Base Stole 3 Years of My Life

“Build on Base. We’ll support you.”

That was the promise.

We believed it for 3 years.

We shipped 10+ products: Games. AI agents. Prediction markets. zkTLS products.

We poured our lives into building on Base.

What did we get?

Nothing.

Not a retweet.

Not a reply.

Not even a group chat.

Last year, we built @ infecteddotfun, the most viral game on Base. We grew a brand new account to 50,000 followers in a month. It went viral everywhere. People couldn’t stop talking about it.

Base didn’t even retweet the launch.

That was the moment something finally clicked. Something was deeply wrong.

Why We Believed

When I first discovered Base, it felt like a no-brainer.

Back then, L2 fragmentation was pure chaos. Building products was already hard. Choosing where to build was even harder.

Then Base launched. Built by Coinbase. Shipped with friend tech. Jesse and the team pushed the “app-first” narrative hard. For the first time in a long while, it felt like someone actually cared about applications, not just infra.

It felt like a real builder-first chain.

They said they cared about builders.

They said they would help with marketing.

They said they were different.

In hindsight, it was just better marketing.

We fell for it.

The Slow Realization

Over time, I started losing my belief in Base.

The first real crack was when they started aggressively pushing Farcaster and Zora. Not because they were necessarily the best products, but because they invested in those companies.

That was the moment I understood how this actually works.

Crypto loves to pretend blockchains are permissionless and open. That anyone can build, and the best products will win. Since only a few apps ever hit real PMF, I thought experimentation was encouraged.

In reality, you either build what they like, or you are part of the inner circle.

Everyone else is just there to bring attention and liquidity to the chain.

But on X, they say: “Come build on Base. We’ll help you go viral”

And we believed them.

We spent 3 years building. We shipped 10+ apps. We poured our lives into this.

They did not reply to us on X. They did not reply to us on Discord. They did not reply to us on TG.

We could not even get a group chat.

Zero support.

I guess we were not building what they liked.

Doing It Ourselves

So we decided to stop waiting.

Fine. We will go viral ourselves.

We spent months brainstorming ideas. We came up with @ infecteddotfun. A game where you spread viruses on the blockchain.

It exploded.

Brand new account to 50,000 followers in a month. One of the most viral games on Base.

Only then did Base team start replying.

They told us: “We’ll support your launch.”

They told us: “We got you.”

They told us to wait.

So we waited.

Launch day came.

And guess what?

Nothing.

No tweet.

No retweet.

No support.

Imagine spending 5 months building a product, finally getting enough traction for them to promise support, and then that support just disappears.

When I asked why, the answer was vague, political, and made no sense.

Look at What They Do, Not What They Say

The worst part is not what happened to us.

The worst part is that this happens to everyone.

But nobody talks about it. Because once you are already on Base, you are a hostage. You do not want to ruin the relationship. You might need them one day.

So you stay quiet. And Base keeps pretending they support builders.

If you only want to support a few chosen projects, that is fine. Just say it.

Do not cosplay as a chain that supports all kinds of builders.

What they say and what they do are completely different.

So we left.

We moved to Solana.

6 months later, we built @ addicteddotfun, the biggest crypto game of 2025. $4M in revenue in 48 hours.

We did not suddenly become smarter.

We just left a chain that treats builders like NPCs.

Our next game @ jaileddotfun is launching soon on Solana.

And all of our future games will be built on Solana.

We’ll never build a single product on Base or Ethereum anymore.

Conclusion

I used to think competition between Ethereum and Solana was good. That builders should just choose wherever they want to build.

After wasting 3 years of my life, I think this is actually net negative for the industry.

So many great builders are still stuck in ecosystems like Base. I would not be surprised if many of them move to Solana and suddenly see 10x or 100x more traction, just like we did.

Builders should be where the users are.

Right now, users and liquidity are on Solana.

This is not a chain-maxi take. This is based on actual results. Ours, and our friends’.

I wasted enough time building on Base.

So you do not have to.

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