Original author: Umbrella, Deep Tide TechFlow

On September 15, 2025, Base founder Jesse Pollak announced that the team was exploring Base's native token, which attracted widespread attention and discussion in the crypto market.

As the star L2 under Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, Base has a TVL of approximately US$7.2 billion. At the same time, thanks to the numerous SocialFi products within its ecosystem, it has nearly 700,000 daily active addresses on the chain, ranking first among all L2s.

This series of data also shows that the market generally has high expectations for Base's coin issuance. In addition, Coinbase Wallet was renamed Base App and a major update was made to the product to add social, payment and other functions, which seems to indicate that Base's native token is about to come.

Related reading: From Coinbase Wallet to Base App: Understanding the Opportunities and Changes of Web 3 Super Apps in One Article

The current market believes that Base will most likely complete its TGE in Q4 of this year, and may issue airdrop shares based on the interaction records of leading projects within the Base ecosystem.

Such speculation has made the leading applications within the Base ecosystem a scarce asset, and quite a number of users have turned their attention to Zora.

As a leading application in the Base ecosystem, Zora has performed very well in the past two weeks. On October 14, it announced that it would launch a live broadcast function on the platform, and it seems that it is also making full preparations for the upcoming "big" thing.

The "content as token" narrative of traditional crypto creator economic platforms has gradually failed to bring freshness to meme players. Compared with text, pictures, and live broadcasts, which can bring richer content and Fomo emotions to the audience at all levels, it is foreseeable that a large number of "talented" creators will launch more memes with more narrative charm through Zora's live broadcast function.

Zora: From NFT Platform to Creator Economic Infrastructure

Zora was founded in 2020 and received support from Coinbase's venture capital fund in the early stages of the project's launch, raising a total of US$60 million through three rounds of financing.

When Zora was launched, the NFT narrative was booming. As the NFT platform of the Base ecosystem, Zora occupied more than 50% of the NFT share on Base. Until this year, Zora completed its transformation from an NFT platform to a popular content platform in the current Base ecosystem, which also laid the foundation for its natural advantage in the distribution of Base tokens.

In April 2025, $Zora tokens were issued with a total supply of 10 billion, 50% of which were allocated to the community. At that time, the market was busy chasing various memes on Solana and not much attention was paid to Zora.

The turning point occurred in July, when Zora underwent an important update and achieved the large-scale issuance capability of creator tokens and meme coins on the platform through Base integration, officially transitioning from an NFT trading platform to the popular track of Meme launch platform, and instantly became the most popular application in the Base ecosystem.

Compared with already famous products such as Pump.Fun, Zora, which entered the market later, has absorbed a lot of experience from its "predecessors" and created a lot of innovative mechanisms.

In terms of token types, Zora not only has tokens corresponding to the content, but also adds "creator coins" corresponding to each creator, one for each user profile, allowing creators to obtain additional rewards of market recognition by providing high-quality content within this content platform.

The more core innovation lies in the design of Zora's revenue distribution model. The token transaction fee on the Zora platform has been reduced from the early 3% to 1%, of which 50% is paid directly to the creators, 20% is locked as permanent liquidity to permanently increase the depth of the transaction pool, 20% is rewarded to the developer/platform that recommends the creator to deploy the token, 4% is used as a reward for a specific transaction address, and 5% goes into the platform treasury.

This distribution mechanism is also closely related to its platform token $Zora. All rewards will be converted into $Zora token payments, and all income entering the platform treasury will support prices through market repurchases.

In general, Zora provides users with an easy-to-use and almost barrier-free token issuance tool, allowing any content creator to complete token deployment with one click, and creators can obtain continuous income from secondary market transactions rather than a one-time sale profit.

According to data, Zora generated over $460 million in trading volume in July, nearly 10 times its historical NFT trading volume. It also issued over 1.6 million creator tokens, surpassing competitors like Pump.fun during the same period and becoming one of the most active meme issuance platforms in the Base ecosystem.

The most intuitive manifestation of this transformation is the price of $Zora. According to Coingecko data, this transformation caused the price of $Zora to rise rapidly from US$0.012 to around US$0.09 in just ten days, an increase of nearly 800%.

Recent Performance and Analysis

In the past month, Zora has demonstrated strong competitiveness in both price resilience and product iteration.

After the rally in July and August, as the creator economy narrative gradually cooled in September and the crypto market generally fell, the price of $Zora also fell back to around $0.05.

On October 10, Zora announced its listing on Robinhood. As the first Base ecosystem token to be listed on Robinhood, the price of $Zora soared by about 70% from 0.05 to 0.085 on the day of listing, and the 24-hour trading volume soared by about 780% to US$569 million, bringing a huge improvement in liquidity for $Zora. On the other hand, listing on Robinhood also marks the mainstream market's recognition of Zora's value and attention to the development of the Base ecosystem.

Meanwhile, the holding structure of $Zora has also undergone significant changes between September and October. On-chain data indicates that a significant number of whales have entered the market to establish or increase their holdings of $Zora over the past 30 days. This trend is particularly evident during the overall market decline in September, when large investors continued to buy against the trend. This shift in holdings suggests that Zora's long-term value is gaining institutional recognition.

After listing on Robinhood, the black swan event of Trump's announcement of increasing tariffs on China on October 11th followed. $Zora's performance in this biggest black swan event in the history of the crypto market further attracted market attention.

According to data, on October 11, the price of $Zora fell from its highest point of $0.12 to $0.05 in a short period of time. However, unlike most targets that had insufficient rebound strength, $Zora took only one day to return to around $0.1, with a single-day increase of nearly 50%, becoming one of the few targets to complete "post-disaster reconstruction" first.

During this black swan event, $Zora demonstrated strong resilience, prompting many investors to add it to their watchlists. On October 15th, the price of $Zora once again demonstrated strong resilience, recovering from $0.08 to around $0.1.

From an ecological perspective, Zora currently almost monopolizes Base's creator economy track. Currently, more than 90% of the meme coins in the Base ecosystem come from Zora. Such dazzling data also provides strong support for the market's speculation on Zora's share weight in the Base token distribution.

Also in October, Zora announced that it would reduce transaction fees from 3% to 1%, with 50% of the profits directly returned to creators. Although such concessions will affect the protocol's revenue in the short term, in the long run it will be conducive to more user participation and subsequent expansion, and the pattern it presents has also brought Zora better "passerby popularity."

Recently, the Zora platform has also demonstrated a clear strategic acceleration. On October 14, Zora released an official announcement that the live broadcast function will be launched soon. It is hard not to recall the live broadcast function launched by Pump.Fun, another meme launch platform some time ago, which brought a large number of out-of-circle events and meme coins in a short period of time.

Although Zora has not yet updated the detailed introduction of this live broadcast function, based on the current mechanism of the content token on the Zora platform, we may as well predict the impact that the launch of live broadcast may have on $Zora.

For example, users spend $Zora to give instant rewards to anchors, anchors spend $Zora to mint NFTs for their fan groups and distribute them as identity identifiers for their fans. On the other hand, it may also develop that users can unlock high-quality paid live broadcast rooms and live broadcast privileges by spending $Zora.

All of the above possibilities will provide clear upward momentum for $Zora, showing a model that is different from Pump.Fun and is more in line with long-term development and $Zora token prices.

Potential risks

Although Zora has many favorable information and factors, the risks behind its growth cannot be ignored.

The main problem is that most creator tokens on the Zora platform lack liquidity. Currently, Coingecko has only tracked 9 tokens with meaningful market capitalization, with a total market capitalization of only 18 million US dollars. Compared with the currently popular BSC and SOL launch platforms with memes with market capitalizations of tens of millions, Zora still has a lot of room to catch up.

If the recent market turmoil causes market sentiment to cool, it will very likely lead to a large-scale liquidity shortage.

A more direct investment risk lies in the token unlocking. On October 30, 160 million Zora tokens will be unlocked, accounting for 4.55% of the total supply, which may create a large selling pressure in the short term.

On the other hand, the live streaming feature that was announced to be launched may also be a double-edged sword. Pump.Fun is the best example. Although the live streaming feature brought popular targets such as $BUN and $BackWork to attract a large number of meme players at the time, it subsequently brought more market controversy due to the inability to properly control the live streaming content. In addition, the collective trend of popular targets returning to zero also caused a large number of investors to suffer losses.

However, unlike Pump.fun's wild development strategy and inexperienced young team, Zora, backed by the more mature and stable Base ecosystem, and its demonstrated operational capabilities have, to some extent, allayed similar concerns. The Zora platform currently boasts a user base of over 2.9 million, providing ample resources for live streaming. Perhaps Zora will offer a new solution to the integration of encryption and live streaming.

Seize the window of Base coin issuance expectations

Zora provides a clear path to participate in the anticipated Base token airdrop. Its core position in the Base ecosystem, strong growth data, and demonstrated price resilience all indicate that it is a target worth paying attention to.

The current $850 million FDV still has reasonable room for growth given Zora's ecosystem status and growth potential. Especially with the expected catalyst of the Base token, its value as a leading application in the ecosystem may be further amplified.

However, the high market uncertainty in the short term and the upcoming large-scale unlocking also bring resistance to $Zora. Investors can pay attention to recent market changes and price performance after unlocking to decide whether to add $Zora to their investment list.

The expectation of Base's coin issuance is getting closer and closer. Against the backdrop of intensified L2 competition, it is almost inevitable for Base to launch its native token. Zora's position in this is a project that must be paid attention to if you want to win the Base airdrop.

The opportunity is right in front of us. The key is whether you can grasp the timing and rhythm accurately.

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