Gates 🛡️

$TOSHI and @Base maximalist

[TOSHI @Toshi]

Join us this Thursday at 7PM UTC for a special Space with @senamakel from @tinyhumansai

We’re talking about what’s next for Toshi, AI, and the bigger vision we’re building toward together.

Set your reminder below. https://t.co/TWTyKWvZ7P

[Gates 🛡️ @GatesOnChain]

@base $TOSHI for starters

[TOSHI @Toshi]

$TOSHI is now tradable in New York on @coinbase.

Meow.

[TOSHI @Toshi]

Grateful to @base, @x, @coinbase, and @jessepollak for helping us secure @Toshi.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the support of everyone involved.

A big step forward for Toshi, the lore, and the IP.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

HODL

[Xen @XenBH]

The handle is @Toshi !

[Coco @CocosLair]

With tremendous gratitude to @coinbase, @base, @jessepollak, @x and all that have helped get this done, we can now proudly say that our official X handle is
@toshi
https://t.co/FXrNiv6O0f
goated

[Zach Prater @ZacPrater]

Memes are one of the biggest markets in Web3. I'm proud to have @CocosLair, founder of @Toshi_base, as this week's Guest of Honor for @Base Founder Fridays!

@Toshi_base is a top meme on @Base with @CocosLair is a strong community advocate!

QT to join https://t.co/81QOBzVv7o

[toshi mart @toshimart]

Launching on @toshimart just got easier.

You can now create and trade $ETH pairs on the @toshimart mini app inside the @baseapp.

https://t.co/C5pgDWrbKf

[TOSHI @Toshi]

Ever wondered how $TOSHI art comes to life?

This is our artist’s POV.

[Gates 🛡️ @GatesOnChain]

Coco for prez.

[Coco @CocosLair]

It's not an easy question to answer. I would love to give you a super long answer, and I may still do so tomorrow, but simply said:
We want to build on a chain that respects its builders. CB provides the infra and in many ways the growth opportunities by onboarding millions of users that trust the established CB brand, we provide products, communities etc within your ecosystem. There should be a synergy between builders and base.
Currently there is almost none.

If you
- aren't backed by base/CB(V)
- aren't an ex CB employee
- don't do what Jesse and team ask of you to help push the products they want to see succeed

You don't get any support or love from the chain. In some cases, being in those three above isn't even enough to get love or support.

Our experience with CB is pretty amazing, my issues is with base leadership and strategy.
In February of 2025 I told Jesse I thought creator/content coins were a horrible idea, with my reasoning, he told me that I was wrong.
We're now almost a year later, and the incessant push for Zora and creator coins, while shoving almost everything else aside has been experienced as a horrible experience by basically all base builders.
There are those like myself that see too many flaws in creator coins due to the single point of value and the legal risks for the creators.
There are those that dislike em in general.
There are those that hate how much attention the creator economy push has taken up on base, fragmenting away from their projects that they work on day and night.

For me it's rather simple; it is clear that many at base and coinbase do not understand memecoins, or meme culture. I speak about this subject as I consider myself an expert. I do advisory for various blockchains and (very) large projects (Jesse can probably tell you about a few that I personally have NDAs with but will make you understand that I know my way around things).

That lack of understanding became even more apparent when you and Jesse made a clip in which you called content coins the next iteration of memecoins (freely paraphrased) and that memes were just a picture and a token.
We are movements like you wouldn't understand. We can be more impactful as a movement than any other project in our industry. We are the easiest onboarding tool there is, as we are a no-obstacle entry point, whereas we both know DeFi is the opposite.

Now, do I hate creator/content coins? No. Do I think they work in their current form? 100x no.

So where is my issue? In many places at this point, but the most important to mention now is:
Jesse and base have chosen to essentially say: We will die on the hill of creator and content coins. The problem? It's a forced narrative in an industry that never accepts forced narratives. We live in the strongest ever industry that is completely built from the ground up.
Coinbase and base have been treating base as a top down funnel to sell products.

Why do so many ex coinbase employees get day 1 listings for project with absolutely no traction, yet base builders that have been active on base for years, that have built significant communities get nothing, not even a bit of support?
Are we on a centralized chain pretending to be decentralized?
Sure there were a few listings, but the timing on them could have barely been worse in most cases. And yes I know a lot of people, thus I also know that pre-Trump it was a lot harder to list memes, no issue from me there. I know many people on your teams, they speak to me.

But to circle back to the question, why does it feel for the real builders on base like there is an uneven, unfair playground. I won't dive deep on the allegations that these things happen because of friendships and angel allocations as I don't have proof, but it is weird right? A project that has proven itself gets nothing, whereas a project without that track record gets everything.
It has devalued the quality of your listings, but also the impact of your listings.

I realize that this answer is longer than I intended, but I'm just going to keep going with things that come to mind. This isn't well structured or prepared/reviewed. I shoot from the hip, moreso my style than sitting down and preparing a text.

A lot of us feel gaslit by the base team. When we voice concerns, we get "thanks for the feedback we always listen". Like Emilie Choi tweeted: we value feedback and voices with different opinions.
I guess that's not the case on base. We get shut down, told off, and we never see any support unless we fall in line, post on Zora, coin content while that hurts our brands. For 99% of projects the only reason they have done it is because they're afraid of angering Jesse who is both the lead at base, as sits on the board of coinbase, and people do not always realize he has no say over listings - which is their fear, that he'd block em for not being cooperative.
This is a power issue too. Unfair playground, remember?

We got a listing for $TOSHI for which I am very grateful. I didn't launch the project, I took it over from a developer that rugged the treasury and left. This was together with a few people, and essentially with the community we have today.
I understand that it must be weird to see one of your pets listed, may even feel intrusive. Not our goal, but the narrative was unparalleled.

I don't speak for just Toshi, I speak for base builders. My DMs are full with colleagues asking me to continue speaking up and out against injustices happening on base.

Now, I don't want to continuously sound negative, but I am here now to say what's wrong, not what is good. A lot is good, but most of the good gets overshadowed by the bad.

My asks (for now)

Base team, stop with the platitudes. All these empty replies, pretending that you're listening, but never really answering concerns or criticism, then replying to the only positive tweet and acting like all is well. It's gaslighting, it's bully behavior.

Bas team, stop with the contradictions. One day content coins aren't memes, then Zora tweets they are, nobody knows what they're saying or doing (seemingly) and it's just "move fast break things" without any realization that you're currently in a room where everything is broken and you broke it all.

Coinbase, create an open line of communication with your onchain builders that have no or very little backing by coinbase or base through investments.

Coinbase, stop listing things purely because someone is an ex colleague. It's bad, and has taken away the power of your listings.

Coinbase and base, once you see incredible traction from base builders (my example: we did 1B of daily volume on CB for a few days straight after our Toshi listing), reach out, try to capitalize on the success instead of letting it go to waste. We were ready to do whatever to seize the momentum, yet neither party was interested in speaking to us. The listing team and many friends at CB reached out to say how everyone was flabbergasted at our performance, yet no follow up by anyone "relevant" to us.
Ever since that's changed, but the momentum was gone.
I see similar situations with many things, recently with the Minnesota daycare situation and Nick. A lot was invested, yet zero attempt to capitalize on the situation to grow.

Base, stop launching "memes" or tokens in general other than your $BASE token if it comes one day.
You keep fragmenting the relatively small liquidity away from people who show up everyday to build on base.
BIFE, baseshake etc are just bad things for the ecosystem. Why? Insiders or early buyers benefit, everyone else loses.
This makes people leave base, exit their other bags, or even sell an existing bag in a project of a hardworking team to buy something that nobody will ever try to keep building.

Base and Coinbase. Stop competing with your builders, build together. Lean into your winners, and collectively do something amazing.
I know why you didn't list Virtuals, but that doesn't mean you can't work with them to seize the opportunity of the incredible attention they had at their peak. Yet it felt like crickets. Why? Because you don't have equity?

Base, stop letting every opportunity go to waste, purely to focus on your own thing.

Brian, speak to your builders. When you speak to threadguy for 2 hours, yet no builder I know has had a conversation, we all wonder what you're trying to achieve. That guy hasn't contributed meaningfully to base at any point, are you doing PR or are you trying to improve an important growth aspect of your company?

Now a few good and bad things mixed.
The Base App is something that has incredible potential for tremendous growth. Do not force things down our throat though. We are not geese, and the app isn't foie gras.
All tweets by Jesse and team suggest that any future base airdrop is tied to your app behavior. They tweet that if you want support on base, you have to show activity in the base app. Well there was no base app for the first 2 years, so those days just get ignored for both traders and projects? Are we only respected if we amplify your products while we're not on your payroll as employees? Make it make sense.

Zora isn't per se a bad project. Creator coins and content coins may work. Allow the market to decide instead of going all-in on them while nobody takes to it. A lot of people on base have lost a lot of money due to this push, which is unacceptable as they're only buying cause speculation gets fueled by the base team. "One day one of my content coins will go to a billion dollars" is just pure manipulation of peoples minds and should never be said. You almost force people with no skill advantage to buy all your tweets praying 1 goes high.

Allow everything and everyone to coexist, to build alongside each other. Don't forcefully ask projects to use your products, and then only publicly tweet nice things about projects that do.
There may be a market for creator coins, but we didn't join base for them, we joined base because of the coinbase brand and the trust you have in the industry and with your users, making us believe we're investing our time to build in an ecosystem with a strong potential future and incredible strength.
Stop trying to replace memecoins with creator coins. Creators will burn out and crash out faster than lightning dealing with communities, as it's not about a shared mission anymore, it's about the creator ensuring that their holders "benefit", yet no holder of any token has any equity guarantee in the future success of said creator, who can just leave base after launching.

And lastly for now: Stop supporting absolute scammers that almost everyone in the "real trenches" and "memecoin world" knows are experienced scammers.
Support legit builders, not souljaboy or Sahil.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far, this was written off the cuff, I can sit down and give you a structured answer if you want, but I'd need to know you actually read it lol.

I deeply appreciate all that your company has done for crypto, I fight to make base a better place and to limit the risk of a builder flight to other chains or ecosystems in the future, which would be a worst case scenario outcome for all involved parties.

Keep fighting the good fight, together with us all

Lastly; do potentially add someone to the base team that knows where the actual trenches are, because those that keep speaking about the trenches wouldn't even know what the trenches are, which is where many of your onchain traders find themselves every single day of every single week, month, year. Trying to get to a better life at the end of the tunnel, but to achieve that the playground needs to be fair.

Thanks for coming to my X talk

Coco

[Coco @CocosLair]

It's not an easy question to answer. I would love to give you a super long answer, and I may still do so tomorrow, but simply said:
We want to build on a chain that respects its builders. CB provides the infra and in many ways the growth opportunities by onboarding millions of users that trust the established CB brand, we provide products, communities etc within your ecosystem. There should be a synergy between builders and base.
Currently there is almost none.

If you
- aren't backed by base/CB(V)
- aren't an ex CB employee
- don't do what Jesse and team ask of you to help push the products they want to see succeed

You don't get any support or love from the chain. In some cases, being in those three above isn't even enough to get love or support.

Our experience with CB is pretty amazing, my issues is with base leadership and strategy.
In February of 2025 I told Jesse I thought creator/content coins were a horrible idea, with my reasoning, he told me that I was wrong.
We're now almost a year later, and the incessant push for Zora and creator coins, while shoving almost everything else aside has been experienced as a horrible experience by basically all base builders.
There are those like myself that see too many flaws in creator coins due to the single point of value and the legal risks for the creators.
There are those that dislike em in general.
There are those that hate how much attention the creator economy push has taken up on base, fragmenting away from their projects that they work on day and night.

For me it's rather simple; it is clear that many at base and coinbase do not understand memecoins, or meme culture. I speak about this subject as I consider myself an expert. I do advisory for various blockchains and (very) large projects (Jesse can probably tell you about a few that I personally have NDAs with but will make you understand that I know my way around things).

That lack of understanding became even more apparent when you and Jesse made a clip in which you called content coins the next iteration of memecoins (freely paraphrased) and that memes were just a picture and a token.
We are movements like you wouldn't understand. We can be more impactful as a movement than any other project in our industry. We are the easiest onboarding tool there is, as we are a no-obstacle entry point, whereas we both know DeFi is the opposite.

Now, do I hate creator/content coins? No. Do I think they work in their current form? 100x no.

So where is my issue? In many places at this point, but the most important to mention now is:
Jesse and base have chosen to essentially say: We will die on the hill of creator and content coins. The problem? It's a forced narrative in an industry that never accepts forced narratives. We live in the strongest ever industry that is completely built from the ground up.
Coinbase and base have been treating base as a top down funnel to sell products.

Why do so many ex coinbase employees get day 1 listings for project with absolutely no traction, yet base builders that have been active on base for years, that have built significant communities get nothing, not even a bit of support?
Are we on a centralized chain pretending to be decentralized?
Sure there were a few listings, but the timing on them could have barely been worse in most cases. And yes I know a lot of people, thus I also know that pre-Trump it was a lot harder to list memes, no issue from me there. I know many people on your teams, they speak to me.

But to circle back to the question, why does it feel for the real builders on base like there is an uneven, unfair playground. I won't dive deep on the allegations that these things happen because of friendships and angel allocations as I don't have proof, but it is weird right? A project that has proven itself gets nothing, whereas a project without that track record gets everything.
It has devalued the quality of your listings, but also the impact of your listings.

I realize that this answer is longer than I intended, but I'm just going to keep going with things that come to mind. This isn't well structured or prepared/reviewed. I shoot from the hip, moreso my style than sitting down and preparing a text.

A lot of us feel gaslit by the base team. When we voice concerns, we get "thanks for the feedback we always listen". Like Emilie Choi tweeted: we value feedback and voices with different opinions.
I guess that's not the case on base. We get shut down, told off, and we never see any support unless we fall in line, post on Zora, coin content while that hurts our brands. For 99% of projects the only reason they have done it is because they're afraid of angering Jesse who is both the lead at base, as sits on the board of coinbase, and people do not always realize he has no say over listings - which is their fear, that he'd block em for not being cooperative.
This is a power issue too. Unfair playground, remember?

We got a listing for $TOSHI for which I am very grateful. I didn't launch the project, I took it over from a developer that rugged the treasury and left. This was together with a few people, and essentially with the community we have today.
I understand that it must be weird to see one of your pets listed, may even feel intrusive. Not our goal, but the narrative was unparalleled.

I don't speak for just Toshi, I speak for base builders. My DMs are full with colleagues asking me to continue speaking up and out against injustices happening on base.

Now, I don't want to continuously sound negative, but I am here now to say what's wrong, not what is good. A lot is good, but most of the good gets overshadowed by the bad.

My asks (for now)

Base team, stop with the platitudes. All these empty replies, pretending that you're listening, but never really answering concerns or criticism, then replying to the only positive tweet and acting like all is well. It's gaslighting, it's bully behavior.

Bas team, stop with the contradictions. One day content coins aren't memes, then Zora tweets they are, nobody knows what they're saying or doing (seemingly) and it's just "move fast break things" without any realization that you're currently in a room where everything is broken and you broke it all.

Coinbase, create an open line of communication with your onchain builders that have no or very little backing by coinbase or base through investments.

Coinbase, stop listing things purely because someone is an ex colleague. It's bad, and has taken away the power of your listings.

Coinbase and base, once you see incredible traction from base builders (my example: we did 1B of daily volume on CB for a few days straight after our Toshi listing), reach out, try to capitalize on the success instead of letting it go to waste. We were ready to do whatever to seize the momentum, yet neither party was interested in speaking to us. The listing team and many friends at CB reached out to say how everyone was flabbergasted at our performance, yet no follow up by anyone "relevant" to us.
Ever since that's changed, but the momentum was gone.
I see similar situations with many things, recently with the Minnesota daycare situation and Nick. A lot was invested, yet zero attempt to capitalize on the situation to grow.

Base, stop launching "memes" or tokens in general other than your $BASE token if it comes one day.
You keep fragmenting the relatively small liquidity away from people who show up everyday to build on base.
BIFE, baseshake etc are just bad things for the ecosystem. Why? Insiders or early buyers benefit, everyone else loses.
This makes people leave base, exit their other bags, or even sell an existing bag in a project of a hardworking team to buy something that nobody will ever try to keep building.

Base and Coinbase. Stop competing with your builders, build together. Lean into your winners, and collectively do something amazing.
I know why you didn't list Virtuals, but that doesn't mean you can't work with them to seize the opportunity of the incredible attention they had at their peak. Yet it felt like crickets. Why? Because you don't have equity?

Base, stop letting every opportunity go to waste, purely to focus on your own thing.

Brian, speak to your builders. When you speak to threadguy for 2 hours, yet no builder I know has had a conversation, we all wonder what you're trying to achieve. That guy hasn't contributed meaningfully to base at any point, are you doing PR or are you trying to improve an important growth aspect of your company?

Now a few good and bad things mixed.
The Base App is something that has incredible potential for tremendous growth. Do not force things down our throat though. We are not geese, and the app isn't foie gras.
All tweets by Jesse and team suggest that any future base airdrop is tied to your app behavior. They tweet that if you want support on base, you have to show activity in the base app. Well there was no base app for the first 2 years, so those days just get ignored for both traders and projects? Are we only respected if we amplify your products while we're not on your payroll as employees? Make it make sense.

Zora isn't per se a bad project. Creator coins and content coins may work. Allow the market to decide instead of going all-in on them while nobody takes to it. A lot of people on base have lost a lot of money due to this push, which is unacceptable as they're only buying cause speculation gets fueled by the base team. "One day one of my content coins will go to a billion dollars" is just pure manipulation of peoples minds and should never be said. You almost force people with no skill advantage to buy all your tweets praying 1 goes high.

Allow everything and everyone to coexist, to build alongside each other. Don't forcefully ask projects to use your products, and then only publicly tweet nice things about projects that do.
There may be a market for creator coins, but we didn't join base for them, we joined base because of the coinbase brand and the trust you have in the industry and with your users, making us believe we're investing our time to build in an ecosystem with a strong potential future and incredible strength.
Stop trying to replace memecoins with creator coins. Creators will burn out and crash out faster than lightning dealing with communities, as it's not about a shared mission anymore, it's about the creator ensuring that their holders "benefit", yet no holder of any token has any equity guarantee in the future success of said creator, who can just leave base after launching.

And lastly for now: Stop supporting absolute scammers that almost everyone in the "real trenches" and "memecoin world" knows are experienced scammers.
Support legit builders, not souljaboy or Sahil.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far, this was written off the cuff, I can sit down and give you a structured answer if you want, but I'd need to know you actually read it lol.

I deeply appreciate all that your company has done for crypto, I fight to make base a better place and to limit the risk of a builder flight to other chains or ecosystems in the future, which would be a worst case scenario outcome for all involved parties.

Keep fighting the good fight, together with us all

Lastly; do potentially add someone to the base team that knows where the actual trenches are, because those that keep speaking about the trenches wouldn't even know what the trenches are, which is where many of your onchain traders find themselves every single day of every single week, month, year. Trying to get to a better life at the end of the tunnel, but to achieve that the playground needs to be fair.

Thanks for coming to my X talk

Coco

[TOSHI @Toshi]

Time to send off 2025 with a bang!

[TOSHI @Toshi]

Merry Christmas from Toshi 🎅🎄

[TOSHI @Toshi]

We ball.

[Gates 🛡️ @GatesOnChain]

@CocosLair happy holidays

[Gates 🛡️ @GatesOnChain]

im blue dabadedabudai

[TOSHI @Toshi]

How it feels to join the Blue Cat Society.

[Base @base]

From Toshi to @baseapp

[Cryptotwits @CryptotwitsHQ]

@Toshi_base We love blue cats

[Cryptotwits @CryptotwitsHQ]

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