Author: Nianqing, ChainCatcher
At 3:12 AM on April 17, Base's official Twitter account announced the "Base is for everyone" token on the Zora platform. With official endorsement and a retweet from Jesse, the head of the Base protocol, many mistakenly believed that Base had officially released a Memecoin, and some community members even misjudged it as Base issuing a token.
The FOMO sentiment quickly drove the market cap of "Base is for everyone" to $17 million. However, around 4:30 AM, the market took a sharp downturn as some early opportunists took profits, causing the token price to plummet rapidly, with the market cap dropping from over $10 million to just over $1 million in a mere five minutes, with a decline of up to 90%.
Meanwhile, Base officially released another token called "Base @ FarCon 2025" on the Zora platform and promoted it via Twitter, which accelerated the decline of the "Base is for everyone" token. Memecoin opportunists quickly shifted their focus to the new battlefield, and the market cap of the "Base @ FarCon 2025" token surged to about $900,000 but soon fell back.
The series of "shenanigans" sparked dissatisfaction within the community, with many players accusing "BaseRug for Everyone," claiming that the official account continuously released junk tokens and then rug pulled.
The Base official account later explained that the release of the two tokens, "Base is for everyone" and "Base @ FarCon 2025," on Zora was intended to encourage content to be put on-chain and promote the development of on-chain culture. They emphasized that Base had never sold any related tokens and that these representations were not official network tokens of Base, Coinbase, or any other related products.
Subsequently, Jesse also tweeted to explain the difference between content coins and memecoins, and linked the relevant tweets on Zora. He published a lengthy article explaining that content coins are meant to convey the idea that "Coin is content, content is coin," allowing creators to spread content more widely and earn transaction fees through content coins, with ownership of some tokens representing a fair market valuation method.
Although the community did not seem to buy Base and Jesse's response, it appears that the farce did not completely backfire; rather, Zora gained real traction.
The price of the "Base is for everyone" token even broke its previous "Rug" high today at 12:30 PM, rising over tenfold from $0.002 to surpass $0.02. The market cap also rebounded to over $10 million. Some tokens previously released by Base on the Zora platform even saw increases of over 20% today.
Who should be held accountable for the token's decline?
Today is not the first time Base has "backfired." Community members have noted that tokens previously promoted by the Base official account and team members have also experienced significant declines, accusing them of "killing without burying" and "only issuing tokens without supporting them."
For example, on March 14, Base officially minted the fourth issue of the "ETH Investor Club Quarterly," featuring articles by founders and contributors of the Ethereum ecosystem, and tokenized it as "EIC04." EIC04's market cap once exceeded $1 million but quickly fell to less than $10,000. To this day, investors are still voicing their grievances under Base's official tweets.
Since last year, the Base official account and protocol head Jesse have frequently released tokens on the Zora platform and promoted them multiple times on official social media. A total of 27 types of "content coins" have been released on Base's Zora homepage. Although they claim to be putting content on-chain, some uninformed investors are easily attracted by the officially endorsed Memecoins, and with the presence of new coin sniper bots on some Memecoin platforms, the content coins released by Base on Zora are easily targeted, leading to rug pulls.
As a result, in today's "Base is for everyone" token incident, many people criticized Base for frequently releasing junk assets. However, to be fair, the core issue causing this situation is the cognitive gap between the Base team and the P small players, who mistakenly regard content coins as memecoins.
Including the phrase "Coined it," which the Base team has used many times to evoke FOMO, this is the core philosophy of Base and Zora—everything can be put on-chain / Just coin it.
This incident can even be seen as a premeditated scheme by the Base team.
Jesse tweeted in February: "When I launch 1 coin, they will tell you I am launching a memecoin; when I launch 10 coins, they will tell you I am rugging; when I launch 100 coins, they will realize I am pioneering the next generation of media, culture, and content."
This is also why today, when Jesse was jokingly asked, "Can we capture @jessepollak's resignation letter and put it on-chain?" he could easily reply, "you should write a fake one and coin it on @zora"—after releasing so many tokens, this time the promotion finally hit the mark.
As a new concept, content coins indeed require continuous user education. But this cost should not be borne by retail investors. Knowing that the market has FOMO sentiment, the official account should have proactively and continuously informed that "this token is just an experiment," rather than explaining after retail investors have been hurt. Base clearly needs to do more work to avoid this, prevent sniping, and educate users through KOLs and broader outreach.
In the end, Zora won the farce
Recently, the Base official account and team members have frequently posted content on Zora, pointing to the upcoming token issuance on Base.
Zora is an NFT marketplace and on-chain social platform based on Ethereum and Base. In early March, Zora planned to launch the ZORA token based on the Ethereum Layer 2 network Base. Zora stated that the token is "for entertainment purposes only" and does not grant holders governance rights.
Zora is one of the key projects promoted within the Base ecosystem. In May 2022, Zora raised $50 million in funding, led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and others, achieving a valuation of $600 million. Jacob Horne, co-founder of Zora, is a former product manager at Coinbase, and co-founder and CTO Tyson Battistella was previously a software engineer at Coinbase, responsible for creating Coinbase Commerce. The Zora and Base teams are closely linked, with Jesse being one of Zora's main advocates.
Additionally, the product philosophy advocated by Zora aligns very well with Jesse's aesthetic. Zora aims to become an on-chain social network where each post is a memecoin. Jesse stated last October that one of the three products he most hopes people will build on Base is—on-chain social media and creator tools. He believes NFTs should disappear, replaced by "on-chain media," "on-chain music," "on-chain video," etc. Last year, the trailer for the documentary "Vitalik: The Story of Ethereum" was released in the form of Zora Mint.
In March of last year, Zora also released the ERC-20z standard, aimed at providing a highly liquid secondary market for its open NFTs. The Zora protocol takes a portion of the minting revenue to automatically deploy liquidity tokens (LP) after the minting process ends. All NFTs adopting this format can be traded immediately on decentralized exchanges without the need to create separate wrappers or index contracts.
This token standard breaks the boundaries between NFTs and tokens, enhancing the liquidity of NFTs originally in the form of images, videos, and GIFs. However, there are also some drawbacks. In August of last year, on-chain detective ZachXBT minted part of his latest investigative report as an ERC-20z token on Zora, expecting it to ultimately present as an NFT digital collectible, but the token automatically created a liquidity pool using the Zora protocol, which subsequently triggered FOMO behavior among retail investors. The market cap of the token surged to $14 million before falling back, leading to controversy. ZachXBT responded that he did not intend for people to speculate on the report.
This is also why content coins can be mistaken for Memecoins. Furthermore, because token issuers cannot organize sniper bots and control liquidity, once FOMO occurs, it is difficult to manage the situation of pulling and crashing.
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