Jesse Pollak, creator of Coinbase's Base network, has publicly pushed back against claims that Coinbase is selling its ETH, stating that the exchange remains the largest non-DAT ETH holder by an order of magnitude. DAT stands for digital asset treasury, a term for companies that hold crypto as their primary corporate reserve.

His remarks followed criticism from Ethereum community members over Coinbase's ETH sales and the company's reported preference for holding Bitcoin. Pollak defended Coinbase's broader role in the Ethereum ecosystem, highlighting its work across Base, EIP-4844, ERC-4337, USDC, cbBTC, and x402.

Coinbase's Role in Ethereum

Pollak said Coinbase has held approximately 150,000 ETH across multiple market cycles. Separate figures place the company's corporate ETH holdings between 115,000 and 151,000 ETH, worth roughly $300 million.

Beyond its treasury, Pollak pointed to Coinbase's operational footprint on Ethereum. The exchange operates Base, one of Ethereum's layer-2 networks, which launched in 2023 and is built on the OP Stack, the same technology underpinning Optimism's Superchain. Base uses ETH for transaction fees and generates ETH through its sequencer, which Coinbase operates to order and process transactions on the network — an arrangement whose reliance on a single operator has been a recurring point of criticism among Ethereum decentralization advocates.

Critics have questioned why Coinbase would sell ETH generated through Base operations, and some community members also cited the company's reported focus on accumulating Bitcoin. Pollak argued that such criticism overlooks Coinbase's broader contributions to Ethereum, including its work on EIP-4844, which introduced blob transactions that cut data costs for layer-2 networks; ERC-4337 smart wallets, the account-abstraction standard; USDC, the dollar stablecoin Coinbase supports through a long-standing partnership with issuer Circle; cbBTC, its wrapped-Bitcoin token; and x402, an open payment protocol Coinbase introduced in 2025 that revives the HTTP 402 status code for on-chain payments.

Ethereum Community Debates Coinbase's Contribution

Ethereum Foundation member chaskin.eth also said criticism of Coinbase was misplaced, citing Base, USDC, cbBTC, EIP-4844, ERC-4337, and x402 as examples of the company's contributions. The exchange of words reflects a recurring tension within Ethereum between community expectations of ecosystem alignment and the network's reliance on large corporate participants for infrastructure and activity.

Pollak additionally described Coinbase as one of Ethereum's biggest customers through Base, noting that the company has also contributed significantly to EVM and Ethereum development. Base has attracted DeFi and consumer applications while processing transactions through Ethereum, and the network has reached Stage 1 decentralization, according to the report — the middle tier of the widely referenced rollup maturity framework, which grades how much a network still depends on its operator.

As a publicly traded U.S. exchange listed on Nasdaq under the ticker COIN, Coinbase's corporate treasury activity remains visible through regulatory filings, meaning shifts in its ETH position would surface in quarterly disclosures. Its corporate ETH holdings are separate from customer assets held through its custody operations.

Pollak urged the Ethereum community to stop moralizing about customers who use the network, saying that attacking users and participants could alienate them from the Ethereum ecosystem.