BaseLayer - Ep 3: Shane Mac (Co-founder, XMTP)

Fri, Jan 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

Shane Mac was one of the first developers on Twitter. He built a company to 100 million users, got acquired by BlackBerry, and had Zuckerberg demo his Facebook Messenger chatbot at F8. Then the platforms changed the rules. API changes. $500K/month fees. After 15 years of building on 'quicksand,' Shane co-founded XMTP, a decentralized messaging protocol built on Base that no one can shut down. In this episode of BaseLayer, Shane shares: • Starting as an eBay power seller at 13 • Being one of the first Twitter developers • Growing to 100M users and the BlackBerry acquisition • Why the open internet died • Building XMTP on Base • "Think smaller to build bigger" Follow Shane: https://x.com/ShaneMac Follow XMTP: https://x.com/XMTP_