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Breaking down Zora‘s latest ’Content Coin fad

Breaking down Zora‘s latest ’Content Coin fad WikiBit 2025-07-29 04:00

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.The last time Zor

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

The last time Zora was in the limelight, the protocol was seeing an all time-high of 20-25k tokens created daily.

That was in April, just before the ZORA token-generation event — launching a “for fun only” token that was universally panned by the Crypto Twitter commentariat.

The ZORA token dumped immediately on launch, daily tokens created cratered to less than 5k, and price had largely stagnated until last week.

Now its back. ZORA is today trading 227% up on the week, and its mobile app is climbing ranks on the iOS App Store.

Nearly 40k tokens were created yesterday, the highest in the protocol‘s history. About 15-50% of the tokens (denoted in blue below) are coming from Base App, Coinbase’s newly rebranded wallet app.

The economics of Zora

Zora is not a difficult product to understand.

Its pump.fun with a social network. Or think Instagram, but tokenized into oblivion.

Heres roughly how it works:

You are a social media influencer, and you post cool stuff on Zora. Each of your posts are tokenized as an ERC-20 token with a 1 billion supply. You receive 1% (10 million).

People think your post will go viral, so they buy it (via Uniswap under the hood), and you earn a 1% cut of the trading fee paid in ZORA. Thats the first revenue stream for creators.

These trades are paired against your “Creator Coin,” which is basically your profile tokenized when you sign up on Zora. Your username is the ticker.

Every Creator Coin has a 1 billion supply, 50% of which is immediately tradable.

The other half vests linearly to you over five years. But here‘s the catch: It only pays out to you when someone really likes you and trades your Creator Coin. That’s the second revenue stream for creators.

You quickly see how the incentives line up.

Make cool content, people buy your tokenized posts, you earn 1% trading fees. Become super popular, people speculate on your Creator Coin, your market cap grows, you get paid out more.

Most Zora trading volume is coming from Creator Coins — about $33 million yesterday.

I imagine that is quite lucrative for content creators.

Consider JACOB, the Creator Coin of Zora co-founder Jacob Horne. Its the second-largest Creator Coin, with a $6.2 million market cap today.

At a linear vesting rate of 500 million tokens over five years, thats 273,973 tokens vested a day. Or about $3,397 in daily value at a $6.2 million market cap.

Contrast that with a typical Instagram creator who takes years to build a 50k following, and gets paid something like $100-$500 for a sponsored post, based on Shopifys estimates.

Zora draws a lot of comparisons to Pump for the way that it both attracts speculators to trade on low-cap tokens.

The key distinction is that Zora is attempting to anchor this activity to a native social network, betting that a durable network effect will sustain engagement.

Disclaimer:

The views in this article only represent the author's personal views, and do not constitute investment advice on this platform. This platform does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of the information in the article, and will not be liable for any loss caused by the use of or reliance on the information in the article.

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