@derek

This is a great read from @itsbasil, tho a touch cynical even for me. ;) I'll preface this long thread with the fact that I love what @barmstrong, @jesse.base.eth, and the @base.base.eth team are building. Also: I'm not an armchair quarterback here. I am a builder/creator with a spouse, children, and bills. I'm all-in on Base with Birthday Labs and that's why I care. I'll support and build even through strategic disagreement. My concern is a bit orthogonal to Basil's, and related to my "credible neutrality" post: the folks building the infrastructure are also the tastemakers. I believe Base should be neutral, but it's not. If their opinionated approach with @baseapp.base.eth doesn't work, Base as a chain will suffer, whether we like it or not. Philosophically this isn't the case, as the two are distinct endeavors, but practically speaking they are inextricably linked. Not just in name. In a real way, Base the L2 (not just TBA the consumer product) is betting the farm on creator coins. My take? Base should 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘭𝘺 focus on builders, developers, startups. Let us worry about creators, consumers, products. Put another way: Base Build, Base Ecosystem Fund, & CDP should have 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 more attention, cheerleading, and hard resources than TBA. Let startups and builders figure out consumer products, product-market fit, and tokenomics. Give us robust, canonical onchain primitives, similar to what @dwr, @v, and Farcaster are doing with the social graph. Don't add cognitive load to devs who have to support Farcaster and TBA with differing APIs and approaches. Easy to say "you can just choose not to!", but it's literally 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘢𝘴𝘦 𝘢𝘱𝘱. Practically speaking, there's no choice. Let builders build. I think the opportunity Base has is MASSIVE. I pray they'll get it right. https://farcaster.xyz/itsbasil/0x394d787c

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