BaseCamp 2025 — The Coining Stack: A Deep-Dive on Coining Mechanics

Cool. Sweet. Uh, okay. So, why coins? So, everyone in the room probably has been in crypto for a while, but I think what I'm going to say may sound uh obvious, but I think it's actually good to restate.

So, coins let you create open, instantly liquid, real-time markets for the thing that you're tokenizing. Um, so for us, like we're full-time focused on creators and their content and essentially all forms of media on the internet. And um we went through essentially a five-year journey of like maybe six or seven different structural iterations of different models. So like we started all the way at the other end like extreme end of the spectrum with one of one NFTts on Ethereum mainet and then over the past 5 years as we've been improving you know the overall user experience improving liquidity and like trying to find the most efficient market we found ourselves at instantly liquid real-time coins. Um, and from a user experience standpoint, the like what they uniquely unlock is that anyone on the internet can buy any amount at any time.

There's zero friction. And if you compare that to other forms of tokenization on the blockchain like NFTs, NFTs absolutely have a place. They can unlock value in very unique and distinct situations. But the user experience is very hard for someone to see it and then basically get that experience of I want to buy some of this right now. all the way from, you know, 10 cents up to millions of dollars.

Very hard to do that um in that particular model, which is why um we went all in on coins and why my general view is that like anything on the internet and then eventually in you know the real world quote unquote that will be tokenized will be using this model in one way or another. And then I think there's a whole bunch of different ways that you can um I think there'll be like nuanced mechanics and market models that expand on coins for different use cases for different things being tokenized and there'll be many different user experiences but I think the underlying model will be the same which is there is a there is a completely liquid um infinitely divisible coin that lives on chain in an automated market. Um, and why you do that is it unlocks a a real-time market. Like it's crypto is kind of like a printing press for markets. Like you get a full public open and adversarial market by just doing this one simple thing which is coining it.

What type of things do you think are going to be tokenized? What's going to have a coin?

I think I think like literally anything that has some nonzero value will eventually find its way on chain. Um why we spend so much time on you know content and creators is that we we all spend a ridiculous amount of time every single day on social media apps and they are powered by ad exchanges in the back background which are essentially a form of attention market and I think uh using crypto we can help one accelerate and unlock much more value from that attention but also then route it directly into the hands of creators and users. So for us, I kind of view um creators and content as kind of like books to Amazon. Like Amazon started with a very specific uh user experience and they were like a book like you know the first online bookstore for many years and that unlocked a whole new universe of things that could be tokenized in the future. That's kind of like how I view creators and content, which is there's, you know, millions of pieces of content being created every day, billions of people consuming it, a lot of value being created, and then you get this like unique market power that comes from doing that.

And in consumer products that have some form of tokenization in there, the magic moment for people using them who are going to join these social products is when they first earn and see those fees come to them extremely fast, right? So trading fee that may come from trading fees, that may come from a token appreciation, but I have seen time and time again as folks are onboarding into this space, especially the social version of it, you know, they're listening, it's cool, there's ownership, and the second they actually create something and then there's earnings streaming back to them or there's a price chart that's really starting to show the value of the attention and information that they're creating, that is when they're hooked, right? right that it really only needs to happen to you once before all of a sudden that is like an app that you will come back to again and again and again because there's really just no experience that's quite like that.

Yeah. So um we originally started at the the post level um and before we had pairing there was basically this inherent issue which is every new post was was dilutive. So I I like to call like the millennia problem which was like you know Trump launched his coin then Melania came out both got nuked and it was like a net value destruction event for a whole bunch of other reasons as well but like that dilution issue um was part of it and we saw that play out on Zoro which is people would post it would be tokenized for the first time and then the market would come in and buy it and then they'd post again and then people are like wait like where what coin should I buy this is getting complicated. Um but I think two things can be true. One is traders and you know fans and audiences want to have just a single coin where they can you know if they can just like support the creator at the creator level but at the same time it's extremely valuable to use the market as essentially an algorithm to capture the value of an individual piece of content.

So for like another way to say that is sometimes um people will have like a gigafiral post that goes extremely vi you know that goes very viral and not everyone wants to buy that creator coin. They they don't even know who that creator is but they know this post is going to go very viral. So you get the granularity of being able to trade and speculate at the content level and also have this aggregation level of the creator which is like well I really like this person. I like the content they're creating. I want to support them in the long term.

And this pairing model essentially allows the creator coin to aggregate the present and future value of all of their posts. And then we just took that exact same model one level up the system, which is okay, the Zora um the Zora token is basically aggregating the value of all present and future creators and all of their content. So what this means is is that you can basically trade, speculate and support at any level of the system be it an individual post an indivual individual creator or the entirety of like the network that we're building. And this like most of the UX from this is completely abstracted because of the magic of routing. So and like how onchain markets work.

So, we have people who just come to a post or a creator coin. You can spend ETH, you can spend USDC. Um, and this routing happens in the background. Like, just because you don't own one of these tokens doesn't mean you can't buy them. It's like a it's all all magic basically.

One really interesting thing is once you've tokenized a creator or like a person, they can now bring that to any platform that integrates that and then anything new that they create will acrue value to that coin. And that's like a very very unique thing to have in the ecosystem where no matter where you're creating, no matter which system that you're adding value into that's acrewing back to that single coin when you do it and that's a very very powerful model that we're seeing.

Yeah, exactly. Like um I wrote a a blog post on paragraph which is a independent writing platform um kind of like a Substack onchain native and my post there was tokenized on paragraph but it was paired with my creatorcoin. So basically my creative coin is able to aggregate across um every platform that I want to use. Um and then I don't have to fragment my holders or the value. It's all in the one spot which I think is like super powerful.

And the other thing that's cool is when you're bootstrapping like a brand new social product, um a lot of times you have a chicken and egg problem where it's like let's say you're building like some type of social feed. It's like well do I get creators first or do I get consumers of that content first? How do I actually like break that loop? Well, the thing with tokenized content is you can just post it in the feed and that token is now available everywhere within your product and without. So all of a sudden you can have folks just start going viral even if you have nobody actually looking at your feed yet because that content that coin is available in any product that is indexing and listing uh that content effectively.

And so what's really cool is like you actually have a strategic way to break the onboarding loop for folks. a creator can just onboard, they can just post, they can actually see their stuff go viral. You didn't even have to build up a full feed of consumers on that content yet. So now you're immediately like, okay, we have a strategy for breaking the loop, give people the magic moment, onboard creators, and then eventually you can build up the other side. And I think that's a really cool thing uh that tokenized content has as an advantage over uh traditional social products where you don't get that off-platform viral activity coming back into your own platform.

So all of that is five years in the making but in the last few months. Um curious Jacob if you can share anything that's coming up soon.

Yes. Uh where so we're always trying to build like the most liquid markets possible. So, we've got some um I think they might be rolled out in the next couple days, but we've got some new fee improvements um that will be going live in the market uh at the app level. Uh we've got um some new creator tools that are going to be focused around how do we push this pairing model further. So, right now every post is like paired and creatorcoin, but we see a lot of cases of posts on Zora individually go viral and get remixed.

So, how can we bring pairing to like the post level and have this kind of like native feedback loop? Um and then uh yeah like uh for creators like we've got you can post short short form video, you can post images, maybe eventually you'll be out of stream. Um and then uh I guess at the market level as well, you know, there's a lot of um early activity and sniping that occurs in like the first block of um new coin launches. And I don't think that's actually necessarily bad. like they're essentially like um programmatic uh you know uh traders that are helping in price discovery, but I think there are ways that we can route some of that excess value captured back to creators and help um form a better price early on.

So that's something that's very top of mind. Um and I'm going to stop giving away alpha after that point because I could just keep rambling. But yeah, that's

we're taking notes over here. So just keep going. Keep going.

Amazing.

Plenty more to come. We have integrated uh post coins on the base app and John you want to share some of the learnings that

uh yes do you want to go okay I'll walk through some slides here coin new content is really like at the core of the base app that you'll see in the feed so by default all posts are tradable uh the reason why we think it's so important is like so the base app is trying to uh build and make an onchain economy grow a lot faster and this type of coining is really firstparty value creation that then flows through the rest of the ecosystem. Okay, so we're unlocking value using these tokens where it was not priced before. There was no price discovery happening for your content. But your content has value, right? Like your posts are assets.

And this is taking that to like the little literal extreme to unlock value that then flows through the mini app ecosystem that flows through payments that flows through additional trading. And so for us, we look at this as like the the first party brand new value creation that will flow through and feed everything else, which is kind of like what's happening in traditional social apps, but it's a little less explicit and we can actually bring that directly down to like the value or like monetary level. Um, okay. So, so what is like really happening? I I would if I was titling this slide, I would titled it as like know your audience uh as a creator.

And uh what's really happening is like creators uh they come into a product like the base app and they post and it feels very much so like a traditional social media experience and we're tokenizing that content for them. These creators would not have had a way previously to access this very very valuable and growing audience with which is traders. So like as this overall trend of of hyper financialization plays out, the trading segment is growing a lot, right? That's everything from protraders to also like much much more casual traders. That is going to be a hugely growing segment.

And traditional creators don't know how to access this. How do I actually like reach that that audience? And so when creators post on the base app or in the Zora app, we're tokenizing the content and that gives the traders these like new attention markets to trade. Uh, one thing Jacob says that I really like, I'm stealing this from you just so you know, is like uh when these content uh these when this tokenized content goes out in the short term it is an attention market. Okay, so it's just kind of like pricing the virality.

In the long term, it's an information market. So if you think about just like all the posts on like Twitter or something, well the long-term value of probably many of those posts is like quite low. Some will be probably zero, others might be like quite low. But then there's actually a ton that are nonzero and that is like a very amazing zero to one innovation that just your content going out there can go through price discovery and get to an actual value at the end of the day. So creators they post on the base app they post on Zora we tokenize the content for them.

It gives new attention markets to trade to traders and then as those traders are interacting with the content, we are streaming trading fees directly back to them which gives them that magic moment, that aha moment of instant earnings. And I have just seen like I've never seen a magic moment work for onboarding people like that. Uh I've never seen something like quite as powerful as that. And so one thing I think about all the time is like the Facebook uh social network had I think seven

seven friends in 10 days was like the magic retention moment and we try to think like what is that going to be for us? I'm like is it like you earned your first $10 in 10 minutes or something like that and I think it makes a lot of sense to start to think on those terms uh in consumer social going forward uh with this technology of tokenization. Okay, this is an interesting one. I would probably title this like uh like the signature of virality. So on the left side uh that is what a viral Tik Tok post looks like.

Okay. So on the y- axis on the left side you'll see likes per hour and on the x-axis on the left side is is time. And so early on in the life cycle of a viral post you're not really getting a lot of likes per hour, right? Like the algorithmic feed has not picked you up yet. It hasn't started distributing you all over the place.

And then you do start going viral and all of a sudden likes per hour goes really really high. you're getting like maximum attention at the like synchronously at that point and then over time that's going to kind of level back down and then level off at some amount. Well, I think that actually looks quite similar to what a viral coin post looks like. So here's an example of a post that was made on on the base app and you can see it looks a lot like this shape and the maximum virality was in the attention market was happening in this period uh where it's like doing its initial price discovery and then eventually it settles out at some like value that was found. So before really getting into the tokenization of content, I would look at a like a time signature of a price chart like this and I would think like oh that that like failed that didn't make it.

that that wasn't like a good thing that happened here. But now I'm like, "Oh, wow." Like this post actually generated like a great attention spike, right? And the trader audience that was there was able to actually like have a great fun game to play doing the price discovery on that. And the creator who created that that attention spike for them to to have, they made a bunch of money on the trading fees that were streamed back to them for that.

So all of a sudden you have to just think about creating content for this growing trader audience that is looking for those type of like maximum attention uh shelling points effectively uh to to organize around. But as we go more into like consumer consumer behavior like I think traders is going to grow a lot but how many people are we really going to get doing like pro style trading where you're looking at like a price chart from second to second. I would guess it's actually probably more than you think. I actually think that segment is going to grow a ton. But I think that there is a huge need for like the mass market retail customer, right, that wants to part use your social apps and things.

Um, and I think what the value prop looks like to them is that they really want to do what's what's on the screen right here. They see a piece of content that was like Brian Armstrong making a tweet and you can see this person said replied to it and said buying in at 57 likes. Uh, and then you can see that that post, uh, it went to 5,000 likes. And because this was done, uh, on the X app, there was no way to actually cut that curator who discovered that content early, who gave it a like, who gave it a a comment. There was no way to cut them into the value chain and actually reward them for being early and helping surface that great content.

And I think over time what we'll be able to do as we consumerify these behaviors more is like actually deliver on that value proposition where you're just using social products. Uh you actually will be making purchases trades but it's going to feel just like liking stuff or retweeting stuff. It's going to feel just like interacting with social media but the value is going to be moving behind the scenes in such a way that you're able to capture some of it through the system that you're using. And I think that's a very very cool thing where uh even if you're just like scrolling the feed and and liking stuff, you are you actually have an opportunity to to be cut into the value chain for that contribution to the social network. Uh and then finally uh so I'll touch back on that point that I mentioned before like I think this stuff is really going to continue to be rolled out quite quick.

Like maybe you're new to tokenization in the social world or the content world. Um but it's probably one of the most powerful drivers that we have seen for like go to market and for retention. And I think um Jacob, this was another I think tweet that you made recently was like um a lot of social companies probably went really hard on AI and not hard enough yet on crypto from the consumer social perspective. Um, but I do think you're going to see things more like these integrations where on the top that's uh a music coupre coins where he's tokenizing the individual songs. And then here you can set up coin pairing um and bring your creator coin with you to other apps.

So everything that you create and and and contribute through that app acrru value back to your same coin and gets more people than following you. By following I say being your holders and really bringing those relationships with you from app to app. So huge opportunity for builders when engaging with the community like in general on social apps uh and in your own apps um to to use the power of tokens for these go to market and retention levers. Amazing.