Behind the 875% increase: How does Zora reconstruct the closed loop of content and value on Base?

1. Market Performance

On July 16, Coinbase officially renamed its Coinbase Wallet to Base App, 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. Users can mint content coins through Zora for each piece of content they publish, and creating a profile generates creator coins, enabling on-chain exposure, trading, and direct monetization.

As of July 30, the ZORA token has risen from about $0.008 at the beginning of the month to $0.078, briefly touching an all-time high of $0.1003 on July 27, marking a total increase of approximately 875% over the month, with a market cap reaching as high as $781 million, making it one of the most watched projects in this market cycle. Meanwhile, starting from July 26, the daily token issuance on the Base network has exceeded that of Solana for three consecutive days, a historical first; since July 23, Zora has consistently led in the market share of token issuance between Base and Solana, with a total of 51,575 tokens issued on July 28, accounting for 62.69% of Base's total issuance, surpassing the combined total 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 automatically receives a creator coin representing their profile. Every content publication, community interaction, and transaction is recorded on-chain, allowing creators to monetize directly 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 a separate ERC-20 token on Zora, typically with a fixed total supply of 1 billion tokens, with the author initially receiving a 1% share, or 10 million tokens.

• Purpose: Represents a specific piece of content as a "work token," which can be traded in the market, serving more as an expressive and speculative collective.

• Revenue Mechanism: Each transaction of a content coin generates a transaction fee (round-trip approximately 3%), of which 1% is rewarded to the content author in ZORA tokens.

1. Creator Coin

• Source: Each user automatically generates their Creator Coin upon registering on Zora and establishing a profile, also with a total supply of 1 billion tokens.

• Distribution Mechanism: 50% is immediately tradable, while the remaining 50% (500 million tokens) belongs to the creator, unlocking linearly on a monthly basis over a 5-year period, but the unlocking condition requires that their tokens be traded for actual release.

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

• Transaction fees generated from content coin trades;

• Trading and unlocking revenue from the Creator Coin itself (the more active the trading, the more unlocking occurs, leading to greater earnings).

The platform mechanism employs a bonding curve approach: each content coin is paired with its corresponding creator coin and 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 be rewarded to creators in the form of ZORA. Furthermore, as the trading of creator coins becomes more active, more tokens are gradually unlocked, allowing creators to benefit from the appreciation of their creator coins. This creates a self-reinforcing economic loop: creators publish content → content coin trading → ZORA rewards → increased liquidity and value of creator coins → heightened demand for ZORA, stimulating ecological growth.

3. Popular Projects in the Ecosystem

1. Content Token (Base is for everyone)

Base is for everyone was initially generated automatically on Zora from a tweet by the official Base Twitter account. Many users mistakenly believed that the Base official had issued a formal token, leading to a rush and speculative behavior, causing its market cap to briefly rise to about $17 million before rapidly plummeting to $1.9 million (a drop of up to 90%). Coinbase stated: "Base has not issued any tokens nor sold any tokens. This is merely Base publishing content on Zora, and the Zora platform will automatically tokenize the content." It also clarified that this is not an 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 category of content MEME on Zora, this token has the highest market cap, trading volume, and number of holders (several times that of other projects), and despite not having official endorsement from Coinbase, it maintains a high level of attention due to market consensus and community enthusiasm.

4. Future Development

With the deep integration of the Zora protocol and the Farcaster social layer in the Base App, Zora is no longer just a tokenization tool but has become a core infrastructure for 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 in posts, and this feature could be expanded into brand promotion interfaces, event sponsorship entry points, and other native advertising forms. By combining content coin trading with token reward mechanisms, Zora has the opportunity to build a true ecological loop that directly channels brand funds into the creator economy system without relying on traditional advertising formats, such as banners or pop-ups.

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

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