The Based Master Plan, Part 2 The first master plan I wrote four months ago is now well into execution. Build the financial layer for trading and spending. Grow an ecosystem of developers on top of it. Turn trading into culture. Bridge on-chain and off-chain finance. Give people a reason to keep coming back. The reason we started with a trading app is simple. That's where the users were, that's where we could prove the product worked, and that's where we could generate enough revenue to fund what comes next. Now we're ready for the next part. What changed I should explain something that has shifted materially since we wrote that first piece. AI is getting dramatically better, faster than most people expected. Eight months ago our engineers were using it because it typed faster than humans. That sounds almost quaint now. Today, frontier models produce work that is genuinely close to what strong developers produce themselves, and the iteration loops are getting tighter every few months. The implication of this is straightforward. If any team can build any software product quickly and cheaply, then software is not a defensible business anymore. The value has to come from somewhere else. It comes from the users you have, the liquidity you sit on top of, and the rails that actual commerce flows through. That is what Based has been building. And it is why the next phase looks the way it does. The actual shift that is coming Here is what we believe will happen over the next 6 months, and what we are positioning for: 1. The next wave of users won’t be human Everyone will have at least one agent running alongside them handling tasks, making decisions, executing transactions. Companies will run fleets of agents working concurrently. The number of "users" on any financial platform will multiply, but most of them won't have names. 2. AI inference usage will increase dramatically from where it is today. Right now, most AI inference usage is concentrated around chat apps and, more recently, coding workflows. That will change. We are going to start seeing collaborative agents automate more parts of work, consumption, finance, and personal decision-making. The amount of AI-inference spending required to support that world will rise materially. 3. Spending is the next pillar that gets disrupted Programming was one of the first domains to get reshaped in a visible way. Spending is next. We believe AI agents will increasingly compute, compare, aggregate, and execute commerce decisions on behalf of users. Over time, AI will compress consumer decision-making itself; finding better prices, better routes, better timing, and more efficient actions. The question worth asking is: where does all of that activity settle? Who owns the rails? Here is what we are going to do The goal is for Based to be the financial execution layer for both humans and agents. Not a wallet. Not a trading app. The system where economic intent, whether it comes from a person or an agent acting for that person, gets turned into action. Here is how we get there. Build the inference layer. If agents are going to operate at scale, they need reliable access to intelligence. That means inference has to become easy to consume, easy to pay for, and easy to embed into workflows (it needs to flow like liquidity). Based has already built AI inference infrastructure (ai.based.one) that can be natively used by both agents and humans. More importantly, payments for this infrastructure have been designed to settle through Hyperliquid and Based Pay, our TradFi payment system. We have already done this. Drive real usage on top of it. Infrastructure without usage is just overhead. We are releasing consumer products that sit on top of the inference layer and generate compounding demand. Product usage drives inference usage. Inference usage strengthens the infrastructure. That loop is what turns an infrastructure bet into a real business. Own the commerce interface. The long-term opportunity is not merely selling access to intelligence. It is owning the interface where intelligence meets action. If AI becomes responsible for more decision-making, then the most valuable layer will not just be the model, or the app, or the wallet in isolation. It will be the system that can take an intent and translate it into execution across trading, payments, purchasing, and financial actions. Expand what "Trade Everything, Spend Everywhere" actually means. When we came up with that phrase, it described a product. Now it describes something larger. Trading is not just perps and spot. It is any decision with an economic outcome that can be turned into an executable action. Spending is not just cards and checkout. It is any transfer of value, regardless of whether the entity initiating it is a human or an agent. Intelligence is not a chatbot bolted onto a wallet. It is the layer that sits inside the commerce stack and optimizes how capital moves through it. When commerce becomes programmable, the companies that win will be the ones that already understand liquidity, settlement, incentives, and distribution as a single system. That is what we have been building. Why BASED We build around one of the most powerful ideas in crypto: that open financial rails enable faster experimentation and stronger alignment than closed systems do. We are making a clear bet on two things. First, that Hyperliquid becomes the dominant chain for AI commerce. The team is building toward housing all of finance on a single, fast, neutral chain. If they get there, it becomes the natural settlement layer for a world running on programmatic transactions. We have built most of our infrastructure there already. There is no comparable alternative. Second, that agentic commerce is real and coming faster than most people think. OpenClaw gave an early glimpse of what it looks like when agents start replacing humans as the primary users of financial systems. That future is not theoretical for us. We have been building with agentic tooling for longer than it has been fashionable to talk about it. We were early on Hyperliquid. We were early on agentic infrastructure. Being early is the only edge that consistently compounds. Why this moment Software is getting cheaper to build. Intelligence is getting cheaper to access. The window to build a defensible position around liquidity, users, and commerce rails is not permanent. We have been in the right places early before. We intend to do it again. The TGE is not just a financial event. It is the moment when the people who built this community with us get a real, structural stake in what comes next. We do not just want to build products for our users. We want to build the future with them. So in short, the Based Master Plan, Part 2: Build the payment and settlement rails for AI inference Release consumer products that drive compounding usage on top of them Own the interface where intelligence meets financial execution Make sure the people who built this with us share in what it becomes The future is Based. p.s: this article is also published on Based Page based-master-plan.based.page. I one-shotted it with Based AI by the way.

Based: Trade Everything, Spend Everywhere. In 2025, we focused on building the best experience on trading. Today, you could trade anything from crypto, commodities, equities and prediction market. In 2026, we will be focusing more on zero-to-one invention on payments.

The Future of Based We are approaching a singular moment in the history of Based. A massive inflection point. Before we get there, before the TGE, I want to share a few thoughts about Based, the culture, and what’s ahead. For those of you who have stuck around during the high-velocity growth period of Based over the last six months, thank you for staying with us. Loyalty in crypto is rare. It is precious. Building something new is incredibly hard. Your faith and belief in us have been the energy source powering us through some of the hardest challenges. Now, in pursuit of building an ecosystem that is worth believing in, we want to share our general direction for the next six months of high-velocity growth. A few guiding principles to consider around Based: Building a burgeoning ecosystem Our journey has progressed loosely as such; From crypto card → to trading app → to now, an ecosystem. A simple way to look at this is as such. Hyperliquid built an entire city unique to itself, attracting builders to build new buildings. Based came along and built one of the finest skyscrapers in the city. Nothing is worse than building a skyscraper nobody wishes to stay in, and this is exactly the issue with Crypto today. You start seeing new L2s and temu DEXes being spun up through which there are no new buildings being built upon, and no new tenants staying. Our commitment in H1 of 2026 is to accelerate Based ecosystem growth in a meaningful way to provide value to Based ecosystem. The Physics of Innovation: Fail Fast, Win Big. A key catalyst for Based’s growth over the past six months has been our rapid experimentation with new ideas and new executions. We intend to retain this spirit of experimentation, to discover what may ultimately become instrumental to the future of Based. For those of you continuing this journey with us, we promise to keep building through thick and thin, and to keep trying things that may not work. But when they do work, the results will be nothing short of spectacular. Today, we can point to four strong product verticals that emerged from this process: - Spot + Perpetual trading (~$13m to date) - Prediction Market (~$150k monthly) - Based Cloud: Enterprise deployments (~$350k monthly) - Crypto Debit Card ($40K+ a month, growing 30% MoM) While we cannot be certain what will succeed in the future, the only certainty is that we are going to keep stumbling upon product verticals that make sense eventually. For every ten things we try, perhaps eight won’t work. That is expected. The spirit of experimentation is what keeps us moving forward. In 2026, we will continue to create new revenue streams and new ways to grow Based into the largest crypto SuperApp that people actually use. We are going to invest heavily in growth, and will do whatever is necessary to build real traction for our future supporters. Create more ways to “Trade Everything, Spend Everywhere” The mission of Based is to build meaningful ways for people to Trade Everything, Spend Everywhere. We are going to be starting 2026 well-capitalized, and will be attempting a few moonshot projects that have not really been done in Crypto before. Realistically, few projects have figured out “retail/normie onboarding”, which has always been a huge CT talking point. A couple of our initiatives are going to tackle this from first-principles: “what do people genuinely want to use?”. The answer is not more complexity. It is not new jargon or new financial abstractions. It is simple, intuitive pathways that let users Trade Everything and Spend Everywhere, without needing to understand the machinery underneath. Lastly None of this is about a single event, a single feature, or even a single token moment. The BASED TGE is not a finish line. It’s the moment where Based stops being “a product you use” and starts becoming an ecosystem you can own a piece of, a skyscraper that keeps filling up with better tenants, better businesses, and better reasons to stay. Our job over the next six months is simple (and hard): keep shipping, keep experimenting, keep compounding real usage: and to make sure that as the city grows, our building becomes the place people default to when they want to trade, earn, and spend. If you’ve been here through the speedruns and the setbacks, you already understand what we value: progress over polish, momentum over narratives, and building over talking. We won’t promise perfection. We’ll promise effort, honesty, and velocity. We’ll keep putting real products in the hands of real users until “Trade Everything, Spend Everywhere” stops being a line and becomes a habit. Thanks for sticking with us. The best part of Based hasn’t happened yet. Stay Based.