What Is Zora?
Zora is an onchain social network, empowering creativity by turning any content posted on its network into tradable coins. Creators earn a share of trading fees, while referrers also earn a share of the fees from users who have engaged with the platform through their unique link. In Spring 2025, Zora launched ZORA – a fun token – on Base.
Key Takeaways
Zora started as a creator-centric decentralized NFT and media marketplace to empower artists to capture a share of the resale value of their work through community-driven value determination.
Now, Zora is an onchain social network and continues to empower creativity by making it easy for anyone to turn their content into tradable coins. It is also featured in the Base App.
Zora launched its token, ZORA, on Base in Spring 2025. ZORA will be a fun token, with no governance rights.
This article was updated in March 2025 by Joel Agbo.
Social media allows individual creators to produce content ranging from pictures, videos, music, and more, incentivizing such creation through monetization opportunities. However, traditional social media is run by a centralized authority, where users have little control over their content and data, and audiences are usually reduced to passive consumers with no place in the reward structure.
Zora, an onchain social network, is utilizing blockchain technology to establish a sustainable economy for creators. With a community of more than 2 million creators and collectors, Zora aims to provide a free platform that fosters both creativity and financial stability for creators, and has already distributed over 3.5K ETH to creators as rewards.
Zora was also added to the "Base App" discovery flow in mid-July, improving retail access and driving creator-side activity, which may have driven a price surge for the ZORA token beginning around 20 July.
Understanding Zora
"In 2023, people are more focused on media and content-focused form factors. Zora now looks more like YouTube or Tumblr where it is actually about enjoying the content, along with allowing people to mint a piece of media. Zora is about enabling the frontier of digital expression—giving creators the tools to not just participate in the digital economy, but to define it on their own terms, free from the limitations of centralized platforms."
- Jacob Horner, CEO and Co-founder of Zora
Zora is a creator-centric platform with a focus on community building and connecting creators and collectors. While its ultimate direction remains the same, Zora has made a few changes to its platform and how it works. Let’s take a look at how Zora has changed over the years.
A Brief History of Zora
Zora was established in 2020 and was officially launched on Ethereum in January 2021. Unlike traditional media-sharing platforms like YouTube, where algorithms primarily drive the visibility and valuation of content, Zora empowers its community to determine the value of digital art.
On Zora’s creator-centric NFT marketplace, creators and collectors have the autonomy to set and negotiate the value of NFTs, fostering a decentralized market dynamic. This was done through an open-sourced, admin-free 'Auction House', where anyone can run their own curated auction houses for any NFTs. As the curator, they have to approve any auction before it commences with their auction house and can charge a curator fee to run an NFT auction. Between the curator and the bidders, the community has control over the valuation and sale of digital assets. One notable auction that took place on Zora was the auction of the original DOGE meme, earning a record 1696 ETH, making it the highest selling meme at the time.
Over 2022 and 2023, Zora launched the NFT marketplace, a secondary marketplace for media, and also introduced tools like Open Editions to enable creators to bring their visions onchain. In 2024, Zora released an app to make it easy for creators to mint their media anywhere on mobile.
During this time, Zora had over $370 million in secondary volume, and its creators received over $27.7 million in rewards from over 2 million collectors.
The Zora Coin Model: From NFTs to Fungible Tokens
With its latest development, the Zora platform is exploring a remarkably different model for its creator economy – Coins. In its new coin model, every content posted on its platform is now its own unique tradeable token.
Coin it and realize the value of attention.https://t.co/MRFou9eyNU
— zora (@zora) February 25, 2025
Coins are a new feature on Zora, focusing on the attention economy, where every post on Zora is now an instantly tradeable coin on Base with a supply of 1 billion and creators automatically receive 10 million coins upon launch, with the option to buy more of their token. Upon creation of a new post, Zora creates a liquidity pool for the token on Uniswap instantly, and allows anyone to trade the related token on the content’s page on Zora.
Coin creators earn from fees on trading volume, where the higher the trading volume, the more creators earn. There are different rewards available on Zora, allowing creators, collectors, developers and the platform to earn from trading activity.
Creator Rewards: The creator of the coin enjoys automatic earnings for all trades of their content.
Trade Referral Rewards: Users who drive trading through their activity earn a reward for each trade made through their shared link.
Create Referral Rewards: Referrers earn rewards on each trade of a coin created by a user who signed up to Zora using their personalized invite link.
Zora Fee: Zora's platform fee to support the development of the platform.
For a full breakdown of rewards, you may refer to this guide.
The new model brings a number of changes to the Zora platform. According to the project, it will continue to support NFT assets from previously published content, and existing legacy 1155 posts on other networks will remain collectable. However, posts priced in non-ETH tokens will no longer be available to collect with the new model.
The ZORA Token
The ZORA token launched on Base Layer 2 network with a total supply of 10 billion. According to the project, ZORA is only for fun, and does not confer any governance rights or claim on any equity ownership in Zora or its products. The first snapshot was taken on March 3 2025, with a second snapshot to be taken three days before ZORA goes live.
While Zora has its own Layer 2 (Zora Network), it is launching on Base – likely for similar reasons as PENGU launching on Solana. Given that ZORA is a coin designed "only for fun," launching it on Base will allow it to each a wider user base and potentially new users.
The initial allocation of Zora is planned as follows:
Incentives (20%): This is for future grants, public goods, hackathons, and other types of incentives as decided by the Zora team. This category has no lockup restrictions.
Airdrop (10%): ZORA will be distributed to eligible community members, including creators, collectors, developers and other contributors to the Zora brand. This category has no lockup restrictions.
Liquidity (5%): Tokens in this category are for liquidity provisioning with exchanges and market makers.
Treasury (20%): ZORA allocated to the company is meant to align the company with the community for supporting and growing the Zora brand. Tokens in this category will unlock monthly over 48 months starting six months after the Token Generation Event (TGE).
Team (18.9%): The current and future team also receives ZORA allocations for their work on the Zora brand within the crypto creator economy. Tokens in this category will unlock monthly over 36 months starting six months after the TGE.
Strategic Contributors (26.1%): Strategic contributors are investors that have supported the Zora team with advice and guidance around the development of Zora. Like team allocations, tokens in this category will unlock monthly over 36 months starting six months after the TGE.
BALAJIS: Coinbase's Ecosystem Push
The Coinbase app now allows users to purchase any Zora creator token directly within the platform. On August 24, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong acquired nearly 5 million BALAJIS tokens—creator coins tied to former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan's personal brand.
https://t.co/uJ9oxUr8I3 pic.twitter.com/LIZle2KZ6a
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) August 23, 2025
Armstrong's high-profile purchase triggered a surge in trading activity and propelled Balaji to the top position among creators on Zora, while raising awareness around Zora's creator economy.
How to Coin Your Content on Zora
You can coin your content on Zora by publishing it on the platform. Everything published on the platform is turned into a coin once the post is published, and these can be traded on Zora. To coin your content on Zora you will need to create a Zora account.
Creating a Zora Account
Visit the Zora platform to create your account.
Click Log in/Sign up to continue.
You will need a crypto wallet to create an account.
Select your wallet provider and proceed to approve the account creation request from your wallet.
You will be required to provide and verify your email address to complete your account.
You can also connect your Zora account to your Farcaster, X.com, and Instagram account.
Now that your account is ready, you can start publishing on Zora to coin your content.
Coining Your Content
To coin your content on Zora, connect your wallet to the platform.
Click the + icon on the left side of the page
Click Upload File and select the media you wish to publish.
Enter a Title and Description for your content and click Next to continue
On the next page, you will be provided an option to buy additional coins from your content or simply proceed to Coin and receive 10 million tokens.
Click Coin (or Buy + Coin) to proceed.
Approve the transaction request from your wallet to complete.
After the transaction is confirmed onchain, your content will be coined and tradable on Zora.
As a creator, you can claim the rewards from your content by clicking the account section on the top right corner of the page.
Click Claim and approve the transaction from your wallet to claim your rewards.
How to Buy and Sell Coins on Zora
Now, let’s look at how to trade coins on Zora.
How to Buy Coins on Zora
Visit the Zora Marketplace and connect your wallet.
To instantly buy a coin from the marketplace, click Buy on the right-hand side of the content. This instantly places a purchase request for the content’s coin.
Approve the transaction from your wallet to complete.
Alternatively, you can click on the post featuring the coin you wish to trade.
From the post's attached trading terminal, you can buy and sell its coins.
To buy a coin, select a payment method and set the amount you wish to spend on the purchase.
Review the transaction details and click Buy to continue.
Confirm the transaction from your wallet to complete.
How to Sell Coins on Zora
To sell a coin, navigate to the content’s page to access the trading terminal.
In the Sell section, enter the number of coins you wish to sell.
Review the transaction details and click Sell to continue.
Approve the transaction from your wallet.
Your purchased coins or ETH from the sale will be sent to your wallet after the transaction has been confirmed on the network.
Final Thoughts
From NFTs to fungible tokens, Zora as a platform is also evolving as it explores the most effective way to run a sustainable and fair economy for creators. Zora has always been a creator-centric network, and with its Coins upgrade, Zora is offering creators new opportunities to create, connect, and earn from their activity online. By turning posts into coins, Zora has created a platform where users decide on the value of a post. This value system is in turn influenced by a real-time market and instant liquidity, making it easier for participants to capitalize on these contents. Zora’s platform creates opportunities; not only for creators but for individuals interacting with their content. With the intention of profiting from viral content, collectors are expected to be more engaged on the platform by looking for interesting content and actively rewarding creators in the process.
