Most Influential: Jesse Pollak

Source: CryptoNewsNet Original Title: Most Influential: Jesse Pollak Original Link: Jesse Pollak, best known as the creator behind a certain major crypto exchange’s layer-2 network Base, has been seen as the person largely responsible for the network’s growth in popularity this year.

Pollak, who began at the exchange in 2017, launched Base in 2023. Designed to make onchain activity cheaper and easier and to support a new wave of decentralized applications, Base represented the first time a major crypto exchange had launched its own layer-2 network.

This year, Base saw significant growth: crossing $15 billion in total value locked (TVL) in January and becoming one of the largest L2s by $10 billion (Arbitrum is the only layer-2 network larger than Base).

The rise of Base’s popularity is not only due to how low transaction costs are — well under a cent — but also because of the growing DeFi applications available in its ecosystem, as well as social applications and memecoins that drew growth over the past year. Pollak’s rising stardom was slightly dimmed when he faced heavy backlash over his $JESSE memecoin launch in November, after what many users claim that bots grabbed much of the supply and the token siphoned liquidity from other Base projects.