Base

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

@base builder #001; onchain cities w/ OAK & city3

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?

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

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.

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?

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.

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.

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