$0XWEB3WIZARD
Fading QuicklySnapshot Window: 2026-07-17 07:20 UTC · ← Back to Crypto Overview
Social Momentum Summary
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Verbatim Community Citations & Social Evidence 1 source posts analyzed
A lot of people saying Jesse wasn’t wrong about social. And, a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon thanks to the success of Ansem. Both are building on the vision and thesis for Tokenized Social we spent years crafting at Zora. This is from last year, but feels relevant today. [Spoken audio]: My name is D. I'm one of the co-founders of Zora. I'm going to be giving a talk today called Tokenize Social. I have way too many slides, so I'm just going to dive right in. We're going to start with a little bit of definition. So what is Tokenize Social? I try to keep it pretty simple. It's just a social network where the posts, the profiles, and the communities are tokens with open markets for people to participate in. Tokens is just a fancy crypto way of saying they're assets which have been issued. And open markets just means that you can buy and sell those assets or direct your capital to them or form your capital around them as an investment of sorts. Cool. OK, I'm going to use, all right, my slides were exported from Figma to PowerPoint, so you've got to bear with me if there's any issues here. So I'm going to use coins and tokens somewhat interchangeably throughout the talk. And this slide is a real reason why. So meme coins, I think, were actually the primitive, if you will, of tokenized social because they wrapped up all of the profiles, posts, and communities into a single thing that was a meme coin. But what they proved was that you can form capital markets around creativity on the internet in new, unbounded ways. And as we're seeing this space mature, we're starting to see more definition around the different types of coins that are coming to market. So on Zora, we help people to launch content coins on other platforms like what you've seen from Believe in the Founder Sense. They're helping people to launch creator coins. We're also going to be helping people to launch creator coins in a bit. I'm going to talk about that in just a sec. And I think if you have open markets, really at the meme coin level, open markets at the content coin level, which means you're able to monetize the post, and then open markets at the creator coin level, which means you're able to form capital around profiles. Those are all the ingredients you need to form what I'm gonna call a new creator economy. So it's like the domino effect to get there is actually by opening the markets at each level. Okay, cool. So what does tokenized social look like? A lot of people might think it looks like a bunch of crypto engineers and devs and whatnot, but it actually looks like this. So every post that you see here is actually a coin and a token that is available to buy, sell and trade on Zora. We've got video content creators, NBA players, photographers, underground musicians from the UK, DJs, meme lords, you name it. Some familiar faces in here like bangers and Gabriel who are all posting their content on this new social network. It doesn't look at all like crypto to that point early around stop saying crypto. It just looks a lot like Instagram or TikTok. It just so happens that there's open markets each of these posts. Okay, so like why are people posting on Zora? They're all cluing into this same universal truth, which is each and every person here, me included, you included, we're all way too online to not be making money. But the problem is all of the money being made, or it's like really the question is I should say, why are we not all making money? Why are only like the top 0.1% of creators on the internet making money? Well it's because all of the money is getting gobbled up as ad revenue by major social networks. To the tune of $164 billion for Meta. I think it's like $91 billion of that was actually Instagram ad revenue. $36 billion for YouTube. And by the way, the incentives for these networks aren't geared to make the creator the real asset here. They're geared to just keep people on the platform spending their time so that they can monetize our attention, monetize our impressions for their own take rate. And so I actually used to have a picture of Hayden in the bottom right. I don't know if anybody here is familiar with of Hayden, but it's like the traditional social networks, they start to feel like very max-extract, where they're like, how many eyeballs can we get on here? How many creators can we get on here? To just max-extract ad revenue, rather than driving that value back into the creator economy. Plus, there's all the eligibility restrictions. Like a lot of people wanna say, yo, content creators don't make a lot of their money on the platform, they make it in brand deals, da da da da, well, this is why. Earnings on Meta actually capped at 5K, and you can only get paid if you're in the United States. YouTube, you basically need a Harvard-style degree of video content creation in order to get paid there. On TikTok, you can't be eligible unless you're actually at 10,000 followers, and so the majority of creators are actually prohibited or restricted from earning in this way. The solution, open markets. Open markets unlock new market participation, new value, and allow the billions of dollars that are currently trapped in ad revenue to flow into the creator economy. So they flow to creators instead of corporations. So we built a mass market app called Zora that allows everybody to do this. It allows everybody to post and have all of the power of the New York Stock Exchange and the elegance of an Instagram post. And then it allows consumers all across the internet to participate in these markets and benefit from sharing their attention with the creators and content they love. In a nutshell, it's a social network where every post and soon to be every profile are a coin. What's it look like in practice? It looks a lot like Instagram like I showed earlier, but again, you have all of the power of the New York Stock Exchange at your fingertips by just posting an image. And so this horse here, viral horse posted by a creator on Zora, it's been remixed by everybody from Pokemon to Pizza Hut, it's one insane amount of attention on the internet. Now it's actually able to capture that value in an open market where any time that that post gets remixed and goes viral again and people discover this market, they can buy, sell, and invest in that post. It allows new money to flow to creators. It's funny, this is actually a post from yesterday. As I was putting the slides together, there was a creator from the UK. Her name is Walking Me Home. She's been posting on Zora at a consistent clip for the last, like, six months. I think she's made, like, $11,000 or something like that, which just blows my mind because a lot of the images are just lifestyle content. But she really illustrates the point that I want to make around the potential of open markets and tokenization to allow money and value to more freely flow to creators rather than getting gobbled up in the ad exchanges that we see today. So benefits to creators in a quick nutshell, unbounded upside on your content, uncapped earning potential, and so get rid of that $5,000 limit that you see from Meta. No eligibility requirements like what you have in TikTok and YouTube and Instagram. It's a new way for your audience to participate, and it's a fresh place to post without any expectations. We see a lot of creators, major influencers, content creators alike who all come to Zora as just a new and fresh place for them to post and share their content because it doesn't have the pressure of all of the established networks. And then this one liner here is coins actually create an incentive. I hear a lot of people talk about how you know there's limited reason to want to really distribute the coin but once you own a post you're incentivized to share that post as wide and as far as you possibly can to to maximize attention and bring people back to that open market. And so it actually creates an incentive for people to rapidly distribute content across the internet. And then here's what it looks like from the trader side. This LaBoubou post you see on the left here, I actually bought a few days ago for like 22 bucks. It's now up at like 28. I think if you checked it today, it's up at like $30. And so if you're early as a consumer or as a fan or as a follower to a piece of content, you can actually benefit from that economically and financially. There's no way that you can do. I mean, we see a lot of this on Twitter or Instagram, where they're like, oh, investing at nine likes or in before 1,000 views, now you can actually turn that into money in your pocket by being early and participating in a market around a piece of content or a creator. And by the way, you can buy as much or as little as you'd like. And next up, we're gonna move up the stack, where we're not just gonna allow people to create coins for their content or their individual posts, we're actually gonna be creating open markets for the creators and the profiles themselves. I'll speed through this because I'm running out of time here, but what this unlocks is the ability for all of the people who want to invest in or bet on their favorite creators to actually go along those creators. So if you don't want to have to invest or bet on a single post, you can actually say, hey, OK, maybe that video from Mr. Beast for the Squid Games was pretty viral, but I actually just want to invest in Mr. Beast the creator. You're now able to do that with creator coins. And we like to say, oh, man, my slides and PowerPoint are doing me dirty. This is the last one here. The real unlock is that creator coins are a fundamental shift in the way that value is driven from the post to the creator. Every creator coin, we're joking that it's called PVP protection technology or PVP prevention technology, because it means that every time a single post is traded, which is paired with the creator coin, it's actually driving value back to that creator's market. And so all of the post activity leads to value accrual at the creator level, and then the creator leads to value accrual at the ecosystem level. And then this is what it looks like in its sort of final form. Like I said, we're tokenizing posts as content coins, and then we're allowing creators to tokenize their profiles next, and then the sort of tip of that spear, if you will, or the flag of that entire new creator economy is the Zora token. It aligns the community of creators, it aligns the content, and aligns the audience all under a single flag of this new creator economy, which is powered by Zora. I'm Dee. I'm just out of time here, and so I want to thank you all for the seven instant change minutes that you gave me to walk you through tokenized social. Download the Zora app, Zora.co.app, and I'll check all you all later.
