Why Coinbase Is Leaning Into The Creator Economy with Base's Jesse Pollak

More than a decade ago, Bitcoin laid the foundation that revolutionized finance and dis-intermediated money for people all around the world.

Now, the same thing is happening for creators.

Instead of intermediaries like YouTube or Meta capturing the attention generated by creators and monetized by big tech platforms, a new paradigm is forming. And as Base founder Jesse Pollak tells Coinage in a new interview, Coinbase wants to take an active role in supporting it.

“I think we've been talking about how do we start to re-platform these legacy systems — whether it's the financial system or the creator economy — for many, many years,” Jesse Pollak said. “But it feels like just in the last few months, all of the technology has finally started to come together.”

At the heart of this creator revolution are the same tenets that led to Bitcoin's rise — merely reformatted to apply to the creator economy. That is, let creators directly own the value of the attention they generate online.

In the legacy system, that would involve a creator posting a video to a platform like YouTube, and getting paid pennies on the dollar for the attention they generate as YouTube sells ads against that video. That has essentially been the engine that has not only fueled YouTube's rise but also that of Meta or X (formerly Twitter.)

But if memecoins have proven anything over the last few years, it's that attention can be monetized more directly online. So, why sell ads as a means to an end, when attention as a coin could be the means in and of itself?

Coinbase and Base are now betting big on that playing out. Last week, they launched full support for creator coins directly in the Coinbase app — letting users trade creator coins right alongside major crypto currencies. Then, this week Base announced it would allow for creator tokens to trade in their app as well regardless of where the token was launched. It’s part of a broader shift to lean into composability, instead of the current dynamic of websites seeking to gate-keep attention. (X's algorithm, for example, has increasingly down-ranked anyone sharing links that might take people off their platform.)

"I think that that is not a creator-first model," Pollak explained. "It's like a platform-first model. And the thing about crypto is that we are a system that wants to build sovereign tools that give power back to the creators, the builders, and that means the way we build these systems must be creator-first."

Still, it wasn’t easy getting here. Pollak admitted the idea of creator coins faced “a lot of pushback” — both inside and outside Coinbase. But the mission never wavered. “We want to build a global economy that increases innovation, creativity and freedom," he said.

That starts by giving creators something they’ve never truly had in Web2: Ownership over the attention they generate anywhere online. As Coinage has experimented with first hand, the way that is all tracked is now the hottest thing in crypto: The creator coin.

Platforms in the Base ecosystem, like Zora, allow creators to spin up creator coins in themselves, which unlike tokens on memecoin launchpads, are automatically locked to vest over a five-year time horizon. That reduces the likelihood of seeing people launching tokens only to rug holders hours later by selling the entire supply on the open market and crashing a token's price.

What this all unlocks is a base layer to tie the attention a creator is generating to a token that they actually control and can take anywhere on the internet. Pollak predicts that will enable various new ways for creators to begin monetizing the network effects of their communities using these creator coins.

"What we're focused on right now is getting those creator coins into the hands of creators in a way that's safe and trusted and works for them and then supporting this ecosystem of creative products that are emerging," he said, praising Coinage for our recent announcement to leverage our Zora creator coin to let anyone co-own our outlet at a 30% discount.

Experimentation with new ways to plug creator coins into existing businesses is expected to grow as Coinbase and Base continue to work on making on-ramping into crypto easier. After all, minting NFTs that correspond to a ticket into co-owning one of the fastest-growing media outlets in Web3 is normal behavior for crypto enthusiasts. It may not seem so natural for newcomers. By leaning into a creator coin, Coinage has already seen a massive wave of new interest among those more familiar with fungible tokens on Zora.

Trading fees from $COINAGE are starting to rack up as well, with the Coinage DAO earning more than $130,000 (paid in Zora) from volume on the creator coin trading.

Meanwhile, as Pollak explains, Coinbase also stands to gain by having an army of creators and their fans also come to trade these creator coins en masse. Pollak has grown more vocal about challenging other exchanges, which often charge listing fees for token creators wanting to be added to exchanges. By listing every creator coin for free, Coinbase essentially just undercut a key revenue driver for competitors.

"When you have the opportunity for your coin to be listed and available for free in a mainstream distribution service like Coinbase, why would you go and pay one 5% or 10% of your token supply to someone else to list it?" he said. Of course, if Coinbase is successful in onboarding creators and their fans, they will more than make up for all of it in activity brought to their Ethereum Layer-2 Base, where all of this trading is going to occur.

“The content coin flywheel is spinning… creators are creating creator coins, and they're able to earn real money from it,” Pollak said. “They're able to distribute it to their fans. They're able to build new experiences around it.”

And in the process, another revolution is forming: A creator economy that creators can finally own.

Join Coinage in our own media revolution now, and become a co-owner in the first community-owned media outlet ever built onchain. Minting is now open for a 30% discount using our $COINAGE creator coin (but only for the first 100 minters.)