Original｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Today, Zora officially announced that it will launch its native token ZORA on April 23.
Upon hearing the news, many in the community were moved to tears. After years of waiting and minting countless Zora ball NFTs and various art and document NFTs on the platform, the dawn of token airdrops has finally arrived. Zora's market positioning has also changed multiple times, from its initial focus on the fashion and music markets, to an NFT trading platform, and then to a content tokenization platform, ultimately transitioning to the latest SocialFi on-chain social network.
Odaily Planet Daily will provide a brief introduction to Zora in this article and analyze the relevant details regarding the ZORA token.
Zora: A 5-Year Journey from Content Trading Platform to On-Chain Social Network
The story of Zora can be described as a series of twists and turns.
From a content trading platform that "rose early but arrived late," to an NFT trading market, and then to a recent content tokenization platform, no one expected its final positioning to choose the SocialFi track of on-chain social networks.
In October 2020, Zora, co-founded by former Coinbase product manager Jacob Horne and others, announced that it had raised $2 million in seed funding, led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from Brud co-founder Trevor McFedries, Rogue founding partner Alice Lloyd George, designer Jeff Staple, and Coinbase Ventures. At that time, its target audience was somewhat niche, primarily focusing on fashion brands and musicians, facilitating their ability to launch products in a tokenized form. Zora's founder Jacob Horne stated that the goal for that year was to bring 100 brands into its market. From its inception, Zora has had the genes of Coinbase and ToB.
In January 2021, Zora announced that it had deployed to the Ethereum mainnet and launched the 0th token "Ours truly," claiming that Zora is a protocol for creating, sharing, and exchanging valuable information. The official statement indicated that after months of design, development, and auditing, it was finally launched; it is permissionless, unstoppable, and owned by no one.
In March 2021, Paradigm co-founder Fred Ehrsam stated that Paradigm had invested in the NFT protocol ZORA, which supports the minting, curation, and collection of artworks, though the specific amount was not disclosed. At that time, posts on another similar content platform, Mirror, also supported being minted as zNFTs. Thus, on the eve of the NFT boom, Zora had already gained a competitive edge.
In April 2021, according to Coindesk report, Zora had raised nearly $8 million through equity sales. (Note: This article has since been deleted.) In June, PleasrDAO (which later received investment from the well-known investment firm a16z) successfully bid 1696.9 Ethereum (worth about $4 million) on the Zora platform for the original Doge photo NFT, thus making Zora famous. At that time, BAYC had just begun to emerge, and OpenSea was on the verge of explosive growth in platform trading volume, with countless people placing their hopes for the title of leading art NFT trading platform on Zora. In the second half of the year, Zora successively supported NFT display and sales and NFT minting functions. It is worth mentioning that Zora's official statement at that time indicated that it would not charge any fees for NFT minting, sales, and other activities, which provided some convenience for the flood of low-quality NFTs or certain art NFTs that did not participate in NFT speculation. This was one of the important reasons why many organizations and individuals chose to "one-click issue NFTs" on Zora.
In May 2022, at the end of the NFT bull market, Zora welcomed its shining moment—completing a $50 million seed round financing at a valuation of $600 million, led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and others. It is reported that Haun Ventures is a Web3 venture capital firm founded by a16z general partner Katie Haun, marking its first investment. Investors at that time may not have anticipated that in the following years, NFTs would gradually fall out of favor, and Zora would have to embark on various paths of innovation and change.
As 2023 arrived, the NFT market cooled down, but Zora, leveraging its relationship with Coinbase, still managed to "settle in" on Coinbase's L2 network Base ahead of others, delivering impressive data of nearly 500,000 NFT mints during the testnet period. In June 2023, driven by the nationwide L2 craze, Zora announced that it would launch the ZORA NETWORK based on the OP Stack Layer 2 network. In July, it mentioned "cryptocurrency airdrops" for the first time in its official service terms document, which greatly increased the enthusiasm for NFT mints among countless users.
In 2024, Zora first opened ERC20 token payment functionality, at which point its ecosystem had expanded to Zora Network, Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Blast, and the Ethereum mainnet; subsequently, it acquired the NFT minting aggregator mint.fun, completing the "last tool puzzle" of its ecosystem. Unfortunately, the NFT Summer is long gone.
In 2025, after experiencing more than a year of the "Meme coin one-click issuance craze," Zora officially announced the launch of the platform post tokenization feature (Coins feature), where each post corresponds to a token with a supply of 1 billion tokens. Creators automatically receive 10 million tokens upon publishing, and they can earn 1% from each transaction. The tokens are for entertainment purposes only and have been launched on the website and the beta mobile app. This month, the Base official also directly launched tokens, releasing two tokens on the Zora platform: "Base is for everyone" and "Base @ FarCon 2025," which, after a brief period of speculation, have now become just another set of tokens.
As of now, according to Zora's official website, Zora is positioned as an on-chain social platform that allows users to publish content and mint it as NFTs, emphasizing creator sovereignty and community connection.
As of April 21, the number of collectors on the Zora platform has surpassed 2 million, with the number of creators at 426,000; the number of NFTs minted exceeds 1,500; and the total creator incentives have reached 3,553 ETH, approximately $915,000, which can be considered the last remaining fruit of the on-chain creator economy, though it is hardly substantial.
From product launch to the upcoming token release, Zora has taken a solid 5 years. Meanwhile, the TGE of the once "number one NFT trading platform" OpenSea remains unknown to this day.
Zora Platform Operational Data
ZORA Token Economic Model:
According to the token economic model previously released by Zora, the token will be launched on the Base network, with a total supply of 10 billion tokens, distributed as follows:
It is worth mentioning that, according to official statements, the ZORA token is primarily used for tipping, purchasing post tokens, and unlocking premium features, with governance not being its core function.
Officially released token economic model
The first airdrop snapshot was completed on March 3, 2025, and the second snapshot will take place three days before the token launch (which has now been completed). Users can participate in the potential airdrop by publishing and trading Coins. In other words, the total number of tokens for this airdrop is 1 billion. It is worth mentioning that Zora co-founder Jacob Horne previously stated, "Just a reminder to those querying airdrop allocations through our API: currently, this data is all fake and for testing purposes. The real allocation results will only be announced after the snapshot process is completed."
Currently, the price of the NFT trading market Blur platform token BLUR has dropped from a high of $1.25 to around $0.1, with a total supply of 3 billion tokens and an actual circulating supply of about 2.3 billion tokens; the circulating market cap is reported at $248 million; the total market cap is reported at $3.23 billion.
Based on the current development status of the NFT market and market cycles, an optimistic estimate for ZORA's price range is about $0.07 to $0.21.
Zora platform token issuance related Dune data panel
Additionally, according to Dune data, as of April 21, the total trading volume of Zora platform Coins has surpassed $170 million; contract trading volume has exceeded $8.49 million; the total number of issued tokens has exceeded 505,000; the number of independent token issuers has surpassed 108,000; the number of independent trading users has exceeded 1.52 million; and the total incentive amount has reached approximately $664,000.
According to crypto KOL Hitesh.eth statistics,
Approximately 100,000 tokens were created on the Zora platform in the past 5 days;
The number of returning creators is greater than the number of new creators, with a ratio of about 6:4;
The number of new traders is greater than the number of returning traders, with a similar ratio of about 6:4;
Similarly, the ratio of buyers to sellers is about 6:4;
Yesterday, 256,000 users generated $5.7 million in trading volume, averaging about $20 per user;
Zora's market share among traders exceeds that of Pump (approximately 73.2% vs. 26.8%), but there is a significant gap in trading volume market share (approximately 4.6% vs. 95.4%).
From this, we can see that the Zora platform is currently in a peak period of user speculation, likely influenced by the ZORA token airdrop plan, and "99.99% of the tokens issued on the Zora platform are garbage, even the best ones cannot maintain attention for more than a few hours." This has already been evidenced by the recent token issuance by Base.
In the future, based on support from the Base ecosystem and Optimism ecosystem, the ZORA token is likely to be listed on Coinbase and receive ecosystem incentives, but whether it can find more value support currently appears to be in a pessimistic state, and readers are advised to proceed with caution.
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