Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on July 13 that Base’s content-coin strategy failed, calling time on an experiment that had run for more than a year.
In a post on X, Armstrong wrote: "It didn’t work, we pivoted earlier this year. We blew it, time to move on." ZORA, the token tied to the infrastructure behind the push, has fallen about 95% from its all-time high in August last year, with its market capitalization dropping from about $550 million to around $30 million.
Base made content tokens a core product feature
Base started pushing content coins through Zora in 2025 and embedded the model into its wallet product. In July 2025, Coinbase Wallet was renamed Base App, adding a social feed, chat, payments, trading, and app discovery.
When the app expanded to more than 140 countries in December that year, Base was still positioning it as a combined social, trading, and payments product. At one stage, the strategy helped make Base the largest L2 chain by new token issuance.
How Zora’s content coins and creator coins were structured
Zora provided the core tooling for Base’s creator-economy push. A content coin was tied to a single post. When a user published an image, video, or text post, the system created a freely tradable ERC-20 token at the same time. Each content coin had a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens, and the creator received 1% at launch, or 10 million tokens.
Those tokens started without a price. Market quotes formed only after other users bought in, and subsequent trading set the market value as well as holder gains or losses. Buyers received a token associated with the post and could sell it back into the market at any time, but the token did not convey copyright, equity, future revenue, or profit-sharing rights.
Zora’s terms limited the purpose of these tokens to entertainment, use, and consumption, while requiring users to acknowledge that purchases were not for equity or profit sharing. As described in the source article, returns depended mainly on whether later buyers were willing to pay more.
Zora also had a separate creator-coin structure tied to an account rather than a single post. Each Zora account had one creator coin, also with a supply of 1 billion tokens. Half went to the public market, while the other half unlocked linearly to creators over five years.
Content coins published by that account were linked back to the creator coin. Zora’s premise was that popular content could increase demand for the creator coin. Creators could sell their token allocation and also receive a share of trading fees. Base had argued that this setup could turn attention directly into trading income without relying on advertising, brand deals, or follower thresholds.
Trading surged, but users did not stay
Cheap token creation quickly boosted Base’s headline activity. In August 2025, after Base App relaunched, Zora activity hit a record. More than 1.6 million creator coins were minted, unique traders approached 3 million, and total trading volume exceeded $470 million. Over the same month, the Zora token rose nearly fivefold.
Still, the trading burst did not translate into lasting retention. The source article summed it up bluntly: 100,000 tokens could go live in a single day, but the trading activity did not leave Base with users.
One of the most cited episodes came in April 2025, when the official Base account posted "Base is for everyone" through Zora. The system automatically generated a token with the same name. It spiked after launch, then dropped about 95% within hours. Base said it had not sold the token and had not issued it as an official project, but ordinary users had little way to separate a content post, a token launch, and platform endorsement.
Creator Nick Shirley offered another example. One of Shirley’s investigative videos drew more than 100 million views on social media, and Armstrong had also promoted it publicly. The related creator coin briefly reached a $15 million market cap before falling back quickly. Viral reach produced short-term buying pressure, but not sustained demand.
Developers also pushed back
The partnership between Base and Zora also drew criticism from ecosystem developers. Some argued that Base gave too much attention and too many resources to Zora and creator coins, without building a durable user moat and while squeezing out visibility for other Base projects.
A community member who questioned Armstrong on July 13 also said many participants were left with losses after token prices fell.
The retreat had already started earlier this year
Armstrong was still defending the model in January. At the time, he responded to a former Coinbase engineer who had questioned the zero-sum nature of content coins, saying that buying a content coin could create economic value and demand for the associated creator coin.
About a month later, Base App ended Creator Rewards and removed its Farcaster-powered social feed, shifting the product focus toward tradable assets.
In March, Armstrong said on a podcast that Base App’s SocialFi features were "not working particularly well." Base’s 2026 strategy then placed trading and stablecoin payments at the center.
Base said it processed more than $17 trillion in stablecoin transaction volume in 2025, covering 26 local currencies and 17 countries. In the source article’s framing, those figures gave the company a clearer commercial case for leaning into financial infrastructure.
Armstrong says trading now gets most of the resources
In the same X thread, Armstrong answered another criticism. @smileyXBT argued that Base was now making the same mistake again by leaning hard into AI agents and chasing another hype cycle. Armstrong replied that Base’s roadmap had consistently been organized around three priorities: trading, payments, and AI agents, with most resources currently going to trading.
From Base’s own token minting episode in April 2025 to Armstrong’s "we blew it" post in July 2026, the period spans 15 months. Over that stretch, the article said, ZORA lost nearly $500 million in market value.
The report also said Coinbase kept adding to the experiment throughout the period, embedding Zora into its wallet product, encouraging funds to build creator-token indexes, and giving insider-linked tokens platform-level exposure. The company may now treat those 15 months as a finished product experiment. Losses on holder accounts remain.