Are Zora's Content Coins Just Highbrow Memecoins?

Olivia Capozzalo & Camila Russo
July 29, 2025

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Today’s big story:

ZORA’s recent rally spurs a debate about the value of so-called “content coins,” a new asset class coined by Base creator Jesse Pollak

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Today’s Big Story

Are Content Coins Just Brooklyn-Branded Memecoins?

Zora has gone parabolic. The protocol’s $ZORA token is up more than 600% over the past two weeks, pushing the fully-diluted cap near $850 million and on-chain activity looks even wilder with Dune dashboard charts going vertical, even surpassing Pump.fun in terms of tokens minted in the past 24 hours.

Meanwhile Zora’s founders and Base’s Jesse Pollak have flooded X, proclaiming a “new creator-economy paradigm.” Critics dismiss the frenzy as “digital slop” in artisanal packaging.

So which is it, a re-skinned memecoin launchpad or something structurally new?

Before answering, let’s just look at the numbers. Since July 26, more tokens have been minted per day on Base – the Ethereum Layer 2 where Zora is built– than on Solana, the (former?) king of token launchpads.

On July 27, a record 54,000 content coins were minted on Base, an 11x jump from June’s 5k-a-day dribble. Unique daily transacting wallets jumped to over 50k from less than 5k just a month ago, while daily volume climbed to a record $41 million, according to Dune Analytics data. Monthly revenue for July jumped to $2M after failing to cross $600,000 for the past two years, according to DeFiLlama.

A Five-Year Overnight Success

While this explosion in activity may seem sudden, Zora is no overnight success story. Founded in 2020 by Jacob Horne, Dee Goens and Tyson Bataller, the project was initially an open-source NFT marketplace. The team has iterated from different types of NFT auctions to launching its own Ethereum Layer 2, to now creator coins on Base.

And after much iteration, the team has seemingly hit the nail on the head, apparently by riding the memecoin launchpad bandwagon, allowing for instant token minting with every post. That’s what makes it easy to lump Zora with memecoin launchpads together.

Looks Like a Doge, Smells Like a Doge?

On the surface, Zora looks a lot like memecoin launchpads. Both let anyone spin up a fungible token in seconds, both encourage hyper-speculation on low-cap tickers, and both are currently overrun by degens chasing a quick 10x.

Those who see Zora as just another memecoin farm are understandably irked when they see Jesse and Jacob talking about a new system to empower creators etc. etc.

And so you have Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko calling content coins on Zora "digital slop.” Artist Sterling Crispin, who said it’s a “zero sum PvP game of musical chairs.” Jon Charbonneau said, “everything launched so far on zora, pump, bonk, believe, etc is a memecoin.” X user who goes by Mosi said, “it's fine to build memecoins Jesse, just embrace degeneracy.”

Are Content Coins Just Brooklyn-Branded Memecoins?

Meanwhile Zora’s founders and Base’s Jesse Pollak have flooded X, proclaiming a “new creator-economy paradigm.” Critics dismiss the frenzy as “digital slop” in artisanal packaging. So which is it, a re-skinned memecoin launchpad or something structurally new?

On July 27, a record 54,000 content coins were minted on Base, an 11x jump from June’s 5k-a-day dribble. Unique daily transacting wallets jumped to over 50k from less than 5k just a month ago, while daily volume climbed to a record $41 million, according to Dune Analytics data. Monthly revenue for July jumped to $2M after failing to cross $600,000 for the past two years, according to DeFiLlama.

A Five-Year Overnight Success

While this explosion in activity may seem sudden, Zora is no overnight success story. Founded in 2020 by Jacob Horne, Dee Goens and Tyson Bataller, the project was initially an open-source NFT marketplace. The team has iterated from different types of NFT auctions to launching its own Ethereum Layer 2, to now creator coins on Base.

And after much iteration, the team has seemingly hit the nail on the head, apparently by riding the memecoin launchpad bandwagon, allowing for instant token minting with every post. That’s what makes it easy to lump Zora with memecoin launchpads together.

Looks Like a Doge, Smells Like a Doge?

Those who see Zora as just another memecoin farm are understandably irked when they see Jesse and Jacob talking about a new system to empower creators etc. etc.

And so you have Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko calling content coins on Zora "digital slop.”

Artist Sterling Crispin, who said it’s a “zero sum PvP game of musical chairs.” Jon Charbonneau said, “everything launched so far on zora, pump, bonk, believe, etc is a memecoin.” X user who goes by Mosi said, “it's fine to build memecoins Jesse, just embrace degeneracy.” VC Richard Chen called content coins an example of an “elitist” type of “Brooklyn crypto.”

But coins on Zora are structurally different from memecoins.

Here’s why

Tokenomics. Each Zora content coin (one per post) and Creator Coin (one per profile) comes with a fixed 1 billion supply. Content coins hand authors just 1% upfront, but every trade routes a 1% fee back to the creator. Creator coins give influencers immediate access to 50% of the supply, while the other 50% vests linearly over five years, but only unlocks when the coin actually trades. Pump.fun, by contrast, gives 20% of supply to the launcher instantly and locks the remaining 80% in a bonding-curve AMM, with no vesting or trickle of revenue. Also, Zora’s 3 % round-trip fees are 3x Pump.fun’s, which makes Zora a lot less “fun” than Pump.fun for degens who just want to trade.
Reflexive pairing. Zora wires coins together. Every content coin is auto-paired in a Uniswap v4 pool against its author’s creator coin, which in turn trades versus $ZORA. It’s a feedback loop designed to concentrate value in the human at the center of the graph, not the meme of the moment. Launchpad memecoins float in isolation, each ticker lives and dies on its own hype cycle.

Medium. Zora’s app is an Instagram-style feed where content is the hero. On Pump.fun, the price chart is the content. In McLuhan terms, “the medium the message.” In Zora’s case, the medium places the focus on content and creators, while memecoin launchpads place the focus on the token.

Why this matters—even if 90 % still goes to zero

Critics are not wrong that most tokens launched this summer will go to zero and that most of the content on Zora is actually digital slop. But writing the experiment off as repackaged junk misses the point. Here’s a social network that’s natively piping trading fees back to the people who create the content we all consume. Pollak’s rebuttal to the “slop” accusation is blunt: “Content is valuable. Creators are valuable,” and coins are “the most powerful technology we have for letting that value flow.” I agree and I think it’s worth at least trying to improve economics for content creators.

We’re still early and, yes, this model will have to continue evolving so I wouldn’t get so hung up on the very specific tokenomic details, but rather focus on the bigger picture:turning every like, share and view into a liquid, creator-owned micro-economy. That’s a bet worth tracking, even if you’re not ready to ape into someone’s bathroom selfie or this author’s creator coin.

But coins on Zora are structurally different from memecoins.

Here’s why

Tokenomics. Each Zora content coin (one per post) and Creator Coin (one per profile) comes with a fixed 1 billion supply. Content coins hand authors just 1% upfront, but every trade routes a 1% fee back to the creator. Creator coins give influencers immediate access to 50% of the supply, while the other 50% vests linearly over five years, but only unlocks when the coin actually trades. Pump.fun, by contrast, gives 20% of supply to the launcher instantly and locks the remaining 80% in a bonding-curve AMM, with no vesting or trickle of revenue. Also, Zora’s 3% round-trip fees are 3x Pump.fun’s, which makes Zora a lot less “fun” than Pump.fun for degens who just want to trade.
Reflexive pairing. Zora wires coins together. Every content coin is auto-paired in a Uniswap v4 pool against its author’s creator coin, which in turn trades versus $ZORA. It’s a feedback loop designed to concentrate value in the human at the center of the graph, not the meme of the moment. Launchpad memecoins float in isolation, each ticker lives and dies on its own hype cycle.

Medium. Zora’s app is an Instagram-style feed where content is the hero. On Pump.fun, the price chart is the content. In McLuhan terms, “the medium the message.” In Zora’s case, the medium places the focus on content and creators, while memecoin launchpads place the focus on the token.

Why this matters—even if 90% still goes to zero

Critics are not wrong that most tokens launched this summer will go to zero and that most of the content on Zora is actually digital slop. But writing the experiment off as repackaged junk misses the point. Here’s a social network that’s natively piping trading fees back to the people who create the content we all consume. Pollak’s rebuttal to the “slop” accusation is blunt: “Content is valuable. Creators are valuable,” and coins are “the most powerful technology we have for letting that value flow.” I agree and I think it’s worth at least trying to improve economics for content creators.

We’re still early and, yes, this model will have to continue evolving so I wouldn’t get so hung up on the very specific tokenomic details, but rather focus on the bigger picture: turning every like, share and view into a liquid, creator-owned micro-economy. That’s a bet worth tracking, even if you’re not ready to ape into someone’s bathroom selfie or this author’s creator coin.

With love,

Cami, founder of The Defiant

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