jesse.base.eth 🔵 on Warpcast

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jesse.base.eth 🔵

AMA - will be answering questions for the next ~1-2 hours!

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Cassie Heart pfp

Congrats on the promo. With your new position, what do you feel like you will be more capable of effecting change on at Coinbase that was previously not possible?

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jesse.base.eth 🔵

thanks! candidly, I feel pretty grateful that since I've been at the company for a long time + have a track record of delivering value, i've *already* been pretty in the loop on most company decisions. that said i think with this change, i'll have more visibility + have a slightly stronger voice. and i'm hopeful that with that new platform, i'm able to push the company to lean more aggressively into our onchain future. the technology platform is finally ready and now we gotta go build all the incredible use cases that show the world what's really possible.

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Cassie Heart pfp

Leaning forward into an on chain future, do you perceive a wind change with respect to embracing privacy preserving assets/technologies, or is this still out of scope for Coinbase?

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jesse.base.eth 🔵

yes! we had our @base 2025 strategy offsite a couple weeks ago and once of the things that bubbled up was that we had to make a meaningful investment in privacy in the year ahead. we had similar feeling around L2 in 2023 and smart wallets in 2024. privacy is the next big technology upgrade for us to tackle.

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What does investing in privacy look like from the L2 perspective?

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jesse.base.eth 🔵

short term - i think we should stand up a compliant privacy pool on base. lots of good work has been done on this. people will be able to use this in the same way they use coinbase.com today — to route through to get new private addresses. on top of this, other people can build things like one click "get me a new private address" in wallets — it's a very simple primitive, but unlocks a ton. medium term - in parallel, we need to do R&D to figure out how we build privacy natively into the smart wallet + L2 stack. the UX I have in my head is basically you can send and receive from private.jesse.base.eth and it's fully private, with no UX complexity. how we get there is not yet fully clear and there are a bunch of potential paths (stealth addresses, dedicated L3 private blockspace, native privacy in EVM), so we need to do some more in-depth research to figure out the right path, then start executing.

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shazow pfp

How are you thinking regarding what "compliance" looks like for a Base privacy pool? Would Coinbase still require to have a viewing key for all transactions, or would you shoot for more ambitious privacy guarantees with ZK proofs that Coinbase can be otherwise blind to transactions that are presumed to be innocent? (Totally understand that this is subject to change and dependent on available technology at the time, but curious to hear about the level of aspiration at least.)

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jesse.base.eth 🔵

we haven't started work on it yet, so i can't speak to what exactly we'll build, that said i've been pretty inspired by @ameensol's work on privacy-pools and i like to think we could get to full privacy with something like those opt-in and opt-out sets to manage compliance. that said, lots of work to do to actually figure out how to bring this to life.

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shazow pfp

I appreciate you taking this perspective, it would be an important precedent for the industry and raise the bar for everyone. Coinbase releasing a proper compliant onchain privacy solution could be one of the most notably impactful moves for the space. 🫡

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