📊 Fantasy Launches Clout. SocialFi platform Fantasy debuted Clout, a new rewards system that incentivizes crypto commentary on X. Users earn points for quality posts, with top scorers eligible for $10k in ETH prizes each month.
🎴 Ubisoft Brings Might & Magic Onchain. Gaming giant Ubisoft is teaming up with Immutable to launch Might & Magic: Fates, a free-to-play card battler on iOS and Android. Players can collect and trade cards, with gameplay powered by Immutable’s L2 tech.
⚖️ Yuga Labs Wants Their Due. Bored Apes creators Yuga Labs are moving to seize nearly $400k in crypto from Jeremy Cahen, a.k.a. Pauly0x, alleging he dodged a court-ordered payout tied to their trademark victory over the Ryder Ripps BAYC parody project.
Zora is the big topic this week, with the $ZORA airdrop now live and debate swirling on social media around the project’s new content coins paradigm.
If you’re still catching up: content coins are are fungible tokens tied to individual pieces of media—e.g. a photo, a video, etc.
Ultimately, they offer a more liquid and market-friendly way to collect media compared to NFTs. And for creators, they present a path to earn directly from trading fees based on how much attention a given post generates.
The onchain activity stats here suggest something’s starting to click.
Yet the growing momentum has also sparked a considerable wave of skepticism. Is this positive-sum innovation? Or just a clever remix of existing memecoin meta games?
People have made good points on both sides, and there’s a lot to parse in this discourse. Below is a synthesis of what I see as some of the strongest arguments for and against content coins.
🪙 The Case for Coins
At a high level, proponents believe Zora is unlocking a long-overdue feature of the internet: turning attention into native market signals. Likes and shares have always been soft currencies. Content coins make them hard.
That said, the main pro-coins arguments I've seen are as follows:
1) Creator monetization without ads
The creator economy is built on indirect revenue paths—sponsorships, ad rev shares, brand deals. Content coins offer something more direct: earn fees as your content gains traction. It’s not huge money for most users, but even small wins (e.g. $5–$50 per post) already eclipse what some people make from millions of views on Instagram or X.
2) The market becomes the algorithm
Instead of relying on opaque recommendation feeds, content coins let markets surface what’s “worth seeing.” If someone’s willing to pay for a moment, that’s a signal—and one that centralized platforms don’t control.
3) Everything becomes collectible
Most posts online get consumed, scrolled past, and forgotten. Coins let people express appreciation in a new way—not just with a like, but with ownership. Some view it as digital patronage. Others see it as speculative trading. Either way, it creates an economy around media that was previously valueless.
4) Lower stakes, more play
Unlike launching a traditional token, coining a post requires no pitch deck, roadmap, or community building. It reduces the mental overhead. That can lead to more people experimenting, minting things they otherwise wouldn’t. In this view, more coining means more cultural exploration.
5) Media provenance
In a world where memes get endlessly copied, content coins offer a way to anchor the original and create a canonical token that can later plug into broader ecosystems, e.g. remix protocols, media DAOs, LP pairings with community tokens, etc.
❎ The Coins Skeptic POV
On the flip side, we've seen critics argue the current coins system feels noisy, overly financialized, and reactive to the 2024 memecoin mania. Some of the main arguments people have surfaced here include:
1) The aura is off
Where NFTs often feel like cultural artifacts—expressive, programmable, scarce—coins can feel thin. A fungible token with a picture attached won't resonate for some NFT diehards accordingly. Consider fully onchain NFTs, where the smart contract is the art and vice versa. The aura springs directly from the digital objects here. Contrast that with coins, where the aura feels fractionalized or diluted.
2) Too commodifying
Critics point out that slapping a market onto every post risks commodifying culture to the point of triviality, to the point that soon every piece of content may feel like a penny stock. The fun can quickly turn into fatigue this way.
3) Misaligned expectations
Because we’re still at the start of the memecoin age, many traders treat content coins like projects and expect roadmaps, engagement, and value accrual. That can put creators in an awkward position, e.g. if you mint a one-off piece of content and suddenly strangers are aggressively demanding to know how you plan to get the coin price up, etc.
4) Oversaturation
Yes, coining is easier than deploying your own token. But with that ease comes noise. The barrier to tokenization is now so low that it can be hard to sort signal from spam. Not everything needs to be a market, and flooding the zone could dull the meaning of what we mint.
5) NFTs offer more expressive power
ERC20s are good at liquidity. But NFTs remain the superior format for programmable media. You can create an NFT as a dynamic game asset, an interactive virtual land plot, an evolving artwork, or all of these things simultaneously. Coins don’t offer the same narrative or experiential potential, at least not yet.
🔮 Final Thoughts
In a sense, what Zora’s done with coins is reframe token deployment from a developer-oriented activity to a user-level action streamlined as posting. It's like a UI/UX abstraction layer over ERC20s, and if it works, it can increasingly shift how people interact with crypto altogether.
The big question for now, then, is if this model can make inroads in the mainstream, e.g. among Instagram users etc., along with more inroads with crypto-natives.
Another deeper question is what kind of speculation will this coins model consolidate around: degen FOMO loops, or lightweight patronage plays? The outcome here will increasingly hinge on norms and tooling.
Zora will need to continue to hone in and nail these elements as time goes on. But it's also worth noting that Zora's coins system is barely two months old; they'll undoubtedly keep iterating for fine-tuning.
Personally, I can see both sides of the debate here and sympathize with many of the points above. I'm somewhere in the middle. If you're still undecided, the best thing you can do is create and collect a few coins and see what you think. Maybe it's not for you, or maybe you'll love it. Either way, it's worth exploring firsthand to try for yourself.
Unlock the power of Unichain – a fast, decentralized Ethereum Layer 2 network built to be the home for DeFi and cross-chain liquidity. To bridge tokens to Unichain and start swapping today, get started with Uniswap Labs' web app or mobile wallet.
Not financial or tax advice. Bankless content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this newsletter to products we use. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless team holds crypto assets.
