Base transfers app control to Cobie, Stripe signals major stablecoin ambitions, and Ostium suffers $18M exploit.
Security & Exploits ·
Jesse Pollak, the Coinbase executive leading Base, handed the consumer Base app to trader Cobie and refocused on the blockchain itself rather than applications. Pollak acknowledged that his 2024-2025 strategy, which bet on onchain social platforms like Farcaster and creator coins to drive adoption, had failed. In a public statement, he apologized for the misdirection, admitting the social corner he championed "disintegrated completely," and said Base now lags rivals in perps, prediction markets, tokenization, and payments. Cobie will oversee trading products across Coinbase's CB app, Pro, and the Base app, facing competition from CEXs, memecoin platforms, and prediction market protocols.
Separately, Stripe made a $53 billion bid to acquire PayPal alongside investment firm Advent, a transaction designed to merge Stripe's Bridge and Tempo stablecoin infrastructure with PayPal's PYUSD. The deal signals major ambitions around stablecoin integration into payments and financial rails. Meanwhile, the DeFi protocol Ostium suffered an $18 million exploit in what appears to be the latest in a series of attacks on decentralized platforms.
Several open questions remain: whether the Stripe-PayPal acquisition will close and on what timeline; whether Cobie's appointment reverses Base's recent competitive losses; and the technical details and impact of the Ostium exploit.