I’ve been a fan of Zora since its early days, when it enabled artists to mint their work cheaply and efficiently, with fair distribution and genuine opportunities for discovery. Over time the platform shifted toward what is now called the creator coin economy, essentially a marketplace for memecoins. The focus on art has largely faded, at least in the form of smart contracts as we once understood them.
There is no better way to put it: Zora today is all about memecoins. Many artists, however, seem confused. They believe they are publishing their artworks when in reality they are deploying ERC-20 tokens, which are fungible, divisible, and infinitely inflatable. With the risk of sounding harsh, this is essentially just the creation of another memecoin. NFTs as we once knew them are gone, and the art component has been reduced to images pinned on IPFS. No matter how strongly the narrative is pushed or how often it is framed as fractionalized art: what collectors are actually buying is a fungible token. To illustrate this shift, I want to highlight two case studies from highly successful artists: Jack Butcher and John Karel.
Jack created his coin almost by accident, since Zora’s pivot into content coins requires every user to launch a token. That is what happened to him, and within a few days the price of this memecoin began to rise. Jack then leaned into the experiment and decided to issue more tokens in his own way. In his characteristic style, he built a narrative around the project and soon outperformed his original coin with a new concept: VV Lemonade Stand. The idea was simple but clever. Jack used his token as the base currency to mint additional coins. The result was a collection of nine visually appealing tokens. He later explained his process clearly in a post on X.
Let's break down the economics of the $visualizevalue token since its inception on July 27th. Ignoring market cap and volumes.
What Jack ultimately earned from the main tokens amounts to $185,000, which is certainly an impressive result. Still, it is important to remember that Jack Butcher is among the most respected performance artists working today, and his traditional art practice often brings in significantly higher sums in shorter periods of time. For context, his 1/1 works frequently sell for several thousands of dollars. Below is a breakdown of the individual tokens and their earnings in USD:
Token Ticker Name | Total Creator Earnings |
|---|---|
$nine (VV Lemonade Stand) | $677 |
$eight (Liquidity SERVED COLD!) | $191 |
$seven (Priced by Thirst!) | $145 |
$six (Infinitely Divisible!) | $397 |
$five (All You Can Drink!) | $159 |
$four (Millions SOLD!) | $663 |
$three (Thousands SERVED!) | $188 |
$two (Customer Owned) | $153 |
$one (Open 24/7/365) | $494 |
Let us now turn to the second example, one of my favorite CGI artists since the Tumblr era, the widely recognised John Karel. His signature character is an animated skeleton, often surrounded by a cast of funny companions. You could almost call his art family friendly.
John’s pieces are usually in high demand. His editions of 25 or more usually sell out within minutes, and his works offered at auction are often gone within a day or two. To give a sense of scale, an edition of 25 typically brings him around $1,200. One of his most iconic pieces, Window Still Life 001, resold on the secondary market last year for more than $4,000, and surprisingly earned him over $400 in royalties.
John launched his $jjjjjohn token recently, on August 1st, 2025, although he had been experimenting with coining even before Zora shifted to the creator coin economy. I will try to include all his tokens in the same table for comparison, but you can see the full list of his tokens here. His very first token is titled waiting for season 3.
Below is a breakdown of John Karel’s tokens and what he earned from each.
Token name | Total Creator Earnings |
|---|---|
$jjjjjohn (the main coin) | $2,435 |
Invest in Vibes | $0.51 |
how often is too often? | $1.38 |
Self Portrait at Work | $7.03 |
$ZORA | $17.09 |
SKELECOIN_2025 | $40.03 |
waiting for season 3 | $317.52 |
While Zora is literally open to everyone (myself included as I could even coin this article), John and Jack are two of the best artists in this space. Emerging artists starting from scratch are unlikely to earn much and I would dare to say close to nothing. For those interested in exploring Zora’s economics in depth, I recommend checking the Dune Dashboard maintained by the Zora team. Lastly, for context: Zora is a startup headquartered in Los Angeles, established in 2020. It has raised over $60 million in funding, with lead investors including Paradigm (Uniswap, Coinbase, Optimism, Phantom), Haun Ventures (Farcaster, OpenSea, Highlight), and Coinbase Ventures.
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