Jesse Pollak: Base, Coinbase's journey to building an L2

<p>This is my conversation with Jesse Pollak. He led retail engineering at Coinbase for many years — building Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, and Coinbase Wallet. More recently, he is leading the development of Base, Coinbase's L2.</p><p>00:00:00 intro <br>00:01:43 sponsor: Optimism (<a href="http://optimism.io/">optimism.io</a>) <br>00:03:07 motivation behind Base <br>00:11:12 pitching Base to the Coinbase exec team <br>00:14:24 challenges of innovating on a schedule <br>00:17:54 failing repeatedly to find the right answer <br>00:22:09 decision to build an L2 with Michael <br>00:23:30 convincing Surojit Chatterjee, Coinbase’s CPO <br>00:24:59 launching Base internally<br>00:31:58 blockchains as serverless compute <br>00:36:53 uniswap as a serverless API for currency conversion <br>00:39:30 the power of small but leveraged teams <br>00:42:31 how to straddle product building in the onchain and offchain world <br>00:45:25 sponsor: Privy (<a href="http://privy.io/">privy.io</a>) <br>00:51:22 the significance of THIS moment in Crypto <br>00:53:56 getting a 100M devs and 1B users onchain <br>00:57:02 how the NFT UX will change with Base <br>01:10:13 how crypto will be incorporated in applications <br>01:14:00 the risk of onchain heterogeneity<br>01:17:27 building privacy-oriented onchain platforms <br>01:26:00 upgrading the financial system <br>01:28:33 attending Quaker School <br>01:34:43 relentless positivity in life <br>01:38:47 building a better future</p><p>Jesse Pollak: <br>• <a href="https://jesse.xyz/">jesse.xyz</a> on ETH <br>• <a href="https://twitter.com/jessepollak">Twitter</a> <br>• <a href="https://github.com/jessepollak">Github</a> <strong></strong></p><p>Into the Bytecode: <br>More episodes and transcripts - <a href="https://intothebytecode.xyz/">https://intothebytecode.xyz/</a> <br>Newsletter - <a href="https://bytecode.substack.com">https://bytecode.substack.com</a> <br>Twitter - <a href="https://twitter.com/sinahab">https://twitter.com/sinahab</a></p><p>Thank you to our sponsors for making this pod