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If you haven’t lived inside crypto culture (or you’ve only heard about it and stayed skeptical), the terms can feel like a password you were never given. Since I’m writing about two of those terms today, let me begin in plain language.
An NFT (a non-fungible token) is a unique digital certificate that points to a specific work that lives on a blockchain. It could be a photograph, an animation, a poem, a recorded moment, a document, almost anything you’d want to preserve and point to with clarity. Its value is bound up with provenance: a public record that says you own that piece. That ownership is not the casual kind we feel when an image sits on our phone or inside a social media gallery. Lose the phone, close the account, and those files can vanish from your daily life; onchain, the record persists. It’s not that blockchains make things immortal (nothing is), but they create a durable, shared ledger that remembers where a work came from and who holds it now.
A coin, in the context of what’s unfolding right now, is different. It’s fungible and liquid, like interchangeable units that behave more like a tradable chip for participating in a creator’s world, or even inside a single post’s momentum. If NFTs are a way to hold an artifact, coins are a way to move inside a current.
What pushed me to finally write this is the shift I’m watching on Zora and inside The Base App. In both of them, posts aren’t only posts; they can be “coined.” You publish something and, under the hood, a small economic system spins up. People can buy in or exit in a few taps, and value begins to move where attention already lives. If you’ve never touched any of this, imagine a simplified version of buying a stock: you enter, the price moves with supply, demand, and mood; you leave when you like. The twist is that here the “company” isn’t a distant corporation but the creator or even one of their posts. The surface experience is surprisingly simple: your feed becomes a place where culture is not just seen; it’s tradable. Crucially, the plumbing routes a share back to the origin, so value doesn’t evaporate into a platform ceiling. It returns to the person who started the spark.
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Eduard🌹
When these creator coins appeared, the takes arrived just as quickly. Some declared NFTs dead. Others said coins would never work and were just a fad. Some argued coins were exactly the unlock that would pull the next wave of people into crypto. I don’t want to litigate every opinion. I want to share how I see the future, because after sitting with this for a while, I don’t think we’re choosing between two rivals. I think we just gained a second gear.
For me, NFTs have always been about intention. When I mint an artwork onchain, I’m hanging it on a wall (not a wall with nails and paint, but a wall you can stand before, revisit, argue with, love). When someone collects that piece, they aren’t buying me as an idea or placing a blind bet on hype. They’re choosing a specific work and saying, “This matters to me, and I want to carry it forward.”
Creator coins are honest about velocity. They’re tuned for participation, discovery, and movement. When I “coin” a post (whatever that post is: a sketch, a fragment, a backstage moment), I’m opening the window and inviting the street in. People jump in because they feel the heat. They jump out when the song changes. A market forms and dissolves around a moment. That does not replace the slow center of the art but rather surrounds it. If the NFT is my album, the coin is the tour, the live energy that funds the studio, and tests whether a motif deserves to become a track.
This is where the anxiety often appears. If every post is a market, “won’t everything turn into speculation?” Sometimes, yes. Markets tend to overheat. But speculation isn’t new to art, as it used to happen further away from the artist, behind galleries and private rooms and opaque secondary markets that rarely sent anything back to the origin. What’s different now (and meaningfully better, in my view) is that the financial layer is programmable in a way that can intentionally route a share back to creators, even when the action is fast and chaotic. Whether you prefer quiet rooms or loud streets, the direction of value matters.
There’s also a craft to these systems that’s easy to miss if you only see the memes. The newer coin architectures are just like designed instruments. Liquidity pools can spin up automatically. Fees can be captured programmatically and split to the right recipients. Creator-level coins can sit beside post-level coins, so a body of work accumulates gravity over time rather than each post living and dying alone. I’m not romanticizing the plumbing. I’m saying the plumbing changes the surface: it turns the feed into an instrument, not just a scoreboard.
So what does all of this look like in a creator’s actual life? For me, it’s a division of center and surface.
At the center, I keep the work sacred. That’s where finished pieces live as NFTs; where editioned experiments that still feel like final statements belong; where specific moments I’ll want to stand beside a year from now can be held. When I mint an NFT, I am asking for “witness”. If you collect it, we’re entering a longer conversation. It’s less about “will this rip?” and more about “does this deserve to last?”
At the surface, I embrace coins as honest energy. That’s where a work-in-progress, a behind-the-scenes fragment, a prompt, a question, a thought, a sketch can live as a coin. The coin lets people back me in smaller, quicker ways. It converts attention into runway without pretending that every spark is a finished sculpture. Some nights the surface will overheat; some nights it will hum. Either way, it’s real. It’s the street outside the gallery, and some nights the street is where the culture actually happens.
I don’t consider one morally superior. They optimize for different truths. NFTs preserve provenance, specificity, and time. Coins amplify liquidity, discovery, and momentum. Lately, I’ve been treating them as two answers to the same question:
How do I hold this moment? If I want to hold it still so we can see it clearly, I make it an NFT. If I want to let it move so we can feel it fully, I coin it.
There is also a human threshold difference I care about. NFTs ask more attention, intention, often a higher price, and a longer relationship. Coins lower the barrier to saying “I’m here.” Two taps, a small stake, a chance to swim with the current before deciding whether to take something home. I don’t want to shame either behavior. The collector who wants the album and the participant who wants the live set are both part of the same night. As a creator, my responsibility is to be explicit about what each thing means in my world so people can choose their way of being close.
I also want to make a short pause and express gratitude to Zora and Base for repositioning the social surface so that earning can happen where attention already is. They’re not just turning posts into tokens, but also building new economic mechanics (content coins, creator coins, reward flows, liquidity scaffolding) that hold the surface together.
But there’s a question I assume all of us are asking and one to which we already know the answer: Will this culture always behave well? Of course not.
There will be mania. There will be ill-considered coins. There will be things that feel like spam, and moments that feel like magic. But I don’t like to measure a medium by its worst use case. I prefer to measure it by what becomes possible when people use it with intention. And what’s possible here is a healthier division of labor: the coins fund the heat, while the NFTs hold the heart. It’s like letting the tour pay for the studio, and letting the album prove the studio was worth paying for.
If you’re coming to this from the outside, I’d suggest entering this world as you would a city you’ve never visited: start with the museums, where everything is slower and artifact-first, then walk into the festivals and side streets where things move fast and the rules are looser. Both are part of the same place. Both are culture. And when you’ve felt both, you can decide what kind of closeness you want on any given day.
I’ll personally be living in both. I don’t want to choose between attention and intention. I want to marry them without confusing them. I don’t want to declare one “better,” but to understand what each is for, and to use them in ways that honor the people on the other side of the screen, those who keep showing up to look and to feel.
Thank you!🌹
Eduard🌹
The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)
1 comment
The world has always oscillated between intention and momentum, between the need to make something that lasts, and the urge to move with what’s alive right now. What’s changing is that we finally have the tools that make both visible. The question is how we’ll use them Will we let coins swallow art, or will we let art remind coins what they’re meant to fund? Will we move so fast that we forget to feel, or will we learn to make movement meaningful again? That’s what I tried to explore in my latest reflection, Two Ways to Hold a Moment. I wrote about how NFTs and creator coins shouldn’t be rivals but different instruments of the same creative song. If you haven’t read it yet, or if you’ve been curious about how and why these two worlds might coexist, you can find it here: https://paragraph.com/@thehiddeni/two-ways-to-hold-a-moment🌹 And if you already did, thank you for taking the time to explore it!🌹 The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)