Behind the monthly trading volume exceeding 27.5 million USD: How does the 0x protocol build a liquidity flywheel for Zora?

Author: 0x protocol

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

highlights

  • New Creator Economy: The Zora platform will tokenize each post and creator profile with posts and creator tokens, empowering a new creator economy that enables on-chain content monetization and new ways of interaction.
  • Unified user experience: By integrating Zora, the Base App allows creators to easily tokenize posts, and users can also perform various operations such as trading creator tokens and post tokens directly within a feature-rich interface.
  • First-class trading pair coverage and low latency: The 0x Swap API provides seamless trading support for Zora tokens in the Base App, enabling Zora token trading through advanced multi-hop routing technology, and ensuring that new tokens are immediately tradable on-chain with real-time indexing functionality, while always maintaining low latency.
  • Rapid Growth: The Base App launched in July, bringing explosive growth to Zora. The daily token creation surged from 6,000 at the beginning of July to nearly 50,000 by the end of the month. The 0x protocol has supported Zora in completing a total of 352,000 token exchange transactions, with a total transaction volume of 59 million USD.

What is Zora?

Zora is a rapidly growing on-chain social platform aimed at creating a brand new creator economy model.

Zora transforms posts into tradable ERC-20 tokens and pairs them with creator tokens. This tokenized on-chain social platform thus creates a flywheel effect, linking token issuance, content creation, and liquidity. Creators can earn transaction fee revenue, while fans and traders can invest in the creator's content output.

Source: Zora

In this article, we will explore how Zora empowers a new type of on-chain creator economy, and how 0x customizes routing architecture for the Zora token to support this economic system.

market pain points

The traditional creator economy is fundamentally limited because both creators and fans lack ownership and monetization methods.

  • Platform control channels: Creators rely on centralized platforms to reach audiences and generate income. These platforms extract enormous value without providing ownership or true revenue sharing.
  • Engagement ≠ Ownership: Fans may be highly invested, but they cannot directly participate in the creator's success. There is no direct way to invest in the creator or their content.
  • Monetization models are limited: Profits rely either on advertising or on tipping and subscriptions. Both of these models are walled garden types with excessively high commissions, leaving creators with only a small share. Additionally, the platform lacks a native value discovery mechanism, which means it cannot measure the value of content, nor can it highlight the value created by creators.

The current social ecosystem can capture attention but fails to convert it into value that creators or fans can own and trade. Meanwhile, content, creators, and users are fragmented across different platforms.

Today, we are beginning to see the emergence of new types of social infrastructure driven by open and permissionless blockchain technology, such as Zora and Farcaster. These platforms not only prioritize user ownership and composability but are also actively exploring new ways for on-chain content monetization and interaction. Applications like Base App are integrating various platforms into one, providing users with a unified and engaging experience.

Zora + Base App: Empowering On-Chain Creator Economy

Zora aims to address these issues by establishing a creator economy centered around content and identity tokenization. Each time a user publishes content on-chain, a post token is generated and linked to the creator token. This system establishes a direct connection between individual content and the creator's broader body of work.

Each creator token will then be paired with the platform's native ZORA token, forming a multi-layered token economy. Fans can invest in individual pieces of content and participate in the creator's growth journey. Creators can earn 1% of the revenue from each transaction, and this mechanism directly converts engagement and mental share into economic returns, while 50% of the total supply of creator tokens will be gradually released to creators over five years.

Zora's token model creates revenue for creators and their supporters by incentivizing user participation, empowering value discovery, and promoting engagement in token activities, thereby rewarding early supporters and long-term content creators. Both creators and fans can easily get involved through the Zora application.

Zora's token mechanism is expected to create a self-reinforcing flywheel effect. The more posts there are, the more transactions occur, which in turn attracts more attention and brings in more users.

But to get this flywheel truly spinning, Zora needs distribution channels. It needs to reach users where they are. Thus, the Base App was born.

In July of this year, Coinbase launched a fully functional new wallet integrated with SocialFi applications and directly incorporated the decentralized NFT marketplace Zora into its social feed. Users do not need to access Zora directly or switch back and forth between multiple applications and platforms; Zora is integrated into a single feed along with platforms like Farcaster and Bankr.

Through the Base App supported by Zora, creators can easily tokenize posts and directly profit through tips and sales, while users can also instantly trade creator tokens and post tokens, all of which can be done without leaving the information flow interface.

However, to achieve this, the tokens need to have liquidity and be easy to trade.

Zora liquidity ecosystem powered by 0x

One of the main challenges facing the Zora token ecosystem is the pairing of post tokens with creator tokens, while creator tokens are paired with ZORA tokens. This token mechanism makes it difficult for users to trade these tokens directly, and it also complicates the ability of routers to effectively route transactions among various tokens.

For example, if a user wants to directly exchange USDC for Postcoin, they must:

  1. Exchange USDC for ZORA
  2. Exchange ZORA for creator tokens
  3. Exchange creator tokens for post tokens

At the same time, the Zora token has also triggered an unprecedented surge in the creation of tokens and liquidity pools.

Users need to be able to easily trade and access deep liquidity for post tokens and creator tokens, and each new token pool generated by a post must be able to be exchanged instantly.

Without the seamless transaction execution services provided by the Base App and other applications, users will find it difficult to acquire these assets, and the flywheel effect will not gain momentum. This is where 0x comes into play.

As part of the integration with Zora, the Base App team needs to fully support the Zora token exchange feature within the application from day one, while maintaining speed and reliability. The Base App team needs to meet the dynamic demands for Zora token support, so they chose to collaborate with the 0x protocol, with which we have a long-standing partnership to achieve this goal.

advanced multi-hop routing

Before the launch of creator tokens, all post tokens were paired with ZORA or WETH. The pairing of creator tokens with post tokens effectively breaks the traditional routing model.

To address this issue, the 0x protocol has built customized support features for Zora tokens to manage all newly created tokens, thereby determining the optimal trading path without affecting latency.

"The complexity of pricing and routing is a very unique feature of Zora. We had to build a customized integration system to achieve the conversion from any token to post tokens." — Sav Dontamsetti, Senior Software Engineer at 0x

To support users in trading Zora tokens with any other tokens, the Swap API adopts advanced multi-hop routing technology, utilizing ZORA and creator tokens as intermediary tokens to provide the broadest trading pair support for exchanging Zora tokens.

real-time token index

In addition to the complexity brought by creator tokens, each post will also create a new funding pool. This means:

  • Tens of thousands of tokens and liquidity pools created every day, reaching the scale of the entire Solana ecosystem.
  • Real-time monitoring of the pool is required to enable instant swapping.
  • With the surge in liquidity pools, efficient management of the new liquidity pools is needed to reduce the impact of delays, thus meeting users' demand for fast exchanges.

"Zora tokens triggered a surge in liquidity pools. The challenge at that time was to support the creation of such large-scale funds while maintaining low latency. To achieve this, we had to enable the backend system to quickly extract on-chain events for instant routing and swapping, while efficiently determining which liquidity pools needed to be included."

——0x Product Manager Eric Wong

After this customized development, the Swap API can now provide first-class exchange path optimization services for Zora tokens, with the widest coverage of trading pairs and the lowest latency. For example, when users purchase post tokens using USDC, the 0x protocol will automatically complete the full-chain transaction from USDC to ZORA tokens, then to the associated creator tokens, and finally redeem them for post tokens. Users can trade at lightning speed at the very moment when creator tokens and post tokens go live on the chain.

flywheel in operation

Through the 0x protocol, the Base App is able to fully support the Zora token exchange function and is officially launched. After the launch of the application, the daily token creation quantity on the Base chain surged from about 6,000 at the beginning of July to nearly 50,000 by the end of the month. This is the first time that the Base chain has surpassed Solana in daily token issuance. Overall, the Zora platform has cumulatively minted over 1.8 million tokens for approximately 200,000 creators.

The value growth for Zora creators is also significant: daily creator rewards increased from less than $1,000 at the beginning of July to consistently over $10,000 by the end of July, with a daily peak reward of nearly $375,000.

The Swap API has facilitated over $7 million in Zora coin swaps through the Base App. A total of $59 million in Zora coin trading volume has been processed by the Swap API, involving 352,000 transactions, with July having the highest monthly trading volume at $27.5 million.

Zora's creator economy marks a key evolution in the Web3 ecosystem, where financial identity and social identity intertwine, and value flow and cultural dissemination advance in synergy. It profoundly reconstructs the way value is created, discovered, and distributed in the online world, and we look forward to the developments that follow.

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