# Your Creativity Has Value (And It's Flowing Somewhere Else) By [jonathancolton.eth](https://paragraph.com/@jonathancolton.eth) · 2026-01-02 --- [![User Avatar](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/f4a7cc9eec4b20a52827b81c4f055178904761ede0cf6bbd28f41180473a7a1e.jpg)](https://twitter.com/punk9059) [Stats](https://twitter.com/punk9059) [@punk9059](https://twitter.com/punk9059) [](https://twitter.com/punk9059/status/2006675546500141292) gm gm Some new years thoughts on the markets. And why the attention economy is proving to be a bust. ![](https://pbs.twimg.com/amplify_video_thumb/2006675112817233921/img/amTjGU7GEm4xRWVx.jpg) [128](https://twitter.com/punk9059/status/2006675546500141292)[ 5:35 AM • Jan 1, 2026 ](https://twitter.com/punk9059/status/2006675546500141292) Stats makes an important observation, and it's one the market has now taught us repeatedly. We've lived through the NFT cycle, the memecoin cycle, and now a wave of creator token experiments that all leaned on the same underlying promise: attention converts to price. If something stays culturally relevant long enough, the token attached to it should hold value. Empirically, that hasn't held. Memes persist. Creators persist. Attention persists. The tokens still go to zero. The failure wasn't memes or creators. It was the belief that attention itself is a sufficient economic primitive. We now have enough cycles to say that with confidence. From a distribution perspective, this is a category error. Attention is not distribution. Distribution is getting the right product to the right user at the right moment to solve something that actually matters. Most creator tokens are optimized for reach, not use. They treated buyers as speculators, not users. There was no repeatable behavior loop underneath the attention. Look at it through a Jobs-to-Be-Done lens, and the gap becomes obvious. Most of these tokens weren't hired to do anything durable. They didn't reliably solve a persistent pain. They didn't deliver ongoing value. They didn't perform the job that users wanted to keep rehiring the system to do. What did exist was an implicit job: buy early and exit early. Once that job becomes visible, it collapses. There's a deeper structural problem. You can't build durable social or emotional value on top of an adversarial loop. "Someone else must buy after me" undermines the conditions for trust, belonging, and identity formation. The moment price matters, relationships become contingent. And there's a third party at the table that's easy to miss. Creators benefit when the price goes up — and when they can sell. But sell to whom? Their own audience. The community becomes the exit liquidity. The platform benefits regardless. Every swap, every entry, every exit generates fees. Zora takes its cut on every trade. Base collects gas on every transaction — $75 million year-to-date. The L2 doesn't care whether a token goes up or down. It cares that transactions happen. None of this feels like revenue to the creator because none of it is. Trading fees are crumbs from volatility. Selling tokens is a one-time extraction — and you're selling to your own community. Price appreciation only matters if there's a buyer when you want out. The liquidity rarely supports it. Real revenue is recurring, tied to value delivered, and doesn't require someone else to lose. The current model replaced monetization with a hope: maybe you can sell this to someone later. The community is saying this out loud now. Jacek on how Base's distribution feels captured by a single partner, while other builders get sidelined. Derek on how creator coins misalign incentives, increase creator burden, and turn people into tradeable assets. TLDR reporting that about 50% of his community — top and most active holders with collectively millions invested in his product — are hesitant to use Base App, with 10% sitting out entirely. That's not hate. That's revealed preference data. Itsbasil put it more bluntly: the strategy is backwards. "No successful creator here has been bought, and no creator bought has led to new users." The system is optimized for asset issuance over retention. That's not user acquisition. That's churn. Every keystroke I'm typing right now becomes tokenized content on Paragraph — a separate VC-backed company with its own token system. Another data point in the attention economy. I know the value will be hard to realize. That's not why I write. I write because the ideas create noise in my head, and I have to externalize them. The work isn't transactional — I'd do it anyway. But I still want that value. Not because I'm owed it. Because the system said it was possible. That was the pitch: create on-chain and finally capture what Web2 never let you own. The frustration isn't that the money isn't there. It's that the promise was real, and the implementation isn't delivering. And then what? Market my own token? "If you liked this post, buy my writer coin." Turn every piece of content into a sales pitch for a speculative asset I can't redeem anyway? That's not monetization. That's asking creators to become marketers for their own illiquid securities — and asking audiences to become exit liquidity. The work should speak for itself. The system was supposed to handle the value capture. Instead, it made promotion the creator's job too. I'm not observing this from the outside. I own /nature, a top 5 engagement channel across the Farcaster protocol. I have a Zora creator token. I have a Paragraph writer token — nearly 20 million tokens, notional value around $524, realizable value around $46 due to liquidity. I share photography, write multiple blogs per week, and specifically write about distribution for founders. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/431ee578f40ee6c2fed726429d646cc2e223bfd3044aed576b5525c8fae9786b.png) Paragraph writer token — $524 notional, $46 realizable\] The value I create is scattered across competing platforms. Farcaster channels, Zora creator token, Paragraph writer token — all on Base, all technically tradeable, all functionally siloed. Different liquidity pools. Different discovery. No unified view of total creator contribution. The /nature token is dormant. The writer token is illiquid. The creator token is somewhere else entirely. They don't composite into anything. Why can't these be unified? Wrapped? Aggregated into something that represents total creator contribution across the ecosystem? Instead, we get silos, each measuring a slice of attention, each with its own liquidity problem. The system isn't measuring what I create. It's measuring where I create it — and then stranding the value there. Brian Armstrong acknowledged the feedback and noted that some or most content coins will have short lifecycles — "a feature or bug depending on who you talk to." From the platform's perspective, short lifecycles are the feature. More churn means more launches. More launches mean more volume. More volume means more fees. The metrics you choose reveal whose job you're optimizing for. Jesse said your creativity has value on Base App. I'd extend that: your attention has value too. Those are the two sides of the coin — what you make and what you give. Creator and audience. Output and engagement. That was the implicit social contract for becoming a participant. The promise wasn't just "come create here." It was that participating onchain would let you _realize_ the value you create in ways Web2 never allowed. The critique isn't that the vision is wrong. Tokenizing creator value is a legitimate design problem worth solving. The critique is that the current implementation fragments that value across competing silos, strands it in illiquid pools, and optimizes for platform revenue over creator capture. The contract was: your creativity has value, your attention has value, and you can finally own both. The reality is: your value is scattered, illiquid, and mostly flowing to someone else. This isn't the death of the attention economy. Memes, creators, and culture aren't going anywhere. What's ending is the assumption that attention alone deserves value capture. Price is starting to demand something sturdier underneath: a persistent pain addressed, real value delivered, a job worth rehiring the system to do. Until systems flip from "buy early" to "do something meaningful repeatedly," we'll keep watching attention survive while value evaporates. --- *Originally published on [jonathancolton.eth](https://paragraph.com/@jonathancolton.eth/your-creativity-and-attention-have-value)*