‘Memetic speculation’: Users debate Zora, the creator-token app with Coinbase backing
Almost a year in, the Zora accounts with highest value are about porn, AI art and memes
ded pixto/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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Since the Zora app launched in September last year, it’s seen some adoption, with over 127,000 downloads on iOS and more than 50,000 downloads on Android, according to data from Appfigures and Google.
Out of those, nearly 18,000 Zora accounts are posting daily, Blockworks Research data shows. And 36% of daily posting Zora accounts are actually doing so not from Zora itself, but from the Base app.
When the Coinbase Wallet app rebranded to just “Base” last month and integrated Zora for some users, that sparked a surge in Zora use through the Base app itself (Zora can also be accessed and used via a web browser).
Yesterday, Base engineer Youssef El Allali shared an AI agent tool that lets Base app users trade small amounts of Zora creators’ tokens by mentioning a Zora account’s handle, which could further speed up trading and further abstract it away from the mobile app itself.
When you join Zora, a creator token is automatically generated and associated with you, and other users can effectively “trade” you. There isn’t really an obvious reason to buy someone else’s token, though, other than to financially support them or potentially flip their token to make a quick buck.
And while some crypto traders may have written off Zora as a short-lived fad like Friendtech or StarsArena, Zora has something those don’t — backing from Coinbase.
So far, some of the Zora creator tokens’ market caps are surprising. As of Wednesday morning, about 20 Zora content creators, including ex-Coinbase employee turned Zora cofounder Jacob Horne, have creator account market caps of $1 million or more each.
45 creators have “market caps” of over half a million dollars each.
The top 10 accounts on Zora by market cap include a porn account, an AI art account, a crypto trading influencer, and some meme accounts, to name a few. Overall, it doesn’t look like art is dominating Zora’s financial landscape.
Some Zora accounts are personal and tied to individuals, while others are more anonymous or appear to represent a company or group.
But is it a good idea to assign “value” to people — or their personal posts or pieces of content — in such a rapidfire, mercurial way?
Some artists and founders aren’t so sure about Zora.
This week, Coinbase’s Base lead and unofficial Zora hype-man Jesse Pollak wrote: “Help I keep putting money into @zora and supporting creators and collecting content but my balance keeps going UP?!?!?”
“It doesn’t always go up,” electronic music artist and Royal founder Justin Blau replied. “The narrative is beginning to feel irresponsible. I don’t wanna wait another 4 years to convince creatives that crypto has more uses for them than memetic speculation.
“There is nothing wrong with speculation, just call it what it is. This disguising narrative is dangerous,” Blau continued.
Pollak hit back: “I didn’t promise up only. I described my experience that is very real. I’m also more optimistic than you about the combination of infinite creativity and a better creator economy.”
Some other artists, like visual artist ThankYouX, aren’t sold on the Zora idea, either (ThankYouX has released his work as NFTs and integrated blockchain tech into his work since 2020).
“It just adds a purely speculative element which isn’t what art is about,” ThankYouX wrote of Zora. “And the Zora team is very irresponsible with how they’ve handled things by launching automatically for artist[s] and hyping the speculation element too much.”
Notably, Vitalik Buterin tried Zora recently — and argued, among other things, that requiring users to input email addresses (and the affiliated smart wallets tied to them) could contribute to user segregation on Ethereum.
“You want compatibility for existing ethereum uses, no?” he asked Horne in a post. “Otherwise you’re creating two incompatible ecosystems, one for ‘real ethereum users’ [and] one for ‘mainstream people’; I actually think this is one of the biggest risks in ethereum UX right now.”
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