Jacob Horne, the Co-Founder and CEO of Zora Labs, is a visionary pushing to redefine digital ownership for creators. Originally from Sydney, Australia, Horne’s ambition was sparked early: his first entrepreneurial endeavor was buying soda in bulk from a corner auto store to resell for profit, due to the scarcity of cafeterias.

This early recognition of market inefficiency is a thread that runs through his career. A keen Formula 1 enthusiast, he often quotes the legendary Sir Jackie Stewart's saying, "If you are in control, you aren't going fast enough," which he applies to the fast-paced, high-stakes environment of crypto development.

His path led from co-founding the college blog Social to the world of cryptocurrency. After discovering Bitcoin, he immediately saw the potential of tokenization, but found it difficult to build applications on top of it, which led him to the flexibility and promise of Ethereum.

His relentless work on side projects and "hacking" ideas, often shared on X (formerly Twitter), caught the eye of the industry, leading to a DM from Coinbase's then-Head of Design, Jack Jennings, and Horne subsequently joining the company in 2017. This experience was the prelude to Zora's foundation in 2020.

Horne co-founded Zora on a radical premise: "everything you are creating online has value." He believes that the current ad-based internet model is fundamentally broken, extracting value from creators and giving too much power to centralized platforms.

The solution, he states, is obvious: use crypto and tokenization to capture that value directly for the creator. Zora, now built as its own Layer 2 network on the OP Stack (Zora Network), with strong ties to Base (Coinbase’s L2), transforms all digital content, from a social media post to a piece of art, into a tradable, tokenized asset (a 'Content Coin' or ERC-721/ERC-1155 edition).

This structure allows an audience to choose to buy or sell a creator's individual post, making every interaction a potential market transaction.

Crucially, Zora’s protocol is designed to ensure protocol-level royalties are automatically paid to the creator on every primary sale, resale, and trade.

Horne’s goal is to build a highly usable consumer app that is fast and cheap (thanks to the Base integration and Zora’s own L2), making complex blockchain mechanisms seamless.

By using an open market for discovery and ranking, instead of a single, closed algorithm, Zora aims to shift attention and value back to the creators and engaged consumers as well.

His ultimate advice to developers today is to focus on the app layer and, of course, build on Base. Horne’s work and Zora’s mission to create an open, decentralized protocol that acts as a "hyperstructure" for media and commerce earned him a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2023.

Jacob Horne’s journey from a childhood entrepreneur in Australia to the CEO of a $600 million-valued Web3 company embodies the disruptive spirit of the crypto world.

His vision for Zora is not merely to build a better marketplace, but to construct the fundamental infrastructure for a community and creator-owned internet.

By relentlessly championing the idea of tokenizing every piece of online content, Horne is actively working to usher in a new era of digital creativity where ownership and value are intrinsically tied to the creation itself.

Join Zora: https://zora.co/

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