How It Started
I first joined Zora back in October, but it was more out of curiosity than intention. I had been watching the platform evolve, but I hadn't found a rhythm with posting yet. That changed recently with the release of Zora's Android app. I knew it would be much easier to be consistent with posting if I could do it from my phone, and it led me to set myself a personal challenge: 30 days of posting on Zora.
Letting Go of Perfection
As artists, we often feel the need for our portfolio to be perfectly curated. We feel there's no room for weaker artworks. But this kind of challenge forces you to change your approach. In this case, consistency was more important than quality, so I decided to have fun and experiment a bit. Over the course of the challenge, I shared a wide range of work — from traditional paintings and photography to AI-generated images. Some were better, some weren’t even meant to be art, like my selfie. This also led to me being much more consistent on Twitter, which brought in some new followers.
Day 30/30 of my @zora challenge.
30 days of showing up, coining, and making noise onchain. It’s been chaotic, rewarding, and surprisingly wholesome.
Sometimes you get 0 likes.
Sometimes @jessepollak and @js_horne buy your work.
30 days of showing up, coining, and making noise onchain. It’s been chaotic, rewarding, and surprisingly wholesome.
Sometimes you get 0 likes.
Sometimes @jessepollak and @js_horne buy your work.
4
Different Models, Different Vibes
I called it a Zora challenge, but at the same time, I wanted to try out Rodeo. Since they haven’t yet released an Android app, I couldn’t fully commit to daily posts there, but the results were still pretty interesting. On Zora, with all the promotion on my Twitter, I got 92 followers. On Rodeo, I have 109.
Both platforms are on Base, but they follow different models. On Rodeo, you post your art, and for 24 hours, collectors can mint it as 1155 tokens. After that window, the artwork is only available on the secondary market. It has its pros and cons, but it’s fairly straightforward for a user to see how much money they’ve made.
Zora was a different story. I didn’t expect to land in the middle of the content coin drama when I started the challenge. At first, I hadn’t even noticed that the artworks were now ERC-20 tokens. Back in October, when I first posted on Zora, they were NFTs, and that shift changes a lot in how you approach both the platform and the art itself. In a way, you could say all Zora posts are now memecoins.
I do appreciate that Zora is experimenting with tokenomics. It opens up space for all kinds of creative use cases. One day, I was airdropping my art just for fun, sending it to different people. It costs next to nothing, and I can imagine dapps being built on top of this functionality.
But right now, the outcome isn’t very art-friendly. It’s a strange feeling when, as an artist, you’re kind of rugging your collectors just to withdraw money from your own art. That vibe is also reflected in the content that trends on Zora — a lot of it is just low-quality memes generated with ChatGPT.
What I Took Away From It
Despite all the drama, financially and socially, the experience was more rewarding than I had anticipated. Compared to my background in stock photography, where content is heavily policed and sales generate mere cents, Zora felt refreshingly open and fun.
It's also funny how being inside the system sharpens your view. Crypto loves experimentation, even if that means a tool built for artists ends up in the hands of memers. Moving forward, I plan to continue posting on both Zora and Rodeo, using these spaces to have some fun and to stay experimental. To keep testing, learning, and redefining what it means to be an artist in a decentralized world.
