The Gravity of Decentralization with Jesse Pollak

Today’s guest is Jesse Pollak, Senior Director of Engineering at Coinbase. Coinbase is the premier platform for buying, selling, transferring, and storing cryptocurrency. Jesse is currently working on protocols, public goods, cities, and currencies at Coinbase. Jesse previously led all Retail engineering at Coinbase, including building Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, and Coinbase Wallet. We discuss various topics, including Ethereum, the Merge, Smart Scaling, the gravity of Decentralization, Public Key Infrastructure, building in Bear Market, and much more. We begin our conversation by discussing how Jesse got into crypto. Jesse shares how he started a startup focusing on identity and security software. The company leveraged public key infrastructure to enable companies to scale their identity and security needs. Most of his clients were crypto companies; this is how he fell down the crypto rabbit hole. The company was eventually acqui-hired by Coinbase in 2016. Jesse explains how public key infrastructure works and how it is widely used in crypto and throughout the internet. We pivot our conversation to discuss why now is the best time to build in Crypto. We discuss how the tools for building in crypto have become more accessible and more robust. We also discuss why this bear market feels different than previous bear markets. We focus on discussing how the number of people building something exciting and innovative is ten times bigger than there was in the last bear market. The number of real-world use cases is an order of magnitude bigger than in previous cycles. This leads us to discuss what sector of crypto excites us the most. Jesse shares that the trend that excites him the most is the increased adoption of users and businesses. Jesse predicts that this trend will eventually culminate in the large migration of a large portion of our society being on-chain. We discuss how we are seeing legacy companies beginning to embrace crypto and integrating crypto into their business Our next conversation topic centered around