Welcome to OpenBuild Dev Digest #110!
This issue covers crypto’s long-term building narrative, Layer 1 strategic shifts and changes to offline industry events. Basic blockchain infrastructure challenges have been resolved, and machine economy emerges as crypto’s core growth track, delivering exclusive trust and financial infrastructure for autonomous AI agents. Base undergoes major team restructuring, stepping back from social and creator coin verticals to refocus on trading, payments and AI agents after underperformance in social adoption. Meanwhile, large-scale crypto conferences face fading popularity among founders and investors, with low ROI and low-quality information as the primary pain points.
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✍️ Is there anything left to build in crypto? 👉Read(EN)
For most of crypto’s history, the interesting question was whether the rails could hold up: whether you could settle in seconds, move stablecoins at scale, run open networks under real load. Those questions have answers now. The infrastructure works, and the next interesting problems sit elsewhere.
What has changed is everything happening around it. Models can act on their own rather than just respond. Robots learn from human video rather than hand-written code. Open standards for agent payment and identity are taking shape. None of these are crypto, but each of them pushes against the limits of the financial and trust infrastructure built for people.
The question worth asking is no longer “what can crypto do.” It is “what does the rest of the world need crypto for”.
The answer, increasingly, is the machine economy.
✍️ Coinbase Capitulates on Creator Coins in Base Team Shakeup 👉Read(EN)
On Wednesday, Base creator Jesse Pollak said he’s stepping back from leading Coinbase’s Base app to focus on the chain itself, handing the app to Jordan Fish (better known as Cobie) and recommitting Base to three priorities: trading, payments, and AI agents.
In a long and candid post on X, Pollak called the first quarter of 2026 “a punch in the face” and admitted that half of the two-part bet he’d spent the last two years working on had failed. He’d wagered that builders and onchain-native social experiences would drive crypto’s next wave of adoption. Builders delivered, through stablecoins, prediction markets, and perpetuals. Social didn’t. Farcaster, Zora, miniapps, and creator coins, in his words, “disintegrated completely.” The focus on social left Base behind where it counted. Its native apps in perps (Avantis) and prediction markets (Limitless) trail competitors that have scaled, and Base is also lagging on the tokenization and payments tooling enterprises actually wanted.
✍️ What Happened to Conferences? 👉Read(EN)
People are becoming quietly disillusioned with the mega crypto conferences. Investors and founders I know who used to spend half their year on the circuit are skipping cities they wouldn’t have missed two years ago. Declining ROI and lower signal are the most common complaints, but those don’t explain the root cause. So what’s going on?
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ZKsync Era is a layer 2 rollup that uses zero-knowledge proofs to scale Ethereum without compromising on security or decentralization. Since it’s EVM compatible (Solidity/Vyper), 99% of Ethereum projects can redeploy without refactoring or re-auditing a single line of code.
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Hydration is the leading liquidity protocol on Polkadot. Its mission is to make DeFi efficient, simple, and unstoppable. To achieve this, Hydration unites swaps, lending and a stablecoin currency under the roof of a single, scalable appchain.
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