Solana and Base founders start a debate: Does content on Zora have "fundamental value"?

Author: Fairy, ChainCatcher

The founders of the two major public chains are just facing each other, and Crypto Twitter is full of gunpowder.

A heated debate surrounding "creator tokens" has ignited the crypto community. The founders of Base and Solana, the two major public chains, rarely went to the court in person, and they faced off head-on around the two platforms, ZORA and Pump.fun.

What exactly happened to this confrontation? Let's start at the beginning.

The tipping point of the controversy, Sterling Crispin's questioning

This "verbal battle" in the crypto circle started from Del Complex researcher Sterling Crispin's public questioning of Zora.

Zora is a Base ecosystem on-chain social networking platform that tokenizes user profiles and posts to help creators monetize content directly.

But in Sterling's view, Zora is nothing more than an old bottle of new wine. He bluntly said that the vast majority of tokens issued on automated market makers (AMMs), with extremely low liquidity and exponential price curves, are still "shitcoins that have changed their skin".

In a debate with community users, he cited Pump.fun as an example: "The median result of ERC20 tokens on Pump.fun is not underperforming the market, but directly zeroing." ”

In the face of this firepower question,Base founder Jesse Pollak quickly turned into defense mode. He said on the X platform: "I think you're wrong. Content is valuable, and creators are valuable. He further emphasized that "treating assets issued on Pump.fun and Zora as equivalent is itself a logical fallacy." Not all tokens are the same, and fundamentals matter. ”

However,Jesse's "Pump.fun ≠ Zora" speech quickly stimulated the emotions of another big guy - Solana founder Toly.

Solana founder interjected, and the war escalated

Solana founder Toly quickly jumped into the debate, retweeting Jesse's tweet on X and sarcastically saying, "lol wut? Does the coin on Zora have any interest in the creator's future cash flow? ”

(Note: "lol wut" is English Internet slang, with a slight disdain or pretending to be confused, often used to express disagreement or ridicule of the other person's point of view.) ）

After that, the battle between the two founders officially began:

Round 1: Does the content have "basic value"?

Jesse is adamant that content itself has fundamental value.

Toly asked: How to prove that it has basic value? Do token holders have the right to share in the content's future advertising revenue?

Jesse responded: Advertising is just a way to monetize. Like a painting, it still has value even if no one pays for the ticket.

Toly continues to onslaught: By this logic, is it a good thing for retail investors for creators to dump Zora tokens? Because retail investors can buy below the basic value of content?

Jesse tried to explain: There are many types of tokens on Zora, but they all have one thing in common: they are all a repetitive, infinite game in which the actions of participants affect the operation of the entire system.

Round 2: The competition was fruitless, and they did not give in to each other

Toly doesn't buy it, and sneers: it sounds like their "basic value" is zero.

Jesse insists on his own opinion: if you want to believe that content has zero value, then you are free. But I think the content itself is very valuable, and we can build new systems to give that value back to hundreds of millions of creators.

Toly drops the final blow: Then you go and convince coin holders to let Coinbase use the profits to sweep away those Zora tokens that are close to zero, because they are "below the basic value of the content."

This conversation is like a primary school student arguing, refusing to admit defeat to each other, and finally to Jesse ended hastily with an "OK."

Interestingly, toIy himself has been heavily touting Solana ecosystem meme coins over the past few years , but this time to enhance his persuasiveness, he also added: "I have been saying for years that meme coins and NFTs are digital garbage and have no intrinsic value at all. Just like unboxing items in mobile games, people spend up to $150 billion a year on mobile games. ”

Zora's "Pull Show"

The Zora project, the focus of this "war of words", not only has the platform of Base founder Jesse Pollak, but the token $ZORA has soared by 883% in the past month. This wave of market is driven by both the benefits of Base App's integrated content tokenization function and the strong assistance of Binance's launch of the ZORA/USDT perpetual contract.

Yesterday The number of creators on the Zora platform reached 21,478, including 12,292 new creators, and the number of tokens issued reached a record high.

However, on-chain data gives another interpretation. According to the analysis of on-chain analyst Aunt AI, in terms of spot, Coinbase is the platform with the largest trading volume of the token, with a 24-hour turnover of $82.6 million; In terms of contracts, Binance's 24-hour trading volume is as high as $1.354 billion, which is 16.4 times that of spot.

It said that ZORA seems to have stepped out of an independent altcoin market, but there is not even a single transaction record of more than $500,000 on the chain recently, which is suspected to be the funds in the CEX.

Source: Aunt AI

The fierce confrontation between Jesse and toly not only reveals the profound disagreement in the crypto world on the nature of "creator tokens" but also reflects the intricate competition and clash of ideas between the public chain camps.

There is no winner in this debate, just as the world's struggle for the definition of value is always a fierce game between ideals and reality, belief and doubt.