Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs, virtual worlds, and more!

Dear Bankless Nation, 

Enjoy Ethereum. That’s the Zora way. 

For those newer here, Zora’s the onchain frontier for creatives, where you can mint and collect art, memes, short films, written articles, you name it. 

A lot of really cool stuff’s happened at Zora since I wrote about it last in November 2022, so let’s zoom back in and get you up to speed on the pulse of Zora as it stands today! 

-WMP

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Refresher: What’s Zora?

Zora is an open-source decentralized creativity protocol (also a hyperstructure) that lets users create, buy, and sell NFTs however they see fit. It boasts a range of do-it-yourself creator tools, including Editions (ERC-721 1/Xs), Multi-editions (multiple ERC-1155 1/Xs on a single contract), and Drops (ERC-721 1/1/X mints, Art Blocks style). It also offers Nouns Builder, a service for customizable Nounish DAO deployments ⌐◧-◧

Zora V3, the project’s core NFT marketplace protocol, is known for its composable, immutable, and universally accessible architecture. It features a modular design that allows for continuous deployments of new versions and market modules by the Zora DAO, and it bears an in-built Finder’s Fee system that incentivizes discovering potential NFT buyers, which in turn encourages builders and curators to integrate Zora. 

Notably, the V3 protocol is also very optimized for gas efficiency and is a one-way deployment, ensuring uninterrupted onchain market functionalities even if platforms built atop it go down. 

The Pulse of Zora

Zora is one of the most popular NFT protocols in action today. According to the “Zora Creator Toolkit” Dune dashboard by Panda Jackson, a snapshot of Zora’s current activity stats looks like so to date:

• Total NFT Contracts Deployed — 11,526 collections (8,520 fixed-size collections and 3,006 open-edition collections)

• Number of Tokens Minted Across All Contracts — 3,608,283 NFTs

• Total Addresses That Have Minted an Edition — 807,714 collectors 

• Unique Creator + Repeat Creator — 8,406 artists

• Total Primary ETH Volume — 3,524 ETH

• Total ETH Secondary Sales — 144,588 ETH

• Median Pricing Across All Contracts — 0.0069 ETH

What’s New?

Over the past six months, Zora’s rolled out over a dozen new offerings and resources that have made the project’s infra suite that much more interesting and empowering. Some of these new features include:

• 🔥 Burn to Redeem — A tool for creating a new edition with a burn-to-redeem period or adding a burn period to an already existing ERC-1155 collection. 

• ✍️ Text NFTs — A functionality that supports minting text, e.g. PDFs, into NFTs; great for creative writers and beyond. 

• 💬 Mint with comment — A feature that allows minters to leave a comment onchain when minting an NFT on Zora. 

• 🧑‍💻️ Activity tab — You can now track mint info and comments as they stream in from a collection’s “Activity” tab. 

• 👋 Zora Profiles — This new functionality lets you personalize your profile on the Zora app with links + custom fonts, colors, and beyond. 

• 📖 Zora Zine — The Zora Zine publication launched its first print magazine as a redeemable NFT on 4/20/2023; a promotion of onchain journalism, the issue boasts over 60 contributors and explores internet and crypto culture. 

• 🛒 Collect from secondary — Missed a mint on Zora? Collection pages now support secondary listings and will let collectors readily buy in at whatever the current floor price is. 

• ⏺️ Personalization — Creators and projects can now customize their mint pages on Zora to create a bespoke collecting experience for their fans. 

• 👁 Zora Feed — The new Zora home feed displays live public mints across Zora, Manifold, and Foundation, so you can more easily track new projects in one place. 

• 0⃣️ Zero mint fees — Zora moved away from a creator fee to a small collector fee per-mint system, so minting on Zora is now that much cheaper for artists. 

• 🎴 ERC1155 Multi-editions — This tool lets creators produce multiple editions within a single ERC-1155 collection, offering greater flexibility over the organization and release of their projects. 

• 🔄 Auto reserve — This new functionality lets artists automatically receive a set number of tokens per mint, ensuring they can capture value from their project post-mint in the face of uncertain NFT royalties. 

• 📝 Zora Zine Style Guide — Letting my inner English major nerd out here, but the Zora Zine team recently open-sourced their style guide and it’s good; if you’re keen on writing more in crypto, I’d definitely take a look. 

• 📺 New video player — Zora also now offers a new video player system directly on projects’ mint pages. 

Recent Notable Mints

These days there’s always something interesting minting on Zora. To give you a sense of the range of projects we’ve seen using the protocol lately, here are some examples of recent mints:

• 🐍 The Basilisk Registry — Deployed by conceptual artist SHL0Ms, this multi-edition “choose your own adventure” collection let minters register as a friend or foe of AI. Could come in handy down the road once a superintelligence comes onchain…

• 😶‍🌫️ Rainbow Finiliar — A special edition Finiliar dropped in collaboration with the Rainbow Wallet team that can be used to dynamically (and cutely) track the current ETH gas price. 

• 🔮 Mantras — A commemorative mint to celebrate the launch of Gemma, a new web3 art fund led by Eileen Isagon Skyers and Lindsay Howard. 

• 🪞 Mirror Zorb — A mint to commemorate Mirror’s added support for Zora NFT embeds in Mirror articles. 

• 🎮 Grimes Gen 1 Avatar — A free mint and game-centric collection by artist and musician Grimes that saw over 78,000 mints during its primary sale.

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Zooming Out

As Zora continues to push the boundaries of onchain creativity, it’s an exciting hub to explore for anyone interested in the crossroads of art and culture on Ethereum. Yet the frontier doesn’t stop there. Zora’s also in the middle of devising its launch strategy with regard to layer-two (L2) scaling solutions, so expect more news there going forward. If you think Zora’s activity levels are impressive now, just wait for the potential minting boom we may see once the protocol arrives on its first L2s! 

Action steps

• Explore Zora: set up your Zora profile and dive in 👀

• Catch up on my previous write-up: Keeping up with the Nouns 💥

Author Bio

William M. Peaster is the creator of Metaversal — a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He’s also a senior writer for the main Bankless newsletter and a contributor to NFT curation platform JPG!

A Bankless Citizen ⚑ turned $264 into $6,077 last year. A 22x ROI 🚀 in a bear market!

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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter 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 I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.