Ethereum Layer 2 Base Co-Founder Rejects Behind-the-Scenes Price Manipulation

Responding to community concerns, Base co-founder Jesse Pollak confirmed the team won’t manipulate charts behind the scenes or favor certain assets.

He clarified that the team will not privately coordinate or deploy capital to push an asset’s price 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.

Base 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 distribution and visibility for high-quality assets and apps. He also acknowledged there is room for improvement in these efforts and said they intend to bring in more capital and attention to the ecosystem.

“But base – and every market – deserves to be free, open, and fair, and it’s my job to ensure that remains the case.”

The comments follow a discussion on X questioning why Base was not backing projects capable of reaching significant market caps. One user even said that such instances are not limited to Base and 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 roughly $147,000 in daily revenue on January 14. It accounted for close to 70% of total Ethereum Layer 2 fee revenue on that day. The figure put Base far ahead of rival networks, with Arbitrum bringing in about $39,000 and Starknet around $9,000 over the same period.

However, this wasn’t 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 lead Nikita Bier shared a screenshot of X’s Smart Cashtags feature showing a hypothetical “Base” token priced at $130 with a $373 billion market cap. This sparked fresh speculation across the industry.

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