The Shepherd’s New Costume

The champion of open access turns out to be consolidating it. Again.

This is the same company that spent years telling builders that Base was infrastructure—neutral ground for the onchain future, a place to ship without permission.

Now the focus is consumer apps. Not because apps serve builders, but because apps capture fees masked in the mission of bringing everyone onchain.

The rhetoric was “come build with us.”

The reality is “build in the margins while we chase the revenue.”

Base isn’t competing with builders. They’re relegating them.

You’re still welcome on Base. You’re just no longer the point.

And prediction markets?

Let’s stop pretending. These aren’t “tools to help people get ahead.” They’re gambling infrastructure with better PR. The house edge is real. Calling this “democratized access” is like calling a slot machine a retirement plan.

But Armstrong frames regulators as the obstacle—the elitists blocking ordinary Americans from opportunity.

It sounds righteous. It sounds like something worth rallying behind.

But, what’s really happening?

It’s Coinbase asking for permission to operate a casino while wearing the language of liberation. A corporation finding another way to make money - nothing new, yet nothing for or about the people.

This isn’t a crypto story. It’s not even a tech story.

It’s concentrated power doing what concentrated power always does: using the language of public benefit to clear the path for private gain.

The costume changes with the era.

Railroad barons invoked manifest destiny while locking up land grants.

Zuckerberg talked about “bringing the world closer together” while building the most sophisticated attention-extraction machine in history.

Kalanick promised everyone could “be their own boss” while offloading every cost onto drivers.

Today the costume is a hoodie, the stage is onchain, and the script includes “builders,” “based,” and “tools to get ahead.”

Now anyone can make it. Just launch a creator token and wait for the wealth to arrive.

That’s the new lie.

But the play is ancient:

1. Spot a frontier with untapped value.

2. Position yourself as the steward democratizing it for everyone.

3. Use that positioning to neutralize obstacles and consolidate control.

4. Extract the surplus once dependence is locked in.

The trick requires our participation.

We supply the network effects—the users, the builds, the capital, the political cover. We amplify the tweets. Some even make themselves corporate ambassadors by creating endless social media posts for free while believing they are now creators.

We believe the promise long enough to make the play valuable. By the time the pivot comes, we’re already embedded.

Here’s what makes this version especially cynical.

Armstrong isn’t wrong that regulatory hostility has hurt crypto. He’s not wrong that prediction markets have legitimate uses. He’s weaponizing valid frustrations to launder a self-interested corporate acquisition into a civil rights issue.

That’s the move: attach your profit motive to someone else’s grievance. Make your corporate expansion look like our liberation.

And the prediction market framing is particularly slick, because it inverts reality. Gambling is sold as “getting ahead.” Speculation is sold as “access.” A mechanism that, on average, transfers wealth from less-informed participants to more-informed ones is packaged as democratization.

Who captures most of the value if Base’s prediction markets scale exactly as Armstrong describes? Not the retail users placing bets. The house takes the fees. The ordinary Americans he’s claiming to liberate become the liquidity.

Three questions are usually enough:

Who captures most of the value if this scales as advertised? Coinbase takes fees on every transaction. Market makers and whales take the edge. Retail provides the volume—which is another way of saying retail provides the losses.

What happens if a competitor starts winning? Watch the “open infrastructure” rhetoric evaporate. Watch the platform incentives tilt. The neutrality lasts only until it threatens the moat.

How has this actor behaved when incentives shifted before? They told builders Base was for building. Now they’re chasing consumer apps and fee extraction. The pattern is already visible.

When builders started noticing the shift, a Base team member clarified that there had been “a miscommunication.”

Base building its own social network with its own App Store is how they support builders, he explained. A social network brings users. Users benefit everyone. Content coins help creators earn. Builders will be “1000x more successful.”

This is the same promise every platform makes.

Join Twitter/X and build your audience.

Post on YouTube and get discovered.

Create on TikTok and go viral.

Some people do. Most become the content—generating engagement, providing liquidity, feeding the machine that rewards a few and monetizes the rest.

And yes, some people will make money on Base. Maybe you already have. That’s not the question.

The question is whether “some people profit” justifies an ecosystem designed to funnel the majority toward gambling, speculation, and token launches dressed up as creative empowerment for all. Whether incremental gains for a few are worth legitimizing a machine that teaches everyone else that quick money is just one more coin away.

The house doesn’t need you to lose. It just needs you to play.

This is the part where essays like this usually offer an exit. Things like: “Build elsewhere.” and “The margins are where the real innovation happens.”

Sadly, that’s half true and half fantasy.

Yes, you can leave.

But Base has the eyeballs, the liquidity, the ecosystem momentum. Building elsewhere means building in obscurity.

You trade complicity for irrelevance. The punk move might just be losing slower with more dignity.

So you’re left with a genuine catch-22: stay and legitimize the machine that’s deprioritizing you, or leave and watch from the outside while the thing you rejected keeps growing without you.

There’s no clean answer.

Maybe you stay and build with clear eyes, trying to help others not get consumed by hype. Maybe you leave and accept that martyrdom doesn’t come with distribution. Maybe you do both—keep a foot on Base for reach while investing your real energy elsewhere.

But whatever you choose, stop believing the shepherds. They are not here to guide you. They definitely aren’t our saviors.

Every generation gets a new version of the same figures: the visionaries who promises that giving them more control will set you free. The speech patterns update but the underlying purpose doesn’t.

We don’t need new heroes.

We need the mindset of seeing through the old tricks.

The future worth building probably won’t come from the loudest voices in the room. But it also won’t come from pretending you can opt out of the room entirely.

It will come from people who stayed clear-eyed about the game while they played it—and who kept building things that mattered even when nobody with power or platform was paying attention.

That’s not inspiring. It’s just true.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The champion of open access turns out to be consolidating it. Again.

This is the same company that spent years telling builders that Base was infrastructure—neutral ground for the onchain future, a place to ship without permission.

Now the focus is consumer apps. Not because apps serve builders, but because apps capture fees masked in the mission of bringing everyone onchain.

The rhetoric was “come build with us.”

The reality is “build in the margins while we chase the revenue.”

Base isn’t competing with builders. They’re relegating them.

You’re still welcome on Base. You’re just no longer the point.

And prediction markets?

Let’s stop pretending. These aren’t “tools to help people get ahead.” They’re gambling infrastructure with better PR. The house edge is real. Calling this “democratized access” is like calling a slot machine a retirement plan.

But Armstrong frames regulators as the obstacle—the elitists blocking ordinary Americans from opportunity.

It sounds righteous. It sounds like something worth rallying behind.

But, what’s really happening?

It’s Coinbase asking for permission to operate a casino while wearing the language of liberation. A corporation finding another way to make money - nothing new, yet nothing for or about the people.

This isn’t a crypto story. It’s not even a tech story.

It’s concentrated power doing what concentrated power always does: using the language of public benefit to clear the path for private gain.

The costume changes with the era.

Railroad barons invoked manifest destiny while locking up land grants.

Zuckerberg talked about “bringing the world closer together” while building the most sophisticated attention-extraction machine in history.

Kalanick promised everyone could “be their own boss” while offloading every cost onto drivers.

Today the costume is a hoodie, the stage is onchain, and the script includes “builders,” “based,” and “tools to get ahead.”

Now anyone can make it. Just launch a creator token and wait for the wealth to arrive.

That’s the new lie.

But the play is ancient:

1. Spot a frontier with untapped value.

2. Position yourself as the steward democratizing it for everyone.

3. Use that positioning to neutralize obstacles and consolidate control.

4. Extract the surplus once dependence is locked in.

The trick requires our participation.

We supply the network effects—the users, the builds, the capital, the political cover. We amplify the tweets. Some even make themselves corporate ambassadors by creating endless social media posts for free while believing they are now creators.

We believe the promise long enough to make the play valuable. By the time the pivot comes, we’re already embedded.

Here’s what makes this version especially cynical.

Armstrong isn’t wrong that regulatory hostility has hurt crypto. He’s not wrong that prediction markets have legitimate uses. He’s weaponizing valid frustrations to launder a self-interested corporate acquisition into a civil rights issue.

That’s the move: attach your profit motive to someone else’s grievance. Make your corporate expansion look like our liberation.

And the prediction market framing is particularly slick, because it inverts reality. Gambling is sold as “getting ahead.” Speculation is sold as “access.” A mechanism that, on average, transfers wealth from less-informed participants to more-informed ones is packaged as democratization.

Who captures most of the value if Base’s prediction markets scale exactly as Armstrong describes? Not the retail users placing bets. The house takes the fees. The ordinary Americans he’s claiming to liberate become the liquidity.

Three questions are usually enough:

Who captures most of the value if this scales as advertised? Coinbase takes fees on every transaction. Market makers and whales take the edge. Retail provides the volume—which is another way of saying retail provides the losses.

What happens if a competitor starts winning? Watch the “open infrastructure” rhetoric evaporate. Watch the platform incentives tilt. The neutrality lasts only until it threatens the moat.

How has this actor behaved when incentives shifted before? They told builders Base was for building. Now they’re chasing consumer apps and fee extraction. The pattern is already visible.

When builders started noticing the shift, a Base team member clarified that there had been “a miscommunication.”

Base building its own social network with its own App Store is how they support builders, he explained. A social network brings users. Users benefit everyone. Content coins help creators earn. Builders will be “1000x more successful.”

This is the same promise every platform makes.

Join Twitter/X and build your audience.

Post on YouTube and get discovered.

Create on TikTok and go viral.

Some people do. Most become the content—generating engagement, providing liquidity, feeding the machine that rewards a few and monetizes the rest.

And yes, some people will make money on Base. Maybe you already have. That’s not the question.

The question is whether “some people profit” justifies an ecosystem designed to funnel the majority toward gambling, speculation, and token launches dressed up as creative empowerment for all. Whether incremental gains for a few are worth legitimizing a machine that teaches everyone else that quick money is just one more coin away.

The house doesn’t need you to lose. It just needs you to play.

This is the part where essays like this usually offer an exit. Things like: “Build elsewhere.” and “The margins are where the real innovation happens.”

Sadly, that’s half true and half fantasy.

Yes, you can leave.

But Base has the eyeballs, the liquidity, the ecosystem momentum. Building elsewhere means building in obscurity.

You trade complicity for irrelevance. The punk move might just be losing slower with more dignity.

So you’re left with a genuine catch-22: stay and legitimize the machine that’s deprioritizing you, or leave and watch from the outside while the thing you rejected keeps growing without you.

There’s no clean answer.

Maybe you stay and build with clear eyes, trying to help others not get consumed by hype. Maybe you leave and accept that martyrdom doesn’t come with distribution. Maybe you do both—keep a foot on Base for reach while investing your real energy elsewhere.

But whatever you choose, stop believing the shepherds. They are not here to guide you. They definitely aren’t our saviors.

Every generation gets a new version of the same figures: the visionaries who promises that giving them more control will set you free. The speech patterns update but the underlying purpose doesn’t.

We don’t need new heroes.

We need the mindset of seeing through the old tricks.

The future worth building probably won’t come from the loudest voices in the room. But it also won’t come from pretending you can opt out of the room entirely.

It will come from people who stayed clear-eyed about the game while they played it—and who kept building things that mattered even when nobody with power or platform was paying attention.

That’s not inspiring. It’s just true.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​