Co-founder of Ethereum Layer 2 Base rejects behind-the-scenes price manipulation

The Base team won’t chase multimillion-dollar token pumps, Pollak says.

In response to community concerns, Base co-founder Jesse Pollak confirmed that the team will not manipulate charts behind the scenes or favor certain assets.

He clarified that the team will not coordinate or deploy private capital to push the price of an asset toward a specific outcome, while adding that such actions would disadvantage other assets, be unsustainable, violate the team’s values ​​around free and open markets, and could likely be illegal.

Basic refuses to play favorites

In his latest tweet, Pollak said that the team behind the Coinbase-incubated Layer 2 network will instead focus on increasing the distribution and visibility of high-value assets and apps. He also acknowledged that there is room for improvement in these efforts and said they plan to devote more capital and attention to the ecosystem.

“But the grassroots – and every market – deserves to be free, open and fair, and it’s my job to make sure it stays that way.”

The comments follow a discussion in which X questioned why Base did not back projects that could reach significant market capitalizations. One user even said that such cases are not limited to Base, but instead demonstrate broader market issues where speculative meme coin trends dominate.

Base’s Fee Lead

Base dominated Ethereum’s Layer 2 fee landscape after generating around $147,000 in daily revenue on January 14. It accounted for almost 70% of total Ethereum Layer 2 fees on that day. This put Base well ahead of rival networks, with Arbitrum grossing around $39,000 and Starknet around $9,000 over the same period.

However, this was not the case with most other Ethereum scaling solutions, such as Linea, Optimism, Unichain, Ink, zkSync and Scroll, which struggled to generate meaningful fees. Many even failed to cross the $5,000 mark during the day.

Earlier this month, X product leader was Nikita Bier shared a screenshot of X’s Smart Cashtags feature showing a hypothetical “Base” token with a price of $130 and a market cap of $373 billion. This led to new speculation in the sector.

You might also like: