Base co-founder Jesse Pollak pushed back against claims that the team influences token prices or secretly supports select assets within the ecosystem.
Responding to community questions, Pollak said the Base team will not privately coordinate, deploy capital, or take any action to drive an asset’s price toward a specific target. He explained that such behavior would unfairly disadvantage other projects, conflict with the principles of open markets, be unsustainable over time, and could even cross legal boundaries.
Base Commits to Open and Fair Markets
Pollak said the Coinbase-backed Ethereum Layer 2 will instead focus on improving distribution and visibility for high-quality applications and assets built on Base. He acknowledged that these efforts can be strengthened and said the team aims to attract more capital and attention to the ecosystem without interfering in price discovery.
He emphasized that Base, like any market, should remain free, open, and fair, and that maintaining those values is a core responsibility of the team.
The comments followed a broader discussion on X questioning why Base does not actively support projects capable of reaching very large market capitalizations. Some users argued the issue reflects wider market dynamics, where speculative meme coins often overshadow long-term builders.
Base Leads Layer 2 Fee Generation
Despite the debate, Base has emerged as a leader among Ethereum Layer 2 networks. On January 14, it generated about $147,000 in daily fees, accounting for nearly 70 percent of total Layer 2 fee revenue that day. By comparison, Arbitrum recorded around $39,000, while Starknet brought in roughly $9,000.
Other scaling networks, including Linea, Optimism, Unichain, Ink, zkSync, and Scroll, lagged behind and struggled to produce meaningful fee revenue, with many failing to exceed $5,000.
Speculation around Base intensified earlier this month after an image shared by X product lead Nikita Bier showed a hypothetical Base token with an exaggerated price and market cap, fueling renewed debate across the crypto community.
