Corporate blockchains are back. Long derided as a phony form of crypto, the idea has gained new life as everyone from Stripe to Circle is building their own chains. On the latest episode of the Crypto Playbook vodcast (available on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube), Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak—who is the driving force behind the company’s Base blockchain—made the case why they will catch on.
To understand why Pollak’s project is a fraught one, it’s helpful to go back to 2015 when, in the depths of a crypto winter, some began rallying around the phrase “blockchain not Bitcoin.” The idea, popularized by an emerging corporate faction of the crypto industry, held that it was best to leave blockchain technology to banks, IBM and other established players.
The plan proved a miserable failure. Bank-backed blockchain projects like R3 raised large sums of money, but failed to take off as critics—correctly for the most…
