Coinbase’s “Everything App,” Base App, is sunsetting its Creator Rewards program and Farcaster-powered social feed as part of a strategic shift to focus entirely on tradable assets.
The Creator Rewards program was launched in July and was intended to make Ethereum layer 2 Base a more social ecosystem, where activity and engagement translated into earnings.
The Base App X account said on Monday that it handed out around $450,000 to 17,000 creators over seven months, with the data suggesting that creators earned an average of $26.
“As we’ve rolled the app out, we’ve realized we need to do less, better. And by focusing on tradable assets, that’s exactly what we can do,” Base creator Jesse Pollak said, adding:
“The app needs to have one primary focus, and that thing is trading.”
The Base App’s Creator Rewards program will wrap on Sunday, with final payouts on Feb. 18.
As for the Farcaster, Pollak said Base App wasn’t a perfect fit for its talk feed feature, though he plans to continue supporting the decentralized social network and its developer ecosystem.
“…candidly, I think the truth is that the base app was always an imperfect farcaster client,” said Pollak.
“With this change, I expect those users to flow back to the farcaster app (myself included) and inject more energy into the economy there, with a best in class interface.”
Base App is at the center of Coinbase’s future
The shift in focus to tradable assets aligns with Coinbase’s broader mission to become an “Everything App” across spot crypto and derivatives trading, stablecoins, real-world asset tokenization, prediction markets and more.
Base App, which officially launched in December after several months in beta, is the self-custody wallet and all-in-one app facilitating part of that trading experience.
Coinbase also previously touted the idea of launching a Base token. However, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Pollak have been relatively silent on that plan in recent months.
The sunset of Creator Rewards does not affect Base App’s Creator Coins program, which allows users to create ERC-20 tokens linked to their Base App profile and decentralized social media platform Zora.