We’ve spent the past decade hyping up the “creator economy” as a way to finally give people a path to earn from their creativity. And sure, some have made it work. But for the vast majority, the system remains deeply flawed. Most creators pour hours into content that travels far but pays little, unless you're landing brand deals, running subscriptions, or chasing affiliate links.

The problem isn’t a lack of talent or effort. It’s structural. Platforms capture most of the value. Feeds and algorithms determine distribution. And creators, the ones producing what actually matters, get whatever’s left. If you want to make a living, you usually have to monetize around the content, not through it, selling subscriptions, building a side hustle, or locking your best stuff behind a paywall. It’s functional, but it rarely feels aligned with the openness the internet was supposed to offer.

"Today’s monetization options come with hard trade-offs: subscriptions require full-time writing and can feel impersonal; ads require a lot of effort & erode the reader experience; and tips & one-off payments rarely scale. We believe there’s room for something new."

Colin Armstrong (Founder Paragraph) on Introducing Coins on Paragraph

Over the past months, a wave of new experiments has started to reshape this landscape, quietly, at first, but with increasingly serious intent. Platforms and protocols like Farcaster, Zora, Base, Paragraph, Noice and Tipn are exploring new models to attribute value to content, while facilitating its seamless transfer between creators, audiences, and platforms.

We’re starting to see three core models emerge, each built onchain, each programmable, and each offering a different take on how value can flow between creators, curators, and consumers. These models aren’t mutually exclusive, and each has trade-offs. But together, they sketch a new possible architecture a more open and economically aligned internet.

Tipping is probably the most familiar model in this new landscape. You see something you like, you toss a few cents or a dollar to say thanks. It’s simple and clean, and it’s already a well-understood behavior, especially in live streaming platforms where tipping has become the default way for fans to support creators in real time. That habit is now making its way into social content too, but with a twist.

Systems like Noice and Tipn are making tipping automated and programmable. Instead of manually deciding when to tip, you can associate a fixed amount to specific actions: a few cents every time you like, comment, or repost. That means your engagement doesn’t just signal interest, it directly moves value as every interaction becomes a micro-transaction.

But even with these innovations, tipping is still a one-way exchange. The creator gets paid, the supporter feels good, and that’s where it ends. There’s no shared upside, no lasting connection between the two.

Shared upside matters because it turns fans into participants. When creators and audiences are aligned, there’s more reason to share, support, and grow together. It’s not just support, it’s skin in the game.

Tipping doesn’t reward early discovery. It doesn’t amplify virality. It doesn’t create lasting networks around content. It’s a useful primitive, every ecosystem needs a low-stakes entry point, but it’s not the mechanism that will unlock a new kind of content economy. At best, it’s a starting point.

Collectibles introduce a new layer of interaction by turning content into ownable, auctionable assets. On Farcaster, every cast can be minted as a 1-of-1 NFT. If more than one person wants to collect it, a timed auction begins, and the highest bidder wins.

This model is designed to be creator-first. 90% of the winning bid goes directly to the creator, with the remaining 10% going to the protocol. That’s a meaningful shift from platform models that capture the majority of value. Here, the platform facilitates the interaction but doesn't dominate the economics.

Because collectibles are ERC-721s, they’re fully programmable and composable. That opens the door to all kinds of extensions: collectors could gain access to private spaces, voting rights, or future airdrops. In theory, these assets can live across multiple apps and plug into other onchain experiences.

Still, collectibles come with natural limits. Only one person can win each auction. There’s no built-in way for a broader audience to participate or benefit from the content’s success. It’s a tool for flexing, signaling, and supporting, but not necessarily for building network effects around belief or alignment. That said, it’s a compelling foundation for new types of digital patronage, and for many creators might be enough.

🔗 Learn more on Farcaster collectibles here.

Dan Romero on Farcaster

Collectibles are now live! 1. Mobile only. Update to latest mobile app / restart your app. 2. If you're on the latest app, you'll get an in-app flow to opt in or out. 3. Your casts are now eligible for collecting! 4. Remember—most casts won't be eligible right away. It will take some time for people to opt in. 5. New cast auctions are 24 hours. Historical cast auctions are 7 days. 6. All bids are in USDC with the Farcaster wallet. https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/79623b2b-f153-474f-4ce7-fdecea335d00/original

Farcaster

The third—and arguably most disruptive—model is the content coin.

Here, the content itself is paired with an ERC-20 token, creating a market around the media. The more the content spreads, the more valuable its coin can become.

Creators earn through two main paths: trading fees generated when their coin is bought or sold, and by eventually selling part of the supply they hold. That second part (selling) can be tricky, as it may affect how the audience perceives their intent. Early fans can earn by getting in early, buying the coin while it’s still under the radar and benefiting if the content gains traction. Platforms earn on trading fees as well, which gives them a built-in incentive to surface and distribute the most culturally resonant content. The more a coin is discovered, shared, and traded, the more value flows to all three sides: creators, fans, and platforms.

Zora and Base are pushing this model forward aggressively. On both platforms, any post or asset can be instantly coined. These coins are freely tradable, permissionless, and liquid, transforming media into a kind of open stock market for culture. Beyond content-specific coins, Zora also supports creator coins, allowing users to activate personal tokens tied to their profiles. These coins let creators build a market not just around their work, but around themselves, enhancing fan alignment and loyalty.

Zora pioneered this approach, both by building the protocol layer and by launching its own app to showcase what’s possible. Base, in turn, is using Zora’s infrastructure behind the scenes, integrative native liquidity into its social layer (built on top of Farcaster) from day one.

🔗 More on Zora rewards structure here

Base on Farcaster

Earn with any post. Powered by Zora. Aneri shows what it looks like to use @baseapp.base.eth in your every day life.

Farcaster

However, coins come with their own challenges, especially psychological ones. When a creator coins a piece of content, they’re stepping into a space still shaped by memecoin culture: speculation, volatility, and short attention spans. It’s not always clear whether you’re inviting belief or gambling behavior. And while the idea is to align value with creative output, the reality is that having a liquid, tradable token attached to your work creates pressure: pressure to perform, to manage community sentiment, and to justify price movements you don’t control. It’s a heavy dynamic to navigate, especially for creators who aren’t crypto-native.

Paragraph takes a different approach. Rather than pushing users toward fully financialized interactions, it emphasizes simplicity and a more familiar user experience. The interface favors approachable terms like “support” instead of “buy,” and replaces traditional market indicators (like market caps or charts) with straightforward popularity signals. To further reduce friction, Paragraph also offers preset support tiers, simplifying user decisions.

🔗 Learn more on Paragraph Coins here + 📊 Paragraph Coins dashboard

Colin on Farcaster

Coins are now live for everyone on Paragraph. A new way to back ideas & get rewarded alongside the writers who spark them. Writers → Earn from your ideas. No subs or paywalling needed. Readers → Support posts you love, amplify great writing, and share in the upside. Read the announcement: https://paragraph.com/@blog/coins

Farcaster

Like Zora and Base, coins on Paragraph influence visibility as well. Supported posts surface more prominently in their Explore feed, creating a discovery loop powered by user engagement instead of algorithmic selection. This softer entry point highlights an alternative design approach to coins—prioritizing user comfort and reducing barriers, without fundamentally altering their underlying economic potential.

In conclusion, content coins represent a major unlock. Unlike subscriptions or ads, they scale with distribution. They reward early belief. And because they’re programmable, they can unlock access, perks, roles, or even future revenue flows. Coins are infrastructure. They’re not good or bad on their own, it’s what we build around them that makes the difference.

"Coins unlock a free and valuable internet—one where information can be freely accessed and shared while the value of that information finds its way into all of the hands that help create, distribute, and consume it."

Jacob (Founder Zora) on Free and Valuable

It’s worth calling out that tips, coins and collectibles are interoperable and programmable signals / assets. That matters more than people realize. Tips (micro-transactions), Coins (ERC-20s) and collectibles (ERC-721s) can all serve as entry points to other experiences, access tokens, community badges and loyalty layers.

The moment someone tips, collects, or buys into a post, that action can carry downstream value. That signal and asset can live across platforms. It can represent taste, belief, alignment, or investment. The point isn’t just that creators get paid, it’s that creators can now build economic systems around their work, and audiences can become part of that system.

Each model (tipping, collecting, coining) serves a different purpose. Tips represent appreciation. Collectibles are about recognition. Coins signal belief at scale. They might seem like competing models, if anything, they’re composable, different tools serving similar needs, and often more powerful when used together.

For now, creators are choosing where to publish based on what fits their goals or content, not mixing models in a single place. Still, it’s valuable to look at these experiments side by side. Because if the future of creator monetization is modular, these are the pieces we’re learning from.

The bigger idea is that these primitives, whether used individually or eventually in combination, give creators the ability to define their own economics and unlock new ways to interact with media.

They also live onchain, which means they’re portable, programmable, and in theory, interoperable. We’re not quite there yet, but the groundwork is being laid. Watching how these early models evolve is the best way to understand not just how creators might earn in the future, but how value itself might move through the open web.

At the core of all this is a deeper shift. The internet today is incredible at spreading information, but deeply limited when it comes to distributing value. Most of the tools we’ve had so far (ads, paywalls, subscriptions) have tried to gate the flow of content in order to monetize it. But the most powerful content spreads freely. The future is about aligning value with that openness, not fighting against it.

These new primitives offer early glimpses into how that might work, and they’re not just tools for getting paid, they’re coordination mechanisms. They help creators, platforms, and audiences share in what they’re building together.

That’s the deeper unlock. A creator economy that actually behaves like an economy, and maybe, just maybe, an internet that finally gets good at rewarding the people who make it what it is.