Coinbase's Base app has announced a major strategic shift, moving away from its social-centric ecosystem to become a trading-first platform focused entirely on tradable assets. The company confirmed it is removing the Farcaster-powered "Talk" social feed and replacing it with a feed dedicated to onchain activity.
As part of this restructuring, Base App is sunsetting its Creator Rewards program, which has distributed over $450,000 to more than 17,000 creators over the past six months. The program will officially end on February 15, with final payouts scheduled for February 18. The figures indicate each creator received an average of $26 during this period.
Base App founder Jesse Pollak emphasized that the platform needed to operate under one primary function, which he identified as trading. "We're making the Base app the best place to trade onchain," the company stated in its announcement. Pollak explained that after the application's rollout, the team realized they needed to "do less, better" and that the app was "too social, hence too close to Web2, and did not support enough assets that users wanted to trade."
Pollak further elaborated that the team believes it makes more sense to layer social features on top of finance rather than vice versa. The developers plan to build a finance-first user experience with new features including copy trading, leaderboards, and feed trading. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong echoed this direction, stating the app is taking a new trajectory focused on retail investors and traders as its initial users, with plans to expand the feed to incorporate a broader range of assets.
The Base App was launched in July 2025 as a central piece of Coinbase's "Everything App" strategy, designed to integrate onchain social networking, messaging, and payments with trading and investing activities. This strategic pivot represents a significant departure from that original vision toward a more specialized trading platform.
