Base dropped a token on Zora last night and we all lost our collective minds.
Base is the clean-cut apple chain, connected to a multi-billion dollar public company, who has said time and time again that their L2 will never have a token, yet in a profoundly off-brand moment they gave into speculation and dropped a “content coin.”
What is a “content coin”? Well Head of Base Jesse Pollak gave us a nice little chart (that you can even collect).
These “coins” are hyper specific niche trading assets tied to a singular piece of content like a tweet or picture. Jesse thinks that “memecoins” are aggregated content ideas, such as the idea of "DOGE” as a dog, which can be repurposed into new content forms.
Memecoins have accelerated tokenized value capture outside of the control of the creator into a sigular speculative product. It’s the perfect manifestation of a Keynesian Beauty Contest where the value is not derived from consumers appeal or preference for the thing-in-itself, but rather a second or nth order conception of others preference for the idea.
Memecoins shift value capture from, “I enjoy this meme (thus its valuable)” to “I enjoy this meme, others enjoy it as well, and so the memecoin will have some value (which I can speculate on).” The shift from implict to explicit is solely represented by price alone. Without a market, the meme is an idea, but as a token, it becomes commoditized.
And since the realm of ideas is infinite in potential, the amount of memecoins (and this subset of ‘content coins'‘) also is.
The chart for Pump.fun is just ludicrous. Giving it perspective, Coingecko, the leading tracking site for tokens, has listed 17,031 coins and tokens. That’s less than half of the tokens created daily on Pump alone.
Solana/Pump has warpped everyone’s brains, as they’ve succeeded in capturing the long tail of “meme production.” Pump’s generated well over a half billion dollar in fees, $32bn in volume, and is the most profitable app in all of DeFi.
Uniswap, Lido, Aave, Sky, Usual, Ethena and Hyperliquid combined collect less than half the fees Pump does in a month.
Every other chain has tried (and failed) to replicate the memecoin production factories Solana boasts, for good reason as well, Pump alone has locked 6% of SOL supply as LP from graduating tokens. It’s the largest demand sink anywhere in crypto.
Contrast that to Ethereum, which gave up its user base to a growing number of L2’s with less security guarantees, killing its deflationary narrative. E
Base has been one of the largest beneficiaries of Ethereum’s retail user decline, earning millions in fees while paying virtually nothing back to the L1.
So while Pump might be a predatory giant casino built for maximum extraction, it at least is driving value back to SOL in the form of fees and locked liquidity. Base on the other hand is just extracting. Coinbase keeps all the ETH collected, passes the value back to its shareholders, which is what they should be doing as a for-profit company.
Again, Pump has warped everyone’s minds. Base’s culture since its launch has mirrored the Americanized Apple-like button up Williamsburg crypto class that holds themselves to a higher moral standard, both in product and marketing.
Base’s marketing campaigns have centered around NFT drops with reputable artists, partnerships with notable brands and other shareholder-friendly campaigns that their legal department signed off on before launching.
Pre-Trump, Base confined themselves to this very specific narrow set of activities which had no profit motive, was open to all participants and was not designed with speculative pump’n’dumps as the core design metric. “Base is for Degenerates” is not a valid description of its users.
Aerodrome is the success story of the network, outcompeting Uniswap and growing into a multi-billion dollar DEX giant. Fun little communities have popped up like Basepaint, Mirror, Pods.media, and Zora, where Base launched its memecoin today.
Zora is was this cute little NFT mitning app that Base relied on heavily for its marketing campaigns. They minted all the Base Summer NFTs and follow on campaigns at launch.
Interest faded over time. Zora as an NFT platform was supported by Base, but it didn’t have the cultural pull needed to survive long term… and so they pivoted yesterday.Now instead of NFTs, all Zora mints are now fixed supply “content-coin” tokens.
Base succumbed to the degenerate profit motives. NFTs are officially dead on Base.
Btw, Coinbase invested $58m into Zora last year. Now they are issuing tokens through their memecoin factory and promoting them on official channels. Fee capture is at an ATH for Zora today. More profit back to shareholders. Jesse gets a bonus.
Base is picking sides here. Two months ago Flaunch launched as a “fair” memecoin factory. All bonding participants get the same price, fees can be directed at the community or a specific wallet, and its using the latest Uniswap v4 contracts. Other than its weird name, the platform should have been the place where Base chose to launch this, but its their ecosystem and they are choosing winners.
Flaunch usage is worse than Zora. They need a rebrand and Coinbase investment.
My point in all of this is that Base isn’t a degenerate chain. It’s clean-cut, upstanding, holding itself to a higher standard to fight battles against overzealous regulators. We’ve raillied behind Coinbase, Circle, Base, and all the other connected IP for the past couple of years as the Biden admin systematically tried to destroy the business. It’s just weird to see the company that created “Stand with Crypto” that claimed “Crypto is a national priority,” pivot to jumping headfirst officially into memecoin pump and dumps.
These type of cheap marketing ploys end up losing gullible retail money and also give the other side anti-crypto argumentative fodder. Keep the high ground Coinbase.
P.s. This marketing campaign is most probably ramp up interest in Zora’s TGE which is rumored to be near. So go mint some tokens and hopefully get an airdrop in the future.
Now turning to the legit side of Base, Aero just locked 1.4m AERO ($400k)
This continues a long standing operation of buying back tokens. Gud work.
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