Zora has named co-founder Dee Goens as chief executive officer, replacing co-founder Jacob Horne, who had held the role for more than six years.
In a Wednesday post, Goens said Horne is leaving the company to begin a new chapter, but "won’t be too far from crypto."
Team cuts and a new operating model
Goens said Zora has carried out layoffs this year, reducing the team to fewer than 10 people. She also said the company is shifting to an operating model that depends more on AI agents.
Product focus moves beyond Creator Coins
On the product side, Zora has shifted its focus away from the Creator Coins model it launched on Base in June last year and toward trading pairs on other networks.
The company’s Custom Pairs feature, launched on Aug. 20, allows users to create their own token trading pairs. More than 4,000 pairs have been created so far. Zora also expanded to Robinhood Chain and Solana over the summer, added support for cross-chain trading, and removed fees for DMs and comments.
Base fee revenue drops sharply
Data from DefiLlama shows that fees from Zora’s deployment on Base came in at just $14,800 in August, down 99.4% from $2.51 million in the same month last year.
Five priorities, led by token-holder alignment
Goens outlined five priorities. The first is to align the business with ZORA token holders through buybacks and reward mechanisms. She did not disclose the size of the plan, where the funds would come from, or when it would begin.
The remaining priorities include rebuilding community trust, focusing on mobile user acquisition, and restarting community incentive distributions.
As of publication, ZORA was trading at $0.00814 with a market capitalization of about $36.3 million, down 94.4% from its all-time high of $0.1456 set on Aug. 11.