That's, in essence, what a certain part of crypto identified as the next trend that'll finally bring mass adoption. Or at least a mass influx of wealth in select wallets (not ours).
You will also have to mint coins associated with it on Zora whenever you tweet, to maximize the value of the attention generated by your hot takes. The good news is that you probably still have 4 weeks to be early on this content coin meta on LinkedIn.
While crypto has always felt the need to tokenize everything and their mum, Jesse from Base identified it as the latest way to get more attention on the Base L2. The first "content coin" to go live was "Base is for everyone," which was amplified through Base's social media accounts, propelling it to a $20 million market cap within minutes before crashing 95%, leading to allegations of a rug pull.
While the coin recovered somewhat, Base addressed this by simply tweeting that this wasn't an official Base coin and that they're just trying to work on bringing more culture onchain.
Takeaway: Coining everything, including pictures of your baby ghiblified won't bring about crypto adoption. It's just lame hyperfinancialization copied from what Solana did last year while pretending it's good for creators.
If you thought the times of new token launches were over, you'd be wrong. The next project to launch a native token is Zora. Zora started as a platform aiming to empower creators by making it easy to create and distribute NFTs, but has now evolved into a content coin farm.
Critical people will say that it is undoubtedly very convenient that just ahead of them announcing their TGE - token generation event - on April 20th, Base suddenly encouraged everyone to mint coins on Zora. Thanks to that, token minting activity is nearly on par now with pump.fun, its evil twin.
The Zora token will launch on Base (not on Zora's own chain), which appears to give further grounds to the allegations of Base pumping the numbers. After all, they seem to be early investors.
However, even setting aside the hype pre-TGE strategy, the tokenomics themselves leave much room for critique. 65% of the supply is allocated to team members, and the only utility is "fun".
Takeaway: You'll get nothing and you'll be happy could have been the more honest slogan for the new Zora token. You know it's bad when even ZachXBT tweets about a token before it's launched.
Not all is coins yet, although it can't be long until some crypto bro will suggest that we should create markets to decide on our moral codex instead of common sense. While in other realms of the ecosystem people are busy turning everything into a coin, a small crowd of resistance fighters persists, trying to get people to care about values that aren't prices again.
You might know them under the label of cypherpunks, the original movement that led to the creation of crypto in the first place and stewarded the ideas of decentralization, sovereignty and permissionlessness.
The torrent of coins and greed has left many of the original cypherpunks feeling tired and burned out.
Clearly, just talking about the values that once mattered won't fix things. The first step is one we should all enjoy: dunk on the chains that aren't living up to them at all.
The next step is a little harder: building dApps that have the values built in by respecting privacy, empowering users, and promoting openness.
Takeaway: All is not lost to coins just yet. Most of the current coin games are short-term, cypherpunk dApps might just have to compete on a different timeframe to win. I, for one, am ready for a doc editor that doesn't use my writing to train its AI (GD*cs) or a banking solution that doesn't block me.
Fact of the week: You're gonna love this if you like coins and the Roman Empire. Tossing coins to make decisions started during the reign of Julius Caesar. Since the emperor's word was law, whenever the coin landed heads up, you had to respect that side's decisions and act accordingly.
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