1. Market Performance

Coinbase officially renamed its Coinbase Wallet to Base App on July 16, upgrading the wallet to a 'one-stop' social and payment platform. The Base App integrates the Farcaster social feed and the Zora protocol, allowing users to mint their profiles and posts into tradable tokens. Each time a user publishes content, they can mint content coins through Zora, and creating a personal profile generates Creator Coins, enabling on-chain exposure, trading, and direct monetization functions.

As of July 30, the ZORA token has risen from about $0.008 at the beginning of the month to $0.078, briefly touching a historical high of $0.1003 on July 27, with a total increase of about 875% over the month. Its market cap once rose to $781 million, making it one of the most watched projects in this round of market activity. Meanwhile, since July 26, the daily token issuance on the Base network has exceeded Solana for three consecutive days, a first in history; in the market shares of token issuance for Base and Solana, the Zora platform has consistently led since July 23, with a total issuance of 51,575 coins by July 28, accounting for 62.69% of the total token issuance on Base, surpassing the combined total issuance of peer projects Letsbonk and pump.fun on that day.

2. Project Mechanism

Zora is a decentralized on-chain social and creator economy platform that allows users to automatically mint social media content (text, images, AI art, etc.) into tradable ERC-20 content coins. Additionally, each registered user will also automatically possess a Creator Coin representing their profile. Every content publication, community interaction, and transaction behavior is recorded on-chain, enabling creators to directly monetize through the market without relying on traditional platform advertising or subscription models.

1. Content Coin

  • Source: Each piece of content published by a user is automatically minted into an independent ERC-20 token on Zora, usually with a fixed total supply of 1 billion coins. The author initially receives a 1% share, which is 10 million coins.

  • Use: Represents a specific content's 'work token', which can be traded in the market, more as an expression and speculative collection.

  • Earnings Mechanism: Each transaction of content coins generates transaction fees (round-trip approximately 3%), of which 1% will be rewarded to the content author in the form of ZORA tokens.

2. Creator Coin

  • Source: After each user registers on Zora and establishes a personal profile, their Creator Coin is automatically generated, with a total supply of 1 billion coins.

  • Distribution Mechanism: 50% is immediately tradable, while the remaining 50% (500 million coins) is owned by the creators and unlocked linearly on a monthly basis over a 5-year period, but the unlock conditions require their tokens to be traded for practical release.

  • Earnings Mechanism: Creators can earn revenue through two paths:

    • Transaction fees generated from content coin trading;

    • Trading and unlocking earnings from the Creator Coin itself (the more active the trading, the more unlocks and the greater the earnings).

The platform mechanism adopts a bonding curve approach: each content coin is paired with the corresponding creator coin and is traded on Uniswap v4, with all tokens priced in ZORA tokens. Users must hold ZORA to mint or trade these content coins and creator coins, and 1% of the transaction fees generated from content trading (approximately 3%) will reward creators in the form of ZORA. Additionally, as the trading of creator coins becomes more active, more tokens are gradually unlocked, allowing creators to gain value appreciation from creator coins. This creates a self-reinforcing economic closed loop: creators publish content → content coin trading → ZORA rewards → increasing liquidity and value of creator coins → driving demand for ZORA, stimulating ecological growth.

3. Ecological Hot Projects

1. Content Token (Base is for everyone)

Base is for everyone was initially generated automatically on Zora by a tweet from the official Base Twitter account. Many users mistakenly believed that Base had officially issued a token, leading to a rush to buy and speculative behavior, causing the market cap to temporarily rise to about $17 million, before rapidly plummeting to $1.9 million (a drop of up to 90%). Coinbase stated: 'Base has not issued tokens, nor sold this token. This is only content posted by Base on Zora, and the Zora platform will automatically tokenize this content.' It also stated that this is not the official token of Base, Coinbase, or any related products.

Currently, the market cap of Base is for everyone has rebounded to about $7.6 million. In the Zora content MEME space, this token has the highest market cap, trading volume, and number of holders (several times higher than other projects). Despite not receiving official endorsement from Coinbase, the token maintains a very high level of attention due to market consensus and community enthusiasm.

4. Future Development

As the Base App deeply integrates the Zora protocol with the Farcaster social layer, Zora is no longer just a tokenization tool but has become the core infrastructure of SocialFi. In the future, Zora is expected to launch an on-chain brand sponsorship system, allowing brands to place sponsorships in content, hold content coins, and even activate the influence of creators. For example, the platform already supports content coin holders to pin comments on posts, and this feature could expand into brand promotion interfaces, event sponsorship entrances, and other native advertising forms. By combining content coin trading with token reward mechanisms, Zora has the opportunity to build a true ecological closed loop that directly channels brand funds into the creator economy, without relying on traditional advertising formats such as banners or pop-ups.

Although brands have not fully engaged in the Zora content economy yet, visible market potential is being formed. According to Balaji, a leading creator on Zora, this type of advertising mechanism is gradually evolving: currently, the largest token holders can participate in content exposure through pinned comments, which is essentially a primitive ad unit. If this mechanism can be systematically integrated with brand collaborations, it will not only bring revenue to creators but also allow advertising income to be natively integrated into the system in the form of tokens, rather than following traditional paths.

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