What is ZORA Coin? Is ZORA worth investing in?

Zora started as an Ethereum-based NFT platform that allowed users to buy, sell, and create NFT collectibles without paying transaction fees. As it continues to grow, the project has transformed into a social platform and continues to enhance creativity by making it easy for anyone to convert their content into a tradable currency.

Zora has attracted market attention due to the Base meme coin incident. In addition, the network announced an airdrop of ZORA tokens on April 23 and a live listing on the Binance Alpha platform on the same day, marking a significant milestone in the development of Zora.

So, what is the Zora (ZORA) cryptocurrency? What is its future potential? Below, we'll take a closer look at the ZORA coin.

What is ZORA Coin? What is the tokenomics of ZORA and its future potential?

 The latest news and developments of ZORA coin

Zora announced on April 21 that its native token, $ZORA, will be officially launched (TGE) on April 23, 2025.

In addition, Binance Alpha will list Zora (ZORA) at 21:00 on the same day, and eligible Binance exchange users who have a purchase record on Alpha will receive an airdrop of 4276 ZORA tokens in their Alpha account by 21:10 on April 23, 2025.

 What is Zora?

Officially launched in 2021, Zora is a creator-focused NFT marketplace. On the platform, creators and collectors can set and negotiate the value of NFTs autonomously, thus facilitating decentralized market dynamics.

As it continues to grow, Zora begins its transformation into a social network and leverages blockchain technology to build a sustainable economy for creators. The network aims to provide a free platform for creators to promote creativity and financial stability.

Zora offers a new model for the creator economy. Content published on the platform can be a unique tradable token.

It is reported that when a new post is published on Zora, the platform will immediately create a liquidity pool for the token on Uniswap and allow anyone to trade the relevant token on the content page of Zora.

The creator's earnings will be measured by the trading volume, and the higher the trading volume, the more the creator earns. Zora offers different rewards for creators, collectors, developers, and platforms to monetize their trading activities.

As of now, Zora has a community of over 2 million creators and collectors, and has distributed over 3.5K ETH to creators as rewards.

Who started Zora? Zora development team and investments

The Zora Network was founded in 2020 by Jacob Horne and Slava Kim, both of whom have extensive experience in the cryptocurrency space.

• Jacob Horne, co-founder of Zora: has been a product manager at Coinbase for over 3 years;
• Zora Co-Founder Slava Kim: Slava Kim also worked with Jacob Horne at Coinbase, where he also worked as a product designer for over 3 years.

Led by the Zora development team, Zora has successfully raised $60 million through three rounds of funding, with investors including Coinbase Ventures (the former company of the two co-founders), Haun Capital, and Kindred Ventures.

 How does Zora work?

Zora's social network redefines content creation using a token-based system. Each piece of content (image, video, or text) is automatically minted with an ERC-20 token with a fixed supply of 1 billion units. As the original poster, the creator immediately receives 10 million tokens.

The value of the content is not determined by likes or algorithms, but by open market transactions. When someone else trades the coin you posted, you'll receive a portion of the trading fee through the Uniswap liquidity pool.

With the upgrade of Coins, these tokens are now instantly tradable on the Zora desktop platform and mobile app. In addition, when others trade the coins of the creator's post, the creator will receive a 50% transaction fee and a 50% LP fee, resulting in a direct source of income.

 What is ZORA Coin?

ZORA is the native cryptocurrency of the Zora network and was launched in April 2025.

However, its official website says that ZORA is only used for entertainment, and the holder does not enjoy any governance rights and does not have any equity relationship with Zora or its products.

Also, while Zora has its own Layer 2 network, ZORA coins are still launched on Base - probably for reasons similar to why PENGU was launched on Solana. Given that ZORA is a currency designed "just for entertainment" (similar to meme coins), launching it on Base will give it a wider user base and potential new users.

 ZORA tokenomics

The total supply of ZORA tokens is 10 billion, and its initial token distribution is as follows:

• Incentives (20%): This is future grants, public goods, hackathons, and other types of incentives decided by the Zora team. There is no lock-in restriction for this category.
• Airdrop (10%): Will be distributed to eligible community members, including creators, collectors, developers, and other contributors to the Zora brand. There is no lock-in restriction for this category.
•  Liquidity (5%): Used to provide liquidity to exchanges and market makers.
• Finance (20%): The ZORA assigned to the company is intended to align the company with the community to support and grow the Zora brand. Tokens in this category will be unlocked monthly for 48 months starting six months after the Token Generation Event (TGE).
• Teams (18.9%): Current and future teams will also receive ZORA allocations for their work on the Zora brand in the crypto creator economy. Tokens in this category will be unlocked monthly over 36 months, starting six months after TGE.
• Strategy Contributors (26.1%): Strategy Contributors are investors who provide advice and guidance to the Zora team on the development of Zora. As with team allocations, tokens in this category will be unlocked monthly over 36 months starting six months after TGE.

As it stands, ZORA's initial circulating supply is roughly 1 billion to 1.5 billion $ZORA (10-15% of the total supply), depending on the number of liquid tokens used by TGE. The remainder (Community Incentive Fund, Team, Strategic Contributors) is locked for at least 6 months, so they do not contribute to the initial circulating supply.

 Zora token airdrop

According to the official announcement, Zora will conduct an airdrop on April 23, and the official has completed two rounds of airdrop snapshots, and the times are as follows:

• Snapshot 1: 01/01/2020 to 03/03/2025
• Snapshot 2: 03/03/2025 to 04/20/2025

The Zora airdrop is designed to reward the community that has contributed to the growth of Zora, specifically the more than 2.4 million collectors and 618,000 creators. Snapshots not only recognize the contributions of loyal users, but also create opportunities for new users to join the ecosystem.

 Zora (ZORA) Future Outlook

At the heart of Zora's mission is to focus on reinvesting in its creative ecosystem, rather than extracting value. As on-chain social platforms have grown, Zora stands out for combining monetization, community governance, and creator tools in a single environment.

However, the native token launched by Zora is not a governance token, but a meme coin that Zora describes as having an "entertainment-centric" purpose. This means that instead of giving its holders control over the protocol, the token has more community-based elements, which is in line with the trend of recent NFT projects such as Pudgy Penguin (PENGU), Milady (CULT), and Magic Eden (ME).

 This has also caused a lot of controversy.

Crypto KOLs @basedkarbon noted, "Why should the team keep 65% when it's just for fun? Why do contributors take 26%? If it's useless, why set up a treasury?"

ZachXBT, a well-known on-chain investigator, also said that if you really want to make a meme coin for pure entertainment, you should adopt a "100% fair launch" model, otherwise the so-called meme coin positioning will lose its rationality.

For the ZORA coin, if Zora does not give it a corresponding value in the future, then it is likely that the cryptocurrency, like most meme coins, will have a hard time breaking out of the encirclement and being buried in the torrent of meme coins.In summary, Zora has evolved from a simple NFT marketplace to a social platform where user-created content (images, videos, or text) can be converted into tokens on the blockchain for monetization.

ZORA's native token, ZORA, will launch and airdrop on the Base network on April 23, 2025, but the cryptocurrency is entertainment-only and remains to be seen. In this article, you may already have some basic information about the project in order to make your own investment decisions.