Shitcoin platofrms aren't sending their best to compete with us
I saw an article about this shitcoin thing called Zora. Apparently, "Zora is a decentralized social network that enables users to tokenize their posts or profiles into ERC-20 tokens or NFTs." While this may reek deeply of shicoinery, I have no sense of smell due to severe olfactory damages incurred from being exposed to abusively bad odors early in my life, and therefore I am able to recognize that the shitcoiners are trying to copy SN.
Also I want to make money, too.
So, to start, I went to zora.co.
Not the kind of art I'm into, but they say the kids are making money on this thing, so first thing I did was look for a way to make money for myself: how to post?
Clicking the "+" sign on the left (which I assumed meant
post) brought up a sign in or sign up page with a bunch of weird options. I don't have a Coinbase wallet and I didn't know Phantom was a wallet and I have no idea what Rainbow is. However, I do have an email address (in fact, I have lots and lots of email addresses...).Compare this to the Stacker News sign up flow: if you are new, clicking
post will start the flow for writing a post. You aren't prompted to do any signing up or signing in because SN has an anonymous mode. This is pretty cool! However, I wonder if it means newbies bounce because they follow the post flow and are then confronted with a Lightning invoice, which I imagine may feel even more foreign than Rainbow felt to me.Anyhow, after signing up to Zora, I had to enter a magic code they sent to my email. Once I did this, it brought me to this page:
I need to complete my profile before posting. I didn't see any way around this. So I continued with my whaling-theme and named my profile Ahab.
After doing this, I was taken to a screen that informed me that it was setting up my wallet. !??!? This surprised me. Are they custodial? Or do they get around being custodial by saying each profile has it's own token?
Their documentation says that Zora is "built on the Superchain." Couldn't figure out what that was, so I clicked around a bit and came to this page about the Zora Coins Protocol:
Every coin has a backing currency and trades through a dedicated Uniswap V4 pool that with a custom hook that:
- Distributes rewards to creators, referrers, and the protocol on every trade
- Preserves liquidity by locking 33% of trading fees as permanent pool depth
- Converts fees through multi-hop swaps to ensure all rewards are paid in ZORA
- Deposits initial liquidity using Doppler protocol for optimized multi-curve positioning
Apparently, your profile is a coin and also each of your posts is a coin (supply = 1 billion coins). They have a vesting mechanism where users apparently can't access the full supply of their coins for five years. Also, when you post, 990M of the coins are given to the "liquidity pool" while the user only gets 10M coins. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding this, it seems to me that Zora is taking 99% of the value of every post. But I might be too ignorant to fully understand what is going on.
All this aside, I'm still not making any money. So I kept clicking through a bunch of brightly colored educational screens until they let me post something.
Finally, I was able to post! Not wanting to pass up a chance to do a little orange-pilling, I decided to use one of the more subtle images I've made:
They didn't make me pay anything to post it :(
My post was not immediately overwhelmed with attention. The market cap of my profile's coin is apparently $0.56. Not much, but I figured I'd take it anyway. Sadly, when I clicked on the
Sell button, this is what they told me:Hmm. Well, I suppose it's not a shocker, considering my coin was only a few minutes old. I decided to give it a day for the shitcoiners to discover me. Sadly, the passage of 24 hours didn't do anything. My market cap was still at $0.56 and no one had bought my coin :( :( :(
Not one to easily give up, I next decided to do some old fashioned "engagement" to see if I couldn't pump my numbers a little. So I clicked on the
home button and was confronted with this:Apparently, the coin for this picture of a pigeon with a green laser thing is worth $144. I couldn't tell if that was what each individual coin was worth or if that was the market cap for all the coins representing this pigeon thing or if it was the value of the coin associated with the user who posted the pigeon thing.
Moving on: all the posts are images and I noticed that there weren't very many comments on any of them. Finally, I found this fabulous image, the coin of which is apparently worth $33,935.00 -- having been purchased by a whopping 58 people.
Due, no doubt, to it's incredible popularity, this image had also been bestowed with a comment (the comment consisted of a series of crosses). I felt that I ought to congratulate user
cultonchain on their great success and perhaps encourage them to turn this great windfall into real money, so I clicked the text field that said Add a comment.Sadly, it seems one must buy the coin associated with the content (or maybe the user?) in order to make a comment.
At this point I was getting pretty bored. I don't much care for stupid pictures and I have not yet made any money.
Returning to the article about Zora:
As of August 2, Zora constituted 64.6% of all token launches on Base and Solana networks. Zora had 39,778 new tokens on the day, while Solana launchpads Pump.fun and LetsBonk saw 15,132 combined.
If this is representative of the number of posts on their app, I'm surprised the best the app showed me was a laser pigeon that wasn't even cool and a black cross. Surely they have something more interesting to show a new user?
I found this video where one of the co-founders of zora talks about how they "are fixing the creator economy"
"Zora is a social network where every post and profile is a tradeable coin," he says. "You may have heard about monetization? Zora is actually all about tokenization."
Instead of needing to monetize through ads, you can just turn your content into an asset in and of itself. You can tokenize your profile and capture any value from your current posts and any posts you make in the future.
Given my lame experience in trying to make money on Zora, I'm mostly interested in how they are marketing this. Their slogans aren't bad. Turn your content into an asset will appeal to users, even if it doesn't really make any sense (ye olde right-click-copy problem: I don't think zora really solves this).
Apparently,the top creator on Zora is a porn-company, but they aren't actually posting any pictures of naked people or anything. As far as I could tell, it was just a picture of a raffle and a boosterish post about how "we like the tech." Their coin's market cap is $9.7 million. Their creator earnings are $54.36 -- although I think that is just on one post, and it is paid in $ZORA.
As far as the onboarding experience for SN, I think it compares very favorably with Zora. It seems to me that successful use of Zora (meaning being able to post something, make some money, and then go use the money to do something else) is way more difficult than on SN. While we can certainly make it easier to onboard, the competition isn't exactly out-distancing us.
Zora raised $50 million at a $600 million valuation in 2022.
I plan on visiting Farcaster next, as I've heard that is another shitcoin platform that introduces money to the social media experience.