Author: 0x Protocol
Compiled by Tim, PANews
Highlights
- New Creator Economy: Zora’s Post and Creator Tokens tokenize each post and creator profile, empowering a new creator economy and enabling on-chain content monetization and new ways of interaction.
- Unified User Experience: By integrating Zora, Base App allows creators to easily tokenize their posts, and users can also perform multiple operations such as trading creator tokens and post tokens directly in a feature-rich interface.
- Best-in-class trading pair coverage and low latency: The 0x Swap API provides seamless trading support for Zora tokens in the Base App, enabling Zora token trading through advanced multi-hop routing technology and combined with real-time indexing to ensure that new tokens are immediately available for trading when they are listed on the chain, while maintaining low latency.
- Rapid Growth: The Base App launched in July, driving explosive growth for Zora. Daily token creation surged from 6,000 at the beginning of July to nearly 50,000 by the end of the month. The 0x protocol has enabled Zora to complete 352,000 currency swaps, totaling $59 million in trading volume.
What is Zora?
Zora is a rapidly growing on-chain social platform that aims to create a new creator economy model.
Zora converts posts into tradable ERC-20 tokens, which are then traded against creator tokens. This tokenized, on-chain social platform creates a flywheel effect, interconnecting token issuance, content creation, and liquidity. Creators earn transaction fees, while fans and traders invest in their content output.
Source: Zora
In this article, we will explore how Zora empowers a new on-chain creator economy and how 0x customizes the routing architecture for the Zora token to support this economic system.
Market pain points
The traditional creator economy is fundamentally limited because both creators and fans lack ownership and monetization.
- Platform-controlled access: Creators rely on centralized platforms to reach audiences and generate revenue. These platforms extract significant value without providing ownership or a true revenue share.
- Engagement ≠ Ownership: Fans may be highly engaged, but they have no direct stake in a creator’s success. There is no direct way to invest in a creator or their content.
- Limited monetization models: Profits rely on either advertising or tips and subscriptions. Both models are walled gardens with excessively high commissions, leaving creators with only a small share. Furthermore, the platform lacks a native value discovery mechanism, making it impossible to measure the value of content or highlight the value created by creators.
The current social ecosystem can capture attention but fails to convert it into value that creators or fans can own and trade. At the same time, content, creators, and users are fragmented across different platforms.
Today, we're beginning to see the rise of new social infrastructure powered by open, permissionless blockchain technology, such as Zora and Farcaster. These platforms prioritize user ownership and composability while also exploring new ways to monetize and interact with on-chain content. Applications like Base App are integrating these various platforms into a unified, engaging user experience.
Zora + Base App: Empowering the Creator Economy on the Chain
Zora aims to address these issues by building a creator economy centered around the tokenization of content and identity. Every time a user publishes content on-chain, a post token is generated and linked to a creator token. This system creates a direct connection between individual pieces of content and the creator's broader portfolio.
Each creator token is then paired with the platform's native ZORA token, forming a multi-layered token economy. Fans can invest in individual pieces of content and participate in the creator's journey. Creators receive 1% of each transaction, a mechanism that directly converts engagement and mindshare into financial rewards. Meanwhile, 50% of the total creator token supply will be gradually released to creators over five years.
Zora's token model generates revenue for creators and their supporters by incentivizing user engagement, enabling value discovery, and promoting participation in token events, thereby rewarding early supporters and long-term content creators. Both creators and fans can easily participate through the Zora app.
Zora’s token mechanism is expected to create a self-reinforcing flywheel effect: more posts lead to more transactions, which in turn attracts more attention and brings in more users.
But to really get this flywheel going, Zora needed distribution. It needed to reach users where they were. That's where the Base app came in.
In July of this year, Coinbase launched a new version of its wallet with a full-featured and integrated SocialFi app, and integrated the decentralized NFT market Zora directly into its social information flow. Users no longer need to visit Zora directly or switch back and forth between multiple applications and platforms. Zora is integrated into a single information flow along with platforms such as Farcaster and Bankr.
With the Zora-powered Base app, creators can easily tokenize their posts and directly monetize through tips and sales, while users can instantly trade creator tokens and post tokens, all without leaving the feed.
However, for this to happen, the tokens need to be liquid and easily tradable.
Zora's liquidity ecosystem powered by 0x
A major challenge facing the Zora Token ecosystem is that post tokens are paired with creator tokens, which are in turn paired with ZORA tokens. This token mechanism makes it difficult for users to directly trade these tokens, and it also makes it difficult for routers to effectively route transactions between the various tokens.
For example, if a user wants to redeem USDC for TXT directly, they must:
- Convert USDC to ZORA
- Exchange ZORA for Creator Tokens
- Convert Creator Tokens to Post Tokens
At the same time, the Zora token has triggered an unprecedented surge in the creation of tokens and funding pools.
Users need to be able to easily trade and access deep liquidity in post tokens and creator tokens, and the new pool of tokens generated by each post must be instantly exchangeable.
Without the seamless trade execution services provided by the Base App and other applications, users would have difficulty accessing these assets, and the flywheel effect would not have gained momentum. This is where 0x comes in.
As part of integrating Zora, the Base App team needed to fully support Zora token swaps within the app from day one, while maintaining speed and reliability. The Base App team needed to meet the dynamic demand for Zora token support and chose the 0x protocol, with which they have a long history of collaboration, to achieve this goal.
Advanced multi-hop routing
Before the launch of Creator Tokens, all Post Tokens were paired with ZORA or WETH. The pairing of Creator Tokens with Post Tokens effectively breaks the traditional routing model.
To address this, the 0x protocol built custom support for the Zora token to manage all newly created tokens, determining the optimal transaction path without compromising latency.
“The complexity of quoting and routing is a very unique feature of Zora. We had to build a custom integration system to convert from any token to the post token.” - Sav Dontamsetti, Senior Software Engineer at 0x
To support users in completing transactions between Zora tokens and any other tokens, the Swap API uses advanced multi-hop routing technology, utilizing ZORA and creator tokens as intermediary tokens to provide the widest range of trading pair support for Zora token swaps.
Real-time Token Index
Besides the complexity that creator tokens introduce, each post creates a new pool of funds. This means:
- Tens of thousands of tokens and pools are created every day, reaching the scale of the entire Solana ecosystem.
- A real-time detection pool is needed to enable its instant exchange.
- With the surge in liquidity pools, new liquidity pools need to be managed efficiently to reduce the impact on latency and thus meet users' fast exchange needs.
"The Zora token triggered a surge in liquidity pools. The challenge was supporting the creation of pools at this scale while maintaining low latency. To do this, we had to enable our backend systems to quickly ingest on-chain events, enabling instant routing and swaps, while also efficiently determining which pools to include."
—Eric Wong, Product Manager at 0x
With this customized development, the Swap API now offers best-in-class exchange routing for Zora tokens, with the widest trading pair coverage and lowest latency. For example, when a user purchases Post Tokens with USDC, the 0x protocol automatically completes the entire transaction chain from USDC to ZORA tokens, then to the associated Creator Token, and finally to Post Tokens. Users can trade Creator and Post Tokens at lightning speed the moment they are released on-chain.
Flywheel in motion
Through the 0x protocol, the Base app fully supported the Zora token exchange feature and officially launched. Following the launch of the app, daily token creation on the Base chain surged from approximately 6,000 in early July to nearly 50,000 by the end of the month. This marked the first time Base surpassed Solana in daily token issuance. Overall, the Zora platform has minted over 1.8 million tokens for approximately 200,000 creators.
The value growth of Zora creators is also significant: daily creator rewards increased from less than $1,000 at the beginning of July to more than $10,000 at the end of July, with a peak daily reward of nearly $375,000.
The Swap API has facilitated over $7 million in Zora Coin swaps through the Base App. A total of $59 million in Zora Coin trading volume was processed via the Swap API across 352,000 transactions, with July seeing the highest monthly trading volume at $27.5 million.
Zora's creator economy marks a pivotal evolution in the Web3 ecosystem, where financial and social identities intertwine, and value flows and cultural dissemination advance in tandem. It profoundly reshapes how value is created, discovered, and distributed online, and we look forward to seeing how it develops.
