Zora used to be a selective artsy-fartsy NFT platform, but this week it's getting attention for going degen. You can now use it to sell content coins, a new kind of token which combines features of NFTs, pump.fun and friend.tech:
- Like NFTs, you're symbolically selling media like images, video or text, without transferring legal ownership.
- The difference is that buyers will get a fraction of a number of fungible tokens issued for each piece of content, as a kind of share in the attention it might receive. Like pump.fun, you're buying from and selling to a contract which raises the price along with the number of tokens sold (a bonding curve).
- Like friend.tech, creators are rewarded by receiving a share of the transaction fees for the coins they created.
Of course this is an extremely speculative business, where only a few coins will go viral, while even those might take a nose dive at any moment. Like pump.fun, there will be snipers, bundlers, influencers and cliques manipulating the prices. The bonding curve does make it possible to sell the coins you bought at any moment, although it'll be at a loss when you're too late. If you're interested, don't wait until the hype is over, jump on the bandwagon now.
Zora runs on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum second layer (L2). You should be able to onboard easily via your Coinbase account or wallet if you have one. But you can also send ETH for fees to Base via one of these bridges. I used LayerSwap today. To sign up to Zora, you'll need to connect your email address and a social media account (Twitter, Farcaster or TikTok).
As a creator who makes ugly conceptual art, what I like about the new Zora is that it offers a large canvas and an unpretentious environment where anything goes. The maximum file size is 2 GB and no, I don't think they're using decentralized storage. I feel energized by the idea that I can post certain memes and works of art there that are just too random for Hive or an NFT collection. So far, I made 14 cents from a meme about Crypto Twitter's reaction to the platform:
Buy your coins for this content here. I'm referring to this debate, for example, and this objection from a pump.fun co-founder of all people. While I understand that crypto veterans feel jaded about another exploitative app, many of these critics can afford to be super ethical after they already made money from ICOs, yield farming or NFT collections. I hated friend.tech because it monetized friendships, but the rewards from transaction fees are a decent compromise to reward artists while traders would prefer not to pay any royalties at all.
https://x.com/enjoyoor/status/1912650030185333169
Jesse Pollak who is actively promoting Zora doesn't even work for them - he's responsible for Base at Coinbase. It's refreshing to see a protocol leader supporting app developers with unrelenting enthusiasm. This is a big contrast with the Ethereum Foundation, which reluctantly started using DeFi apps like Aave on their own chain recently, because it wanted to remain neutral. If we want to onboard more people to web3 – and I believe that's important for the future of humanity, not just for our bags – we'll have to stop worrying, we'll have to go outside to meet people where they are, without being afraid of looking cringe: