Zora and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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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 it’s 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.
It’s pump.fun with a social network. Or think Instagram, but tokenized into oblivion.
Here’s 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. That’s 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. It’s 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, that’s 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 Shopify’s 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.
(Pump appears to be moving in a similar direction with Twitch‑style livestreaming.)
That may explain Zora’s decision to deploy on Base, despite having already developed its own OP-stack L2 chain in 2023.
Zora’s revenue-sharing tokenomics is undoubtedly superior to traditional social networks. But without a genuinely organic social graph — and that is the most daunting task of them all — it’s hard to see Zora maintaining its momentum.
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