Base Defends Builder Support After Criticism Over Its Ecosystem

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• Base publicly replied to a builder’s complaint on Aug. 24, 2026, listing three builder-support programs launched since Aug. 6 and pointing to an Ecosystem Fund that has backed more than 30 teams.
• The reply arrived six weeks after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Base co-founder Jesse Pollak each admitted, on the record, that Base’s prior social and content-coin strategy had failed.
• One of the three programs is simply the next scheduled cohort of an accelerator that’s been running since 2025, and another launched a day after Base’s own third anniversary.

Base spent part of Sunday defending its record with builders. Responding to a public complaint from a crypto trader who posts as Miyamoto, the network’s official account replied within hours, listing three initiatives it said had drawn “amazing” feedback: a builder call, a builder grant program, and the fourth cohort of its startup accelerator, Base Batches.

Miyamoto’s original post argued Base had only recently started rewarding memecoin momentum and CEX listings the way traders wanted, and needed to extend that same energy to backing “the strongest founders.” He credited Robinhood Crypto with doing exactly that.

The admission Base’s reply skips

What Base’s answer never mentions is what happened in the six weeks before it. In mid-July, Armstrong said on X that Base’s content-coin push “didn’t work” and that the network had pivoted away from it earlier in the year.

Pollak went further, calling his two-year bet on onchain social apps “definitively wrong” and stepping back from running the Base app to focus on the underlying chain instead. Around the same time, Robinhood’s own blockchain, Robinhood Chain, passed Base in daily active users, a milestone Base had taken years to reach and Robinhood hit in under three weeks.

That sequence makes a tidy case for reading Base’s builder push as a scramble triggered by Robinhood. Batches has run three prior cohorts since 2025 on a similar few-months cadence.

The Builder Grant Program’s timing is a better fit for the “responsive” story Base is telling, but it launched the day after Base’s own third anniversary, which is its own plausible reason to ship an announcement that week.

Miyamoto’s specific claim, that builders are already leaving Base for Robinhood in growing numbers.

What is confirmed is the broader pressure sitting underneath his complaint: a rival chain outgrew Base by nearly every visible growth metric within weeks of launch, days after Base’s own leadership conceded its prior bet had failed. Base’s reply answered the tone of the complaint. Jesse Pollak defended Coinbase’s Ethereum holdings after criticism over a slight decline in its corporate ETH position, with filings showing no clear evidence of a major sell-off.