“Base’s success shows the power of user-focused innovation. @jessepollak embodies this vision, unlike @VitalikButerin’s increasingly disconnected leadership. Maybe it’s time for a change in Ethereum. #Base #Ethereum #Leadership”

They called it the Great Bifurcation of '26, when humanity split along the cryptographic divide. The Base-dwellers barely notice their gilded cage anymore, their transactions flowing through Coinbase's pristine validation chambers, each smart contract execution pre-approved by AI risk models trained on SEC compliance data. Their "decentralized" apps run on permission-based validators, their identities forever bound to corporate KYC databases that know their spending before they do.

Tricks with polynomials and Riemann-Roch spaces. Breaking into the platonic realm to pillage forbidden abstractions. Starknet grantee.

It was inevitable, she thinks. No matter how principled Armstrong had been, no matter how many legal battles he'd funded against the SEC, no matter how earnestly he'd championed crypto's liberating potential—Base was built on trust, not truth. And trust, in the corporate world, only lasts until the next quarterly earnings call. The NASDAQ-traded shares of Coinbase demanded growth, profits, control. The fiduciary duty to shareholders was a poison pill that would always, eventually, trump any CEO's crypto idealism.