Jesse Pollak on "Base selling ETH" controversies

Some more thoughts on this after the weekend: 1. Purity tests like “do you hold all the ETH you earn” are a distraction and hurt Ethereum. Overfixating on virtue signaling like this distracts us from the real work, which is building products that people love and creating sustainable economies that enable more people to do the same thing. 2. Base's goal is to bring the world onchain. We believe the best way to do that is to build a sustainable economic engine that can fund that global growth. And we believe we need more businesses built onchain that can do the same. 3. For us, this means finding ways to generate revenue, then taking the money we earn and reinvesting it in growth — salaries, grants, acquisitions, infrastructure, dedicating ~15% of revenue to public goods funding via @Optimism, one-offs like sponsoring the audit of solady, and much much more. Our #1 priority is building a great product and vibrant economy and we will invest everything we can to make that happen. Spending money on growth is good and should be celebrated! 4. At the same time, we also think it's valuable to hold ETH (we hold over 100K) to reinforce its role as a store of value and share in the upside we are creating in building on Ethereum — but this is a privilege we earn through our ability to deliver value. And it’s not a “solution” people should fixate on, it’s an end state that ETH the asset earns by being useful and productive. 5. We recognize that all of this isn’t transparent as it could be — our quarterly reporting is built around the structures of a public US company. But as Base is increasingly decentralized as a global onchain economy, we are working hard to move more of our operations onchain (vendors, contractors, etc.) so they can be immediately visible, rather than on the quarterly cadence that the offchain world operates on. Stay based, keep building.