t say they’re low grit) but there were plenty of teams along the way that got the highest level of support. I’m talking about “the express route” RTs from the entire Base team for any single announcement, taking part in official events, CB listings, Eco fund. Some of these teams literally disappeared after a few months. The signal both traders and builders got is that the most important thing is to optimize for Base/CB affiliation rather than building and investing in high grit teams that expand the pie(Remember when Zora migrated to Sol because Base shifted focus from creator economy?) I cannot count how many good builders in and out the chain expressed this sentiment in personal DMs and publicly. For (3) this is a bit similar to the whole social centric strategy taken with the Zora collab. A team like FC suddenly realize their core social graph is vertically integrated, teams that are building terminals, launchers, agentic trading seeing on a weekly basis some sort of verticalization into official Base offering(B20 another example) harmful for smaller teams and even more so to bigger ones. In contrast following some of the initiatives Sol FDN: efforts/apps like @capitalmarkets or @sunrise are powered by multiple providers like Backpack, Ondo, Xstocks, Met. Routing lending or something like @world_xyz and so on powered by dflow and Jup. Sol fdn is not building their own apps and protocols to compete with Eco they are mostly aggregating and help on heavy lifting to turn hybrid offchain offers (like Kalshi PMs on Sol) into fully onchain protocols. For (4) there are OG Base traders much more knowledgeable than me. But I think everyone remember the biggest cases (virtuals, base memes etc getting snubbed) personally I think CB has a great brand and trust so printing listings for anything that has motion onchain is not the right choice. But seeing lots of not so high quality assets getting listed day1 or very fast with no reason to believe they are sought after(vs let's say Sol assets or something like Monad) while ending up shortly after dumping stronger than the most degen bundled meme out there does not feel like a high trust + quality listing strategy it feels like leveraging the liquidity CB provides for affiliated teams and investors. I don’t want to be forced out of the chain so I can only hope some of these things will be fixed. The highest leverage thing I can imagine is just re-building trust with eco participants then flows, growth with new apps and existing apps will follow. I don’t think there is any one trick that will flip things. But having some deep recalibration would improve morale by a lot.