R K

Look, I obviously don’t agree with Jesse on everything, and he himself may tell you that I am pretty annoying with my dissents inside CB. But to answer your question, I think it was because it was earned. Jesse willed Base into existence from nothing. In fact, Base sort of created the category that Stripe, Robinhood etc have followed into. Robinhood and Johann are doing a great job btw, very impressive and good to see trenches eating again, but hard to say if their chain would even exist today if Base didn’t exist. Base was created before the major Solana memecoin wave (6 months or so before WIF was created in 2023) which means Jesse fought to ship this through the post-FTX bear market. Obviously Jesse made some mistakes last year. Building stuff is really hard, and building it inside a big public company is even harder. I wouldn’t have made all the same choices he did, and not defending those choices either. But one thing I respect a lot about Jesse is that he still turns up and continues to put the work in every day despite all of CT treating him as a punching bag. Not sure how many other ppl I know that are willing to do that.