Base App Cuts Creator Rewards

Olivia Capozzalo & Denis Omelchenko
February 11, 2026

gm Defiers!

Today’s big story:

• This past summer, Coinbase announced Base App was rebranding into a social-first super app, built around creators, content, and creator coins — but that vision has been shelved.

In other news:

• Robinhood launches its L2 public testnet
• LayerZero reveals L1 Zero
• IBKR adds perp-style futures for BTC, ETH
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Today’s Big Story

Base App Sunsets Creator Rewards as It Pivots to Trading Focus

Every once in a while, a crypto company decides it needs a new golden goose. NFTs, memecoins, AI, you name it. Most of the time, the story ends the same way: hype fades, attention moves on and the product gets quietly shelved.

This time, it’s Coinbase. More specifically, Coinbase’s aspiring web3 super app, Base App, and its short-lived attempt to turn itself into a social-first everything app built around creators, content, and creator coins.

In a Feb. 9 post on X, Base App announced — not for the first time — that it’s refocusing on trading, a move that nudges the product closer to what Coinbase Wallet was before the rebrand. The Farcaster-style “Talk” feed is being shut down and, notably, the Creator Rewards program is set for closure on Feb. 15.

In an apparent attempt to log a milestone, Base even pointed out that it paid out more than $450,000 to roughly 17,000 creators over the past six months. But that means the average payout comes out to less than $30 per creator.

As an aside, Coinbase reportedly spent around $15 million on a one-minute, karaoke-style Super Bowl ad this year, a stunt that didn’t exactly win over the crypto crowd either. Maybe it’s an unfair comparison, but as a thought experiment, if that money had gone to creators instead, those same 17,000 wallets could’ve walked away with close to $1,000, not $30, each.

John Granata, head of product at Base App, told The Defiant that the company is “proud of what we built with the initial version of the Base app and the creators who helped shape it, and we view this [the shift to a trading focus] as a natural evolution of the product.”

Granata pointed out that the feedback “so far has been overwhelmingly supportive of a more focused, trading-first experience,” adding that the team is “staying heads down as we roll out the next wave of features for (mini)apps, traders, and the broader onchain community.”

But the closure comes just a few weeks after Jesse Pollak — Base’s creator and a tireless advocate of creator coins and Base — repeatedly went on X pledging support for creators, again and again, and again.

In an X post this week, Pollak attempted to frame the latest move as clarity rather than retreat. He admitted that the Base App “was always an imperfect Farcaster client” and needed a single primary focus. That focus, he said, is now trading. With the Talk feed gone, he expects social users — himself included — to flow back to the Farcaster app.

Not everyone was convinced. X user @thegreatola summed up the frustration felt by many:

“Base is always pivoting to something new every two months. Identity crisis at its finest.”

After last summer’s keynote-style rollout of the Base App as a social-heavy super app, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong reduced the latest reversal to a short, two-word post on X, calling the move a “Rapid iteration. 👌”

Others were less minimalist. The Block co-founder Mike Dudas noted in a Tuesday X post that with such constant changes in priorities it's “simply impossible for long term builders and long term, patient capital to build and invest predictably in an ecosystem where capital, attention and support is reallocated on very short term time horizons.”

Denis, staff reporter at The Defiant

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