Coinbase and Zora Accused of Shady Marketing Ahead of ZORA Token Launch

Onchain social network Zora revealed that its token generation event (TGE) is slated for April 23, in an X post on Sunday, April 20. Many in the community are criticizing the timing of the announcement, after the controversial launch of a memecoin on Zora last week.

The platform’s token, ZORA, is set to go live just a week after Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) Base launched a memecoin on Zora that caused a wave of backlash on Crypto Twitter. The memecoin — which Base creator Jesse Pollak insisted should be called not a memecoin, but a “content coin” — was posted about on Base’s official X account, causing many onlookers to assume it was an official token from Base. The tokenized content’s price surged before crashing 95%, in what many in the community were quick to dub a rugpull.

Base clarified its positioning in an X post only the following day, April 17, stating “To be clear, Base will never sell these tokens, and ​​these are not official network tokens for Base, Coinbase, or any other related product. The content we share is creative, and we're going to keep bringing culture onchain.”

Since Zora’s TGE announcement yesterday, the community is voicing frustrations over the timing, with some outright accusing Coinbase, Pollak, and Base of intentionally hyping the social platform ahead of its TGE.

Per Zora’s original TGE announcement in March, the ZORA token will launch on Base, not the Zora Network itself, with a total supply of 10,000,000,000 tokens.

Phin Totten, the marketing lead at Ethereum L2 Abstract, summarized the situation and the sentiment of many in the crypto community in a post on X yesterday, April 20:

Coinbase, which is currently the fourth largest centralized crypto exchange by 24-hour trading volume, launched Base in 2023. Pollak, Base’s creator, is currently the Head of Base and Coinbase Wallet, per his LinkedIn profile.

Coinbase’s venture arm lists Zora as one of its portfolio companies.

Per its official website, Zora, a creator-focused Ethereum L2, first launched as an NFT marketplace in 2022. The platform pivoted to being an onchain social network recently, as interest in NFT trading continued to wane. Aside from its own Zora Network, the platform supports blockchain networks Base, OP Mainnet, Arbitrum One, Ethereum, and Blast

In an X post today, Pollak pushed back against accusations that the token launch timing had been coordinated, writing "the truth is the effort to coin things from @base went 0 to 1 in <1 day [...] everything else has just happened. coins are viral I guess."

ZORA tokenomics

Other are questioning tokenomics, which will see 19% of the token go directly to the team, 26% to investors, and 20% to the treasury. Just 10% of the token will be distributed to Zora users from the last five years.

As mentioned, the ZORA airdrop event was originally teased in March. In its official announcement, the Zora team stated that the token is “for fun only” and will reward users based on two snapshots, with the first taken in January 2020, and the second on March 3 2025.

Zora’s documentation describes it as a “fast, cost-efficient, and scalable Layer 2 built to help bring media onchain.” When users mint media using the Zora platform, that image is immediately assigned a liquid ERC-20 token pair that represents it. This has led to large amounts of speculation when notable users tokenize or share any media they have published on the platform.

In October, onchain sleuth ZachXBT launched a free NFT on the marketplace, and speculators ended up pushing the ERC-20 rendition of the artwork to a $12 million market capitalization. That token, 243MTHEFT, now trades at a $91,000 valuation with just $10,000 in liquidity.

Zora did not respond to The Defiant’s request for comment by press time.