Zora
While Crypto markets have been buoyant as of late, the breadth on chain activity has remained subdued for the most part. On a relatively quiet Crypto Twitter, one project and token which is causing quite some controversy is Zora.
Much of this attention is thanks to a recent product launch, and even more so due to controversy surrounding their token launch this week.
Zora recently launched a launchpad-style feature on Base whereby any user post gets instantly tokenised. A relatively simple idea; to turn content into coins. I suppose it’s pump.fun meets Farcaster? I’m not quite sure but either way, the cointent launchpad continues to gain traction:
Even the Base team themselves got involved, “coining” a tweet:
In fact, Chief of Base, Jesse Pollak has been pretty vocally bullish with a number of supportive tweets and doing plenty of coining himself:
It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that this new product launch and the hype created through a big marketing push with the Base team came right as Zora launched their token $ZORA on Wednesday. As an avid on chain experimentoor I was lucky enough to be endowed with some $ZORA myself:
Hardly enough to write home about but one can never complain with free on chain money. Despite the free money, the Zora token launch has caused quite some controversy.
Quoting Kevin Mills (Head of Research @ Triton):
"This is exactly the problem. Zora launching a token - and simultaneously claiming it is just 'for fun' and does not confer any rights or claims on flows, but then allocating 'just for fun money' to its treasury and investors. What does that mean? They are willingly letting retail put real money into an absolutely worthless token that will serve to fund the project and investors, and have zero qualms about that. We all know the pre-launch pump campaign and marketing, the points/snapshot, the game they are playing. That is to pump the price up at launch. For something they themselves explicitly call out as worthless. This is the exact BS that has to stop."
The market has broadly agreed with this view with the $ZORA token trading immediately to around a $200m FDV, around 66% below a funding round in 2022 which valued Zora at $600m.
Airdrop recipients have largely been rushing to claim Zora with significant inflows to DEX pools following claims:
Ultimately this is reflective of a broader trend whereby the market punishes VC coins launching at high valuations which do not have the fundamental story to support said valuation. For the most part grassroots, bottom up, community led projects continue to lead in mindshare and token price performance. These are projects like Hyperliquid which allowed community members to get in at the ground floor into a project/token which can conceivably be valuable. Or coins like Fartcoin which do not claim to be anything but meme, and do not suffer from the insider<>retail misalignment problem which a coin like $ZORA might contend with.