Zora and the rise of content coins

Transcript

GM, good morning. Welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show reporting from a market so bullish even your grandma is asking how to buy Salana. I'm your host Jay Hamilton. It's Friday, May the 9th, and there is something happening within crypto right now that these are the moments that get me so fired up. Like, I know markets are bullish and I know ETH is above 2200 and y'all listening are fired up and Bitcoin's above 103 or maybe it's at 102 now. It's, you know, it's Bitcoin. It's doing its thing and that's all great. But today I want to dive into an area of crypto that I'm really excited about because we talk so much about product market fit and building real apps for real humans, not just the super techy crypto native nerds that we have right

now in crypto. What about the rest of the world? How are we going to get them on chain? And today's guest is leading that in a huge way right now. I'm talking about DGens, co-founder of Zora, where they are building around content coins. I'm sure you guys have heard about content coins and maybe you heard about the base content coin controversy that happened a few weeks ago. We talked about that in a past show with Laura Shin, although we'll address that in today's show as well. But what is happening around content coins is opening up an entire new market of value on the internet around attention and social media content. Why does Facebook get all of the value from the content that you post on Instagram? I have no

idea. And I know you all agree with that. So that's what today's discussion is all about. A super exciting use case that I think is going to be a massive onboarding ramp over the next year. Before we jump in and hear from D, I got to let you guys know quickly that if you want to know about a massive acquisition that happened this week, I'm talking about Coinbase acquired Darabit. talked about it a little bit on yesterday's show with Dan Tapiro because he is one of the investors in Darabit. But if you want to know more about that story, check out our newsletter from yesterday. Great post that really breaks that down and why we are so bullish on IPOs and M&A activity happening in crypto right now. Check the link in the show notes.

Today's episode is brought to you by Letin get cash without selling your Bitcoin. It's also brought to you by Coin Shift powering top crypto treasuries with their yield bearing stable coin CSUSDL. Without further ado, D, welcome to the Milk Road Show. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. I appreciate you for having me. Yeah, super excited to have you, my man. Okay, let's start with uh let's just start with some like you guys launched content coins seven weeks ago. Uh give us the numbers so far. Yeah. So far, uh, the coins that have been launched on the protocol have done $243 million in trading volume, which is kind of crazy if you think about just people trading content on the internet as like a net new novel behavior, which

is pretty wild. I think we've seen over 2.5 million unique traders of these coins. Um, and so market participation and market demand is definitely present, I would say, uh, for this type of asset. And then um I think we've seen uh well over a 100 thousand or so unique creators. And so uh there's a ton of people who are excited to use the platform or excited to use the protocol. I think we've seen like uh podcasters like yourself. We've seen short form video content creators, musicians, we've seen comedians, sketches, parodies, you name it. It's been really cool to see a lot of different creative disciplines sort of on boarding and uh a lot of real people and real faces and yeah, it's been it's been amazing. Uh we're super

stoked and uh you know just getting started. I want to make sure that everybody can frame this conversation. So if if somebody listening to this has never used Zora before. Give give us the like I'm a 5-year-old definition or uh description of Zora. Yeah, I'd say the ELI5 is Zora is a toy that allows you to post your drawings or pictures with your friends. And if your friends like those pictures, they can also buy some of those pictures or videos with their little pieces of candy. And if your uh you know, your picture goes absolutely bonkers, aka all of the kids in your classroom really like that

picture, um then you can actually get a bit more candy, maybe even like a nicer piece of candy. Uh that'd be like the Eli5 all the market talk. The market talk. Oh, we can pause there. Maybe we'll No, no, no. Go ahead. Keep to to 18 plus. And this this is maybe my favorite description. I pulled this up uh from earlier today from your your Twitter. Here's somebody saying um I'm having fun. I made a dollar, which doesn't sound insane, but like I don't make a dollar from doomcrolling Instagram. If I had a dollar for every time I doomcrolled, that would be nice. Like this is this is a great example of what Sora is. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I think

um one one of our uh one of our like peers in the bass ecosystem, Alexander over at Airrum, he wrote like a really thoughtful essay or article on Twitter this week about Zora and why he's so fascinated with everything that Zora is doing. And uh one of the pull quotes from it was, "It's like Instagram, but it pays better." Uh and so it's cool to see that like actual like uh value proposition show up for an end user. Like that's a screenshot of a tweet from a friend of our events marketing lead, Karen, where she was like, "Hey, how are you liking the app?" And like that's an actual piece of feedback. Um, and so I think on the consumer side, we're starting to see that participation in social networks now can have like a, you

know, economic benefit to you as a person who's engaging and sharing your attention with the space. And then I think we can get into this in a bit, but like on the creator side, um, you know, the only way that that person who was scrolling was able to make money is the fact that there's a liquid market that exists for that creator's post and the fact that that person could buy it actually helped the creator to earn a bit of money. And so I think like I was thinking about this on the way over at a high level, the internet and social networks feel like the new emergent markets. I know that sounds like a little crazy to say because they've already emerged uh in a major way, but why I think this is that crypto is allowing net new capital markets to form around internet native assets in ways

that they never could. And so we're starting to see these markets form around content in net new unique ways where creators are able to benefit from, you know, extra monetization of their content and their work. But consumers are also able to benefit from sharing their attention with these networks uh you know in the form of either ownership, value added participation or you know if you're a cryptonative speculator type like maybe a little bit of profit. And so I think we're starting to see like a really it's kind of subtle and it looks like a toy where people are posting Tik Toks on chain but when you see the market cap next to that video and it's like a $1,400 video and it started as like a $12 video or a $22 video you're like wait what what's happening here? And uh I think a lot of

it is that sort of net new capital markets machine that is crypto. Yeah. If to me the two biggest obvious use cases for adding value to the internet are the value of information through predictions markets and the value of content through Azora. Like those are like the two like we we're see I think everyone gets prediction markets now, right? Like everybody's seen what's happening with polling market like I think we all saw what happened with the election of how it was much better at predicting literally a driver of yeah it was it predicted the the election before any of the media called the election.

Right. So, and and then that same thing is going to happen with attention where when you ascribe value to attention, then we we we we can get out of we can escape the current monopolies and the current algorithms that control our attention and we can spend our attention on things that are other people think are valuable and it's it's going to change and it just feels so obvious to me. Yeah. Yeah. I do feel that like uh like prediction markets which you think of like information attention and content markets are all converging on the same thing which is the token like they're all converging on the same type of capital market tesseract which is a token on chain because it allows for radically new participation in capital markets. So like if you think about the

way that like an ad exchange works which by the way like you mentioned like uh the things we spend our attention on etc. It's like all of that is getting monetized on a private exchange run by an incumbent social network, right? And so even as the crypto like excuse me, even as a content creator, you don't actually have ownership of that market even though you have ownership of that IP, right? So like you might be able to like add some ad slots into your individual video, but the majority of that monetization is actually happening outside of your remitt. it's happening behind the scenes for, you know, X, uh, behind the scenes for IG, and they're monetizing the attention you're generating, you know, selling your impressions to publishers, uh, and then giving you, uh, you know, the the I

don't know where the creator revenue payout stacks up. Yeah. Equity, okay? Like, you're not getting paid first, okay? Getting paid somewhere around last, okay? Um, and so you're probably getting like even though it feels like a lot of money for the top 1% of creators, you're probably getting like pennies on the dollar. You're getting chump change, you know. And then in many other programs, you know, like let's look at Tik Tok for example, you're not even eligible to to earn or monetize from their creator program unless you have 10,000 followers, you know, and and this is all because to get back to the original point, the markets for attention are locked up and gatekept by the networks, right? They're not open and accessible to the public in ways

that allow capital to flow and form around creativity in these sort of unmititigated ways. You know, starting Oh, go ahead. I was just going to say, and you bring up Tik Tok, uh, you need 10,000 followers to monetize. You also need to live in certain countries, right? Like, man, you got to live countries. How many jurisdictions can't even they they can't, you know, you might have millions of followers on TikTok. You're an incredible creator, but you live in you live in a country where your jurisdiction doesn't allow you to monetize. Yeah, they are, right? Or your video might just not be eligible. Like uh I I mentioned my sister to you earlier uh before we jumped on the live stream. Uh prominent Tik Tocker. She makes uh video content for sports. Uh you can actually check her out. Mariah Rose Hoops for Hotties.

Absolutely incredible content creator. But she's like, "Yo, I don't make my money off of like like Tik Tok helps me to pay my bills, but like I don't make the majority of my income off of Tik Tok. I actually make it off platform outside of my you know base craft which is content creation through partnerships and ads all all this other stuff. So it's like that that asset like the that the asset that is content hasn't been monetized effectively or efficiently because it's been monetized in very private markets. Like if you're a if you're a a free market like champion, right? Like turn down the gates like this should be a market that you also want to free, you know? Um, I see a lot of people sometimes up in arms around the fact that memes and content and

maybe a photo of somebody's lunch or a video of somebody's dog is winding up on chain and but people are trading it. That asset would otherwise live on another network and get monetized by some massive privatized ad exchange. Like why not why not let that creator own that market? It's like the next phase your IP. Selling your Bitcoin should be a last resort when you need cash. That's why there's Leen, the trusted platform for Bitcoin backed loans. You can unlock cash in as little as 18 hours with no monthly interest payments and no prepayment penalties. They've issued over 9 billion in loans and never lost a single Satoshi of client funds, even during the chaos of 2022. If you're a long-term hodler, this is the move. Get liquidity without

selling at milkroad.com/letin spelled L E DN. Meet CSUSDL, the stable coin built for institutions and Dows. Don't just hold basic stable coins. Earn yield all without compromising security. Backed by regulated real world assets and secured with institutional grade risk management by our friends at Stakehouse Financial. Put your treasury cash to work earning native yields and protocol rewards. Built by the team behind Coin Shift, which is trusted to manage over 1 billion in business treasuries on chain, including a Gitcoin, and hundreds of leading institutions, CYCSUSDL is gaining traction at

milkroad.com/coinshift. Yeah. Yeah. It feels what I feel like when I look at Zora right now is I won't deny that it feels um it's it it feels so new that it feels a little bit uncomfortable, right? because it is stretching. It's innovating and pushing and disrupting and seeing dollar signs next to a content post is weird, right? Like let's be real, it does feel you're you're like what is this? Like why is that there? Like this is value. Like what is that value? You know to and obviously like I understand it but to a norm it is a little bit weird. But then at the same time as we said earlier once you use it and you get into it you're like oh why hasn't it always been this way? This

makes so much sense. So, it's I don't know. This is a I I think this is a gradually and then all of a sudden there's going to be I mean you guys are already having you said $230 million in trading volume in seven weeks. Like that's incredible success so far, but it feels like the takeoff velocity is just coming. Um, I w I wanna I want to pause here for a second and I want to dive into some examples of of some actual posts because I we're talking about this, but I want to make sure that our audience actually understands how you are tokenizing content and how value is exchanged here and how this all works.

Uh, so I'm going to bring up a a tweet that you shared recently of what you said was one of your favorite Zora stories. So, I don't know if this is the one you want to share or if there's another example you want to give, but walk us through how a content coin actually operates and how value is exchanged. Yeah, this is really cool. So, from the creator side, um it's actually as easy as posting on Instagram. It takes like two seconds to sign up. You can sign up with an email. You don't need any familiarity with crypto or any like technical knowledge of tokenization. You can literally just sign up with a picture, post it, and you can now uh you just tokenized your media and your content. more radically, you just created a market for that unique piece of media, which is crazy. Uh, and

so this person, uh, who we're featuring here, Tiny Soul Game, animator out of Southwest London, they've actually been posting on Zora for like the last two weeks, they make these crazy banger viral gifts. Um, this pigeon this is the internet right here. Like, this is By the way, like I think if we go to that actual pigeon post, let me let me see if I can pull it up real quick. It's It's like a It's like a $1,400 pigeon, which sounds insane to say, but it's like a $1,400 pigeon. Like, this is this is the part you need to explain. Okay, even crazier, it started as a $22 pigeon, and there's been so much market demand. So, so here's what's really happening is that uh the market is signaling or acknowledging what other people will

think is valuable. Like if I as a potential speculator or an audience member or fan, I see this pigeon and I'm like, "Yo, I've seen it all over my timeline. It's like it's going crazy. Like this thing is winning that attention. I think people will find this valuable if there's a market for it and I'm early to it." You buy it at $22 that I mean, the thing starts trading like crazy because it's a viral post that other people find valuable. other people make their way to the market and you wind up with a case of there being, you know, 3,000 trades of this pigeon gift, you know, uh you you wind up you wind up it's actually insane. Um or this might be for like their total collection and because this is what's really cool, like because the market for monetizing media

on Zora is disintermediated from the sort of private publisher network ad relationship. there's value that can flow to the creator. And so as people are trading their attention really of this piece of content, the creator is able to earn a small trading fee. They also are able to own I think so by default every creator gets 1% of each post and so they wind up with 10 million tokens. But what that is is it's ownership in the asset that is their content. Like really when you're posting you're issuing an asset which is crazy.

That's which is true. I really like that take actually. You're right. Yeah. Like you are creating IP that you you created this IP asset. I should tweet with it's like content creation is the new form of asset issuance and it's because content creation is now bundled with market creation and market formation. Right? Even more radical is it's broadly accessible to the entirety of the internet which allows capital to form around this asset in a radically different way than a permissioned either geographically permissioned you know compliant whatever whatever restriction or eligibility you have to form fit in order to participate in the market has now dissolved so the whole internet can participate and so you see you see

demand it's probably been bottled up on ad exchanges or bottled up in uh really bottled up and only able to escape via merchandise sales where it's like, oh, I'm going to buy a cup of my favorite a fork from my favorite food creator, right? But it's like, oh, wouldn't you rather just buy the the real IP of asset, which is the post. Um, and so I think we're starting to see that latent demand make its way into into content coins. And so if we go back uh to the to the post real quick, you'll see that they've made like $500 just $42346 plus all of the ownership that they have in the post, which I don't know if we did the math, it's probably like an extra like,000 bucks or so.

Yeah, roughly. So, so like they've now made uh in two weeks, you know, $500 plus a,000 bucks in unrealized gains. Like they have this money sitting here, right? So, it's like, okay, now map that against what you're making on as a content creator of this size, 92,000 followers on X, right? Maybe you're having a couple weeks where you're pushing a lot of impressions. So, you might be eligible for like a if you paid for X premium, by the way, you might be eligible to earn a bit of money. But then even like if you're making $1,000 or $2,000 on X in a month, yo, you're probably like the top those numbers are what I see from like the top 5% of creators. So, I'm like, "Oh, man. We've now we've now raised the floor of

earning potential for the longtail of creators on social networks. So it's like the the the everyday average creator now has a similar earning opportunity as the top 1% of creators just based on their content alone because the market has been freed and made available for people to participate in that either want to support, they want to signal, or they want to speculate. you know, like there's it's it's actually are those the three because I was going to ask that as my next question is like like I get the the creator side I think is pretty obvious.

We all get that especially on the longtail as you said like I mean my brother started creating on uh you know what I gota get my brother on Zora my brother started creating Oh you're the friend that's telling your friend remember there you go. Yeah I'm that guy now is successful and you'll have a who tells their friend you're the friend. Yeah. Yeah. You you you zorapilled me already. Yeah. Hey man, your words. So, but he he's creating on on Tik Tok and Instagram has gotten up to about 300,000 followers in in a few months. So, he's like doing very well, but he's he's making no money because a he can't he can't join the creative creator program because he's he's in Canada and uh Instagram gives you nothing. So, he's not getting anything there. So like, you

know, and he's been, you know, like there's a great example and people love him and Okay, but going back to the um uh the the user because so I get the creator side, right? But here's the challenge is creators aren't going to go to a platform unless there's attention there and there's users there, right? And so what's the you mentioned there's three reasons why a a user would would would buy and would like because to me like the speculation is the one that stands out to me and I get that part but does the whole world want to speculate like I don't think so. No, no, they don't. But I think a lot of people do want to support like so, you know, we learned this through the NFT cycle, uh, both on the 721 auction side and the

1155 open edition side is that like patronage on the internet is a thing, but I don't think that that's like the whole thing, right? And patronage with limited secondary markets is actually pretty inefficient patronage because you're not able to capture the maximum amount of benefit from that work which you would be if there was a liquid secondary market which coins uniquely enable uh just out of the box. And so I do think patronage and support is is definitely a factor. One thing that uh I'm going to I'm going to park the three S's. So we have support uh speculation and signal. uh signal being like taste uh speculation being oh I think that this will be more valuable in the future um and then support being the patronage

piece there's something like a a secret third thing or fourth thing which I think is emerging which I'm very very excited about which is when you remove the ad exchange from the social network and remove the need for there to be this almost undesirable type of media in the network you increase the connection premium that each user gets when they find their friends, right? So, it's like when you're scrolling through Zora, what makes it super unique in the fact that there's no ads is that it's all friends.

And like one of the things you hear the most about on social networks is that people can't find and connect with the people they want to and the friends that they want to because the networks are littered with [ __ ] billboards and littered with ads. It's littered with people who are telling you a bunch of [ __ ] that you probably didn't want to hear, right? And so what's super super cool in the long term is if this actually works and we we are able to really have efficient and liquid markets for creativity and for content, then you might not need the ads, which means you might have a peer network, which means like the the just engagement experience alone might be dramatically improved, right? So it's like, oh, I can actually

find the people I want. And by the way, now also the market is telling you what content is valuable to show up in the feed. So it's like the market is the algorithm to some extent, which is actually to your prediction market's point earlier, almost like a better and more efficient way to get what's really valuable content. Instead of trying to determine what's valuable based on what an advertiser is willing to pay for, we let the market figure out what's what's valuable based on what people are really willing to put their weight behind or what they're willing to put their, you know, say you put your money where your mouth is kind of thing. And so it's like if if I think this post or this pod is going to be really valuable one day, like now instead of me having to tweet or be like, "Yo, in before a thousand

views, yo, in like comment before, you know, 500 retweets, right?" I could just So, in fact, like I want to show you how easy it is to part. It's like I just double tap on my phone. Like it's actually Oh, we just updated the app. So, I got to click the button first. One sec. You guys are sh You guys are shipping too too much too fast. Yeah. Like this is Zora. It's a And you look at that that looks like Instagram. That looks like Instagram. Bingo. Okay. But what doesn't look like Instagram to your point earlier which is so jolting for people is market cap. But like guess what? Like a lot of these videos, like if you think about earned media value, like you're you're a content creator and this has been like the magical metric

that marketers have conjured up back in the science labs to to really make influencer marketing and all that stuff like a science to some extent, right? It's like one impression is worth two cent and one like is worth four cent and a retweet is worth $4, right? And like oh that makes this video worth 100K, right? I can show you a $100,000 video on Sora and it's not because I cooked up some math equation. It's because the market decided it was a $100,000 video, you know, and then when you start to think about like the sort of like uh reconciliation of those two stats, it actually feels natural. So, it's like, oh, maybe we're just showing you a number that's been hidden the whole time behind the shrouds and veils of the ad

exchanges. Yeah, this is a kid who posted a video of himself rapping on Zora. Okay. It's like a $400 video now. He's just like, "This is crazy, bro. You don't see this on chain, right?" Okay. So, be like this. I just bought it. You just bought it. I just bought it. Like at the bottom, you see it's pending. Like, I just bought this. At what price? Like h like with with like is this how did you decide what money to put into this? Oh, okay. So, the cool thing about the app, first of all, I think we're the only mobile app that has double tap to buy. Like, think you used to have to go on MetaMask. That's actually huge. You used to have to connect, right? So, you don't have to when we first when we first set

out to develop the Zora app, the mobile app. This got to be one of the most differentiated apps in all of crypto. Um, like when we first set out to do it, we were like, "Oh, we'll ship this thing in like a month, right?" We were like, "Oh, it's like two months, right?" Seven months later, like seven months later, we shipped this app, right? But like during that time, we were like, "Okay, what's the what's the current path to buying a token on your phone, right?" And we mapped it out. My co-founder, Jacob, had this big ass slide that he shared at a town hall and it was like, "It takes like 12 clicks or seven clicks and three app switches, right?" Like, you're you're in the you're in the merrygoround at that point to to spend your money. No wonder

we can't onboard anybody new to crypto. Well, there's other reasons we can't do that that I won't go into on the stream. We could do a whole another episode about that. But there's like three app switches, right, to to actually spend money. You could imagine how much demand is getting uh curved out of the market or is falling off in that flow, right? So, we were like, yo, what if you could just double tap and you buy? And so, now in the app, you're you have a smart wallet connected. It's loaded up with a balance. You tap twice and you buy. And then I can set what I want my default to be. So like mine might be, you know, 50 cents. Other people's might be a dollar.

Maybe it's 20 cents or whatever. By the way, again, the markets for these pieces of content, they're starting at $22. They start at 22. Okay. Yeah, that's the default. The default starting market cap is $22. So when I $22 any reason? Oh, we're trying to get it to zero, right? Yeah. So the reason being is that we want to have the most efficient and most accurate price discovery of every piece of media on the internet possible. And the only way that that's like mathematically possible is if we get the starting market cap as as close to zero as we can. It is an enormous mathematical and technical challenge to achieve this. Like it is like we're working with this uh this team uh

Doppler. They've built like an amazing unis swap v4 hook. I think we're like the first team that h it's like multi- curves like man I I do the ops like all the other it is brilliant brilliant engineering happening underneath the hood for these markets which allows us to have the best price discovery of a piece of media that you can find. And so like before it was actually $2,000 and then people would show up to the app and be like, "What the [ __ ] This isn't a $2,000. What? That's crazy." You know, like it's like very hard to believe. But when it starts at zero or it starts near zero, you're like, "Oh yeah, that's probably this might be worthless." And then it turns out, oh, it's worth $400.

Oh, it turns out it's worth $3,500. You know, I think the top the top token on Zora um in like the last 24 hours, it wasn't like a it was more of a meme than a piece of content, but I think it hit like a $2 million market cap in like six hours. Two Wow. Now, now $60,000 of trading volume in like four hours. It was great. Does that to to you does that say that like the crypto casino crowd is in Zora and they're like memecoining Zora and they're speculating or is that like is that the future and we're going to see more of that happen? I think we'll see more of this happen, you know, like I think I pulled the stats and it's like

0.1% of posts on social networks like go properly viral, you know, so I think it's going to be a very small percentage of posts that truly do go from zero, like real zero to, you know, multi-million dollars, you know, uh, you know, eight figure posts, right? But we've seen it happen and I think it will happen again and again and again and again. Do I think it's the crypto casino crowd? I don't know if like the the like there's two defaults that I don't exactly know how we got to, right? Like like when it was unis swap at ICOs, they didn't really call it a casino. Yeah, true. But like for some reason like like

like we've gotten to some other place where I think the sort of perception of these markets is being somewhat warped and distorted as we figure out some of the like novel mechanisms to prevent things like sniping or to do things like efficient price discovery, right? And so like and people have gotten burned so I get it. But like I don't think that like I feel the same way. It's kind of spicy. We did this video at Zoro where they asked you like what's a word you were get get rid of in the crypto space and um man I was hardressed to think of one. It took me so long and then I just blurted out trench. It's like oh say trench. I'm like everybody loves the word I love the word I've been in the trenches for months. Yeah. I realized I said it because it I think casino and

trench and like there's like these war sort of brands and then these like casino speculator like those really brand the space, right? And I think like uh speculation I actually wrote this the other day. It's like a capital formation doesn't necessitate speculation and speculation doesn't necessitate extraction. Like I don't think speculation has to be this like perverse you know bad behavior. I actually think speculation drives discovery and um liquidity to emergent markets like the ones I'm describing on the internet now.

And they're al it's also responsible for helping to bootstrap many of like the most important industries and markets in our space like in in the world, right? And so I don't want to demonize really either of them, but I think we're maturing out of them, you know? And I and I think what really is happening is that people are acknowledging um undervalued internet native assets like memes or undervalued internet native assets like content and are are smart money piling in with their bags uh and making a lot of money at the expense of some other people. But I think the canary in the coal mine here is like there's creators all over the internet now who are able to apply these markets to their craft and benefit in a major way. I think I think we're it's still

we're in like the I think I'm not going to do the we're still so early even though there's literally 500 million people probably less. We we are that use crypto. I know but I said that on Twitter the other day. I was like there's 560 million crypto users compared to the six I think it's like six billion internet users. And people were like there's not even that many. And I was like oh then you don't get the point. like I'm like um so yeah, I think we're probably in our like uh tween age years. Like we're somewhere in there and we'll mature out of this and um just like free markets got applied to just about every other industry in the world. I think they're about to get applied to social media and attention on the internet.

Okay, two two other topics I want to talk about. One I want to talk about Zoro token. Um and then the other is what's what's the end game here? Let's talk first about what the endgame here is and then let's talk about Zoro token. What I mean when I say the endgame is um are the existing social media players going to adopt crypto and copy what you guys are doing eventually or are you going to disrupt and displace them? I think that the existing social networks wow I've never thought of this analogy but I'm going to try. Okay. I think that them starting to adopt will

be like banks or traditional brokerages or exchanges adopting like support for crypto assets, meaning you're allowed to trade them and whatnot. I think that it will be kind of like social's version of like a large incumbent financial institution launching a stable coin where it's like it's oh that's a great payment rail to get money to a creator but I don't know that they're going to lean all the way into full-blown asset issuance where it's like creators are now like as a part of posting they are also creating markets that people who are outside of your platform are able to access, you know, and so it's kind of

like the centralized exchange to decentralized exchange path where I'm like, oh, I think they're going to be much more like the centralized exchanges where like some of that or some flavor of these services will be available there or like some dimension of these assets will be available there. But then there's going to be dexes like Zora, which is probably like the unis swap or the aerodyome of of this pipe, which will be doing the issuance piece as well as allowing people to have price discovery on the content itself. So, it's just like one click deeper into the stack versus just staying at the payments like layer. I I should write this more fully because I've literally never thought of that until now. the centralized exchange and decentralized exchange piece. Alex from very like uh

from Aerrum has written a lot about and it's it's pretty good, but the the sort of payments analogy one is is new and loose. So, if that didn't quite hold, thank you. No, that's that's solid. That's solid. Okay, let's let's talk about Zoro token. Uh give us the talk us through Zoro token. Is it does it have utility? How is it used? Uh yeah, give us the background. Yeah, so we launched the Zora token on April 23rd. um as exactly what it was, which is a memecoin and collectible for the Zora ecosystem. Um that was meant with a lot of spice and fervor because people do want um matter of fact, I would say people expect there to be a bit more uh a larger risk appetite for adding

utility into your token at the outset. I would say like that's what the market expects right now. even if that isn't what we feel like leads to the most successful in to your point in-game for the token. And so um we actually were pretty pretty stoked about like like a lot of the hate was kind of par for the course you know like so like we were we were kind of like oh that will happen and then we will show people what we plan to do from this much more flexible state um which is to build the the token into the Zora stack right so like no there aren't a bunch of governance functions and staking functionality in the token itself or the contract itself there is the ERC20 votes extension which I think a lot of people are missing

which allows anybody to do sort of lightweight voting with the token um for their own initiatives not protocol governance but just for whatever they want um but yeah we've prioritized putting the token into the Zora stack and like this is what I'm most excited about and I think it's probably the subtlety that people have missed in the last week and so a week after launch maybe like five days after launch um or so um we actually enabled Zoro rewards on the Zora protocol which means now instead of receiving your rewards as a creator in your coin and ETH, you now receive those rewards in the Zoro token.

Uh, which is cool because it's like an incentive alignment where it's like, oh, I get I receive the token and official collectible of the platform that I use all the time. I'm like really excited about that. If this is successful, I feel like that's what like, you know, like there's alignment there. Um, but underneath the hood on the technical side, which I'm super stoked about, is that the Zora token, that memecoin is actually the quote currency for every market uh that is issued by the Zora protocol that's created by the Zora protocol. So every post is actually paired with the Zora token underneath the hood which means that all of the sort of trading activity uh like the sort of like market cap if you will of

the content itself is actually getting shoved into the Zoro token uh because it's the quote currency for all of the markets on the protocol. And so I think the only other team to really do something like this is virtuals. Yeah. and they did it at the creator level versus the sort of post level. We're starting off at like the sort of atomic unit of attention which is the post and making sure that the Zora token um to some extent is like like as the quote currency for every post is like the quote currency for many posts on the internet. Um and then can imagine sort of layering in things over time where there could be other types of coins that could be quoted in the the Zoro token.

And so I think like when I think about the stack and I tweeted this the other day and I think people were like wow you do a lot and there's been a lot of changes or whatever but it's like what team do you know in crypto that has it's like liquid token that's live. Yeah exactly like a social network a mobile app a protocol it's a collectible which is a token. We have a developer toolkit by the way which you know hundreds of developers throughout the crypto ecosystem are now building on top of so that they can have coins and Zora issuance in their own protocols or in their own experiences.

It's the quote currency of every payer. It is the flag and signal of our community and ecosystem and yeah it's a memecoin but like read all the other words. Um, and so I do think that, um, especially like if you were to look at my Twitter, um, now like you just click it and scroll and like you see all of the real faces and real creators and like like net new humans that are onboarding to Zora. I'm like, "Oh man, this is their flag." So like this I actually think the token is going to be the flag of the broader crypto creator economy where it's like if you believe what other crypto creator platform has a token you know that is built into the

stack right so like um I'm really excited about the outlook and prospect of the Zora token both as like uh the default pair for any post or piece of media that is put on chain which means it's like the default quote currency for any piece of media potentially on the internet, which is crazy. And then also just being the flag and signal of the, you know, the emerging crypto creator economy. It's like if you believe in content on chain, if you believe in crypto, if you believe that we can onboard more than just crypto, Twitter and Telegram users, and I say this a lot, but I'm like, it's kind of crazy that the dominant crypto social networks are Telegram and X and I guess we're like social. They're all

they're all textbased, right? They're all text first. So like what we're presenting to crypto is almost orthogonal to what it like naturally experiences. And so it's like I actually think this is a massive opportunity for crypto to onboard the rest of the media landscape and the rest of the world who by the way is on Instagram, YouTube, and Tik Tok, right? Right. And so it's like if you believe that crypto can do that and if you believe that Zora is pretty well set up to execute on that vision and has an economic model that makes sense for you to participate in, why would you like like there's your thesis. There you go.

Your thesis, you know. Um and I I think we can do a much better job of like sharing that vision with people because we did say that the token which it is is it's is it's just for fun and engaging content on the Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think that's a that's that's not a um I think we're seeing I think you guys are starting a playbook that we're going to see more crypto companies follow. I appreciate that. I said this and on the token side on the token side. I think we're going to see where like I think we did a lot of founders a disservice by having them overbake their tokens from the outset. Yeah. like having to put all of the govern like all of the promises and then create all the

theater like we just we made everything a bit of a distraction like it was just like h is that really what it is and do you really have to do that versus allowing people it'd be like if you had to know everything your company was going to do from day zero. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Like you have to know every remix of your of your meme before you launch this. It's like you just don't you just don't you don't know. Yeah. So then just simplify it to the maximum which is just say it's a memecoin to start with. Well, and by the way, be honest. Yeah. Yeah. And then just allow it to over time become something that's much bigger and become integrated. And not to mention uh that you guys are one of the first tokens that didn't require KYC in the US,

right? Is that am I Oh man, this is a whole So I have like a half of my blog written on this. Um, I almost don't want to bring this up because we're we're we're almost we're actually over time right now on the show, but let's let's let's talk. So, like I really like this concept of just like American coinage or like Americanmade crypto. It's like uh we've been talking about it for the entirety of our token explorations which started like two years ago. like it I think in 2022 and 2023 we kicked off an analysis of how we could launch a token from the US like our US entity and like many many moons later we wound up with the Zora token. Um and so our token was issued um developed um and all of our operations um happened straight out of

our Delaware CC Corp which I think is like the first time ever. There's a litany of boxes that we had to tick in order to facilitate an airdrop from our uh like a token launch and airdrop from our Delaware CC Corp, which did not require us to do uh 1099s in KYC. A lot of the learnings that went to that actually came from us fast failing last December when we had a uh an OP retrogrant redistribution where we gave tokens to uh a bunch of uh the creators and collectors and developers in the Zora ecosystem. Um but because of some of the mechanics of that distribution as well as the value of those tokens, we were faced with some pretty large

compliance hurdles and it just limited the amount of people who were able to really not even from like a you know a functional perspective but just like a practical perspective like they just preferred not to do a lot of that stuff and it was met with a lot of disdain. And so, um, fortunately, when you're you're issuing a token, you don't have some of the sort of, uh, large value constraints that you would have on an existing and liquid token. And so that plus a lot of um the amazing sort of compliance brilliance from the the teams that we worked with um on the compliance and legal side helped us to design a um a launch plan that like I I mean I'd

love to just put out the like I really think after going through this like there's like a a legal Zoom stripe at like I'm like there's some product out there that allows people to do this in a legible way even on chain. and you just add the required memos and docs that you need and people can see it. But we had to invest a lot of financial capital uh as well as uh time and uh writing and writing and writing uh to get the required memos to button the whole thing up. But yeah, we uh issued and uh launched a token from our Delaware CC Corp. We are very excited to share with the world how you can do it. Um, we think more teams should be issuing their

tokens from the US in uh in a genuine way and and we'd love to to sort of share how you can do that yourself. So, yeah, it was a um my co-founder, Jacob, uh, who's probably one of the most brilliant people I've ever met, looked me in the face and was like, "No, no, no. We're going to do the whole thing from the US entity as a memecoin." And I was like, "That is expert mode." You you're like, "Are you sure?" It's just Yeah. I was like, "Fucking hell, man." So, um, yeah, I feel like trial by fire, we made it through. I'm super stoked. Like I said, the forward-looking opportunity is super bright and, uh, yeah, I'm pretty If if a founder is listening to this, uh, are you Where are you sharing that? Because I I have heard you and Jacob talk about

how you're going to like open source basically almost how to do this. Yeah, I'm currently drafting a blog that will have a lot of this information in it. uh that's going to have to go through all of the sort of all of the same checks that we went through to do this. So bear with us on time. Um if you want though, you can reach out to me on Twitter. Um I think you got my Twitter here because it's live. Um we'll put it in the show notes, too. Yeah. Yeah, you can DM me. I'm always down to chat. I'm happy to spread the gospel until I until we write the whole thing down, but um yeah, soon to come. Awesome. D, thanks so much for joining us today. Really appreciate your time. Yeah. Hell yeah. Thank you, Jay.

This is great. Appreciate it, man. Appreciate you all listening in. As you all know, this is for entertainment purposes only. None of today's episode was financial advice. Whether you're buying a token on Zora or grabbing a content coin or you're investing in the Zoro token or Bitcoin or ETH, whatever, everything is risky and you should do your own research and you should make your own investment decisions and you should only invest what you're prepared to lose. With that all being said, if you are trading, you might want to check out OKX, which is one of our partners and a one of my favorite exchanges. Why? Because it's simple. It's easy to use.

It's trustworthy. They got great security. If you hit the link in the show notes and you trade on OKX today, you could win $60,000 USDT through our partnership with them. Check it out. Thanks again for listening, folks. We'll see you back again tomorrow. As always, if you liked today's episode, please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us so you don't miss out on the next one. There's also a link in the description to our free 5minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh. And if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game, we're going to also leave a link for Milk Road Pro. You get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying. This is your number one resource to help you invest successfully

in crypto. One final note, this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice. Investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose. Thanks so much for listening in my friends. Have a wicked awesome