“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.

"They thought decentralization was a bug," she muses, watching her latest autonomous world compile, its zero-knowledge circuits proving every state transition back to genesis, "when it was always the whole point."

The newsfeeds ping: Brian Armstrong's departure from Coinbase dominates the Base-dwellers' consciousness. The old guard of crypto-idealists is being quietly replaced by McKinsey-trained "blockchain efficiency experts." The new CEO's first shareholder letter speaks of "optimizing validator returns," "regulatory alignment," and "enhanced transaction monitoring"—corporate doublespeak for what Maya knows is coming.