The incorporation of onchain primitives into social media across protocols including Zora and Farcaster; Base App and Retake's onchain streaming platform; as well as Paragraph the onchain writing publication - has launched what may be the most significant challenge yet to traditional platform economics.
This new wave of apps are amongst the leaders in the pack embracing "coining of content" - a fundamental shift toward onchain financialization that transforms digital assets, creative works, & even social interactions into tradeable tokens with real economic value. Representative of the tokenization of previously non-financial digital activities, where everything from social media posts & memes; to gaming achievements & creative content; can be minted, owned, or traded as blockchain-native assets.
This weekend, creators, builders, and brands discovered the Zora flywheel. When supporters can directly invest into your profile, the game changes. Real time record-breaking momentum:
All time highs across profiles with market caps at $100K+ and $1M+
One profile hit $15M market cap, the highest ever
And the entire ecosystem moved with them. Zora exploded with new voices, ideas, and markets:
72K Creator Coins created
75K+ posts shared
$56M+ in trading volume
$450K+ in creator rewards
Thousands of creators are shaping this moment. They are experimenting, trading, and earning.
Their journey to this moment began in 2020 as a platform to mint NFTs and has grown into an ecosystem like no other. The native token $ZORA, launched in April 2025, for instance is the culmination of innumerable pivots & dalliances with death/destiny.
Two-Layer Tokenization:
Creator coins: Each creator gets their own economy (1 billion tokens, ticker symbol, market cap)
Content coins: Every individual post becomes a tradeable asset
This isn't just "creator tokens"—it's programmable content.
Your viral post doesn't just get engagement metrics; it gets a market price that fluctuates based on cultural relevance. Driving attention, eliciting more content, and so on till it ... eats the world ? again ?
Infrastructure Advantage:
Onchain settlement: Tokens exist on public blockchain infrastructure
Onchain social: Decentralized relationships that port across applications
Composability: These assets plug into any app built on the same protocols
When your content gains cultural traction, everyone aligned with your success benefits proportionally. When your creator coin appreciates, the platform benefits too (fees, attention, etc).
For the first time, creator and platform incentives might actually align.
There's no two ways about it.
For decades, platforms have been on the extractive end of value in their relations with creators. Classic media operates on a well-established economic model where creators are the product, not the customer. Platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch built businesses around packaging creator content & audience attention for advertisers—in hoc to fiduciary duties to shareholders—bringing behaviour from TV, magazines etc online but not really drastically altering it.
YouTube offers creators 55% of ad revenue, earning them around $18 per 1,000 views on average
Twitch typically splits subscription revenue 50/50 with streamers
Instagram is pure distribution for the most part, with brand deals possible for the top x%
TikTok creator rewards vary significantly by geography and engagement
Nader Bit (dabit3) has a robust developer centric presence on twitter (167k) & youtube (54k).
This classic model underlies an inherent misalignment of long-term interests where platforms maximize shareholder value by controlling distribution algorithms, owning audience relationships, and optimizing for advertiser needs rather than creator success.
The original "Faustian bargain"—trading creative control for distribution access—is less and less worth making as platforms gain/exploit leverage over their creator ecosystems.
Even generous revenue-sharing arrangements don't address the fundamental issue: creators build audiences they don't own, on platforms that can change the rules unilaterally. Algorithm changes devastate creator reach overnight, and platform policy shifts can eliminate entire revenue streams.
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With Legacy Platforms
Viral vids may earn a few hundred dollars in ad revenue, split via opaque terms, dictated to creator.
A trending post may gain followers — but is (more or less) restricted to that platform & its whims.
A new platform means creators/users starting from scratch, rebuilding clout from zero.
Onchain the creator carries his audience and assets across apps, protocols, and even chains.
The Creator Stack Is Now Modular
Identity: onchain social like farcaster & lens handle the social graph and user identity.
Distribution: minting and monetization at the content level.
Programmability: Smart contracts define revenue mechanics, reward systems, & collaborations.
Interoperability: Everything lives onchain — forkable, composable, remixable.
Tokenizing everything, on open protocols rather than in walled gardens, opens up the aperture for assets to plug into any app built on the same rails. Your creator tokens, your content tokens, your follower relationships—living on decentralized infrastructure, not in a platform's database.
This changes the game fundamentally.
The technical stack makes much more possible e.g. base chain for settlement, Farcaster for social, composability for interoperability. Every interaction, every follow, every piece of content becomes programmable money.
The creation entirely new categories of tradeable assets from digital culture itself, echoing earlier moments of financial innovation, from the commodification of agricultural futures in 19th century Chicago to the securitization of mortgages in late 20th century, but with unprecedented speed/scope.
Unlike traditional financialization that often abstracts value from underlying assets, onchain financialization promises more direct ownership and participation in digital economies, though it also introduces new forms of speculation and volatility into everyday digital interactions.
What emerges isn't just trading for trading's sake, but a fundamental revaluing of creative work.
Market caps now reflect:
Posting consistency over follower counts
Community engagement over vanity metrics
Cross-platform presence over single-network dominance
Authentic cultural contribution over manufactured virality
Zora's creator coin explosion has propelled Base past Solana in daily token launches, generating massive trading volumes as fans, speculators, and fellow creators bet on cultural momentum. Each platform choice, each post, each engagement becomes part of a complex economic system where creativity generates not just likes, but liquidity.
On paragraph users can coin their publications, articles, poems & prose to support ideas they love & help writers earn without subscriptions or ads. By using straightforward support tiers & avoiding speculative mechanics, Coins amplify great ideas, foster connections, & boost visibility through an explore page where top posts rise based on real engagement. This is the start of ongoing experiments with features like post-level rewards, long-term incentives, event access, and NFT integrations—aimed at expanding the “idea economy” and making creative work more valued and discoverable.
On retake if you earn $100 in fees from people trading your streamer coin, $50 gets sent to you in ethereum, and the other $50 is sent to you in your streamer coin. Its up to you what you to do with your coin, but having that half in eth is great for creators to actually be able earn without having to sell their own coin to earn income. On farcaster its possible to choose to tip others (via your likes) using your coin earnings on noice!
Suffice to say its an exciting time to be onchain.
That being said...
Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.
But, before I go, Nassim Taleb's Skin In The Game offers a warning:
"Don’t take advice from people who don’t have skin in the game. Be aware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a particular action is good for you and while it’s also good for him or her.
The gartner hype cycle boom and bust that has characterised the space merits as much caution and due diligence as it dues hope, belief & optimism.
So, as if there wasn't enough speculation flying through the air, on August 5th 2025 via Zora Protocol I took a snapshot of Nine creators. Nine economies. To launch one experiment that will help those on the fence start to get to grips with how this ecosystem is redefining how culture accretes value.
What you see above it a prediction market.
Popularised by polymarket (built on polygon), 9 Lives is a prediction market built on arbitrum as part of the superposition ecosystem.
So I created a market comprised of a random assortment of zora creators i like (and have picked up some tokens for): questioning who will achieve the highest market cap by September 1st, 2025?!
Kicker: mine is in the mix, and for the final ten days my content will be fully focused on creating content (like this) bullposting them to try take us all HIGHER.
August 5th 2025 snapshot by Papa, Zora Protocol
@aoifeodwyer $187K mcap, 150+ posts. NFT creativity, & multi-platform consistency.
@papajams $67K mcap, musician, writer, poet is as much memes as he is culture
@grams $52K mcap, take photography, art, installations and statement pieces to new levels
@gromer $19K mcap, whose distinctive style & mobile app has attracted 118K+ insta-followers
@empresstrash: $237K mcap, 150+ posts. Experimental art that breaks the internet.
Each creator represents a different thesis on what drives value in the attention economy.
Token price action is perhaps most direct way to get skin in the game, capturing our perception of value today. The prediction market encourages another level of thinking, with engaged participants nudged to weigh current performance against future trajectory. It's not enough to identify who's winning right now—you need to predict who will be winning tomorrow, and what part token holders [or prediction market participants] will have to play in driving that.
It's not just trading; it's cultural forecasting.
"creators become economies. followers become stakeholders. content becomes market-moving events."
The market is live. The countdown is running.
Which creator will you bet on?
Support is beyond the call of duty, reading this far is its own form of evangelism, I appreciate you.
Farcaster @papa — warpcast.com/@papa
Lens @papajams — lenster.xyz/u/papajams
Twitter @papajimjams — twitter.com/papajimjams
PAPA: https://paragraph.xyz/@papajams.eth/farcasters-zk-anons
PAPA: https://paragraph.com/@papajams.eth/reverse-engineering-scout-game
I have some music coming out you may enjoy 😋
Demasiado: https://ffm.to/dmsdo
Silbon: https://ffm.to/silbon
Next Time: https://found.ee/nexttime
Papajams
@dabit3: $40K mcap. 1 post. Educator, Experimentor, DevRel, Builder.
@chriswallace: $5k mcap, 21 posts. design leadership (Roblox) UltraDAO $2.6M in six months.
@disky: $35k mcap, 24 posts. Leads farcaster's /design channel (220k users), built Rumours app.
Over 200 subscribers
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