“The 0x team is at the forefront of best execution and routing for the largest apps in the industry. The fact that they were first movers to routing through $ZORA and Creator coins is a testament to their ability to execute on their mission to help tokens flow freely. It’s been a huge unlock for the powerful system we have designed and for traders who want access to Zora creators and their content. I’m excited to see first class support for Zora coins in their latest update and for further collaboration in the future.”

- Jacob Horne, Co-Founder of Zora

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Highlights

• A new creator economy: Zora’s Post and Creator coins tokenize every post and creator profile, empowering a new creator economy that enables novel ways to monetize and engage with content onchain.
• Unifying the user experience: By integrating Zora, Base App makes it easy for creators to easily tokenize their posts, users to trade Creator and Post coins, and much more - all directly in one powerful interface.
• Best-in-class pair coverage and latency: 0x Swap API powers seamless trading for Zora coins in the Base App with advanced multi-hop routing to support Zora coins, alongside real-time indexing to enable instant trading as new coins hit the chain, all while maintaining latency.‍
• Rapid growth: The launch of the Base App in July drove massive growth for Zora. Daily token creation jumped from 6k at the beginning of July to nearly 50k by the end of the month. In total, 0x has powered $59M in total volume for Zora coin swaps across 352k trades.

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What is Zora?

Zora is a rapidly growing onchain social platform that aims to create a fundamentally new creator economy.

Zora transforms posts into tradeable ERC-20 tokens, which are paired with creator coins. Together, this tokenized onchain social platform creates a flywheel where token issuance, content, and liquidity are tied together. Creators earn trading-fee revenue and fans and traders invest in creator output.

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Source: Zora

In this case study, we’ll take a look at how Zora is enabling a new kind of creator economy onchain and how 0x helps power this economy with custom routing architecture for Zora coins.

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The problem

The traditional creator economy is fundamentally constrained by lack of ownership and monetization options for creators and fans alike. 

• Platforms own the rails: Creators depend on centralized platforms to reach their audience and earn revenue. These platforms extract significant value without offering ownership or meaningful revenue sharing.
• Engagement ≠ Ownership: Fans may be highly engaged, but they can’t directly participate in a creator’s success. There’s no native way to invest in creators or their content.
• Monetization is limited: Revenue is either ad-based or relies on tipping/subscriptions. Both models are siloed, extractive, and leave creators with a small cut. And there’s no native discovery for how valuable a post is or the value that creators generate.

The current system captures attention but fails to convert it into owned, tradeable value for either creators or fans. At the same time, there is fragmentation of content, creators, and users across many different platforms.

Now we are starting to see the emergence of new social infrastructure, like Zora and Farcaster, made possible by an open and permissionless public ledger. These platforms not only prioritize user ownership and composability, but are also building new ways to monetize and engage with content onchain. And apps, like Base App, are bringing these platforms together into a unified, participatory experience for users.

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Zora + Base App: Empowering an onchain creator economy

Zora aims to solve these problems with a creator economy centered around the concept of tokenizing both content and identity. Every time a user makes a post onchain, a Post token is minted and linked to the creator’s token. This system creates a direct connection between individual content and the creator’s broader output.

Each Creator token is then paired with the platform’s native ZORA token, creating a multi-tiered token economy. Fans can invest in individual posts and participate in a creator’s success. Creators earn 1% of every trade, directly tying engagement and mindshare to earnings, and 50% of their Creator Coin supply streams to them over five years.

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Zora’s token model incentivizes participation, enables value discovery, and engagement with token activity. By generating returns for both creators and their supporters, it rewards early believers and long-term content creators. Creators and fans alike can get started with the Zora app.

Zora’s coin structure holds the promise of creating a self-reinforcing flywheel. More posts lead to more trades, which attracts more attention, and brings in more users.

But for this flywheel to really take off, Zora needs distribution. It needs to meet users where they’re at. Enter Base App.

In July, Coinbase launched its refreshed wallet as a fully-featured SocialFi app, integrating Zora directly into its social feed. Instead of having to visit Zora directly, or move between a number of other apps and platforms, Zora is integrated alongside Farcaster, Bankr, and more into a single feed.

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With the Base App powered by Zora, creators can easily tokenize their posts and earn directly from tips and sales, while users can instantly trade Creator and Post coins - all without ever leaving the feed.

However, for this all to work, tokens need to be liquid and easily tradable.

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Zora coin swaps powered by 0x

One of the major challenges with the Zora token ecosystem is that Post coins are paired with Creator coins and Creator coins are paired with ZORA. This token structure makes it difficult both for users to trade these coins directly and for routers to effectively route trades across the spectrum of tokens.

For instance, if a user wanted to trade USDC for a Post coin directly, they would have to:

1. Swap USDC → ZORA
2. Swap ZORA → the creator’s coin
3. Swap the Creator coin → the desired Post coin

At the same time, Zora coins have led to an unprecedented surge in token and pool creation. 

Users need to be able to easily trade and access deep liquidity for Zora Post and Creator coins, and new token pools (created with every post) must be instantly swappable.

Without seamless trade execution available in Base App and other apps, users would struggle to access these assets and the flywheel would fail to gather momentum. That’s where 0x comes in.

As part of its integration of Zora, the Base App team needed full support for Zora coin swaps within the app from Day 1, while maintaining speed and reliability. The Base App team needed to be able to meet dynamic requirements for Zora coin support and turned to 0x given our long history of partnership.

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Advanced multi-hop routing

Before the launch of Creator coins, all Post coins were paired with ZORA or WETH. The pairing of Creator coins with Post coins effectively breaks traditional routing.

In order to solve this, 0x built custom support for Zora coins to manage all of the new tokens created to determine the best route for a given trade - without compromising latency.

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“The complexity in quoting and routing is very unique to Zora. We had to build a custom integration to go from any token to a Post coin.” - Sav Dontamsetti, 0x Senior Software Engineer

In order to enable users to complete trades between Zora coins and any other token, Swap API features advanced multi-hop routing utilizing ZORA and Creator coins as intermediate tokens, providing the widest pair support for Zora coin swaps.

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Real-time coin indexing

Alongside the complexity that Creator coins introduced, each post creates a new pool. That means:

• Tens of thousands of tokens and pools are created daily, a level of pool creation that outstrips even Solana.
• Pools need to be indexed in real-time to make them swappable instantly.
• With this explosion of pools, new pools need to be managed efficiently to reduce the impact on latency so that swaps remain fast for users.

“Zora coins have resulted in an explosion of liquidity pools. The challenge was to support this level of pool creation while maintaining latency. Solving this required pulling onchain events through our backend system fast enough to enable routing and swapping immediately, while efficiently determining which pools to include.”
- Eric Wong, 0x Product Manager

As a result of this custom engineering, Swap API now provides best-in-class routing for Zora coins, with the widest pair coverage and fastest latency. For instance, when buying a Post coin with USDC, 0x will automatically route from USDC through the ZORA token, the associated Creator coin, and finally into the Post coin. And users can trade new Creator and Post coins as they hit the chain - at lightning fast speed.

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The flywheel in action

With 0x, Base App was able to launch with full support for Zora coin swaps. Following the launch of the Base App, daily token creation on Base jumped from around 6k at the beginning of July to nearly 50k by the end of the month. And for the first time, Base (where coins are minted) overtook Solana in daily token issuance. In total, over 1.8M tokens have been minted on Zora across approximately 200k creators

The increase in value for Zora creators has been equally significant: daily creator rewards rose from less than $1k in early July to consistently over $10k per day by the end of July, peaking at nearly $375k.

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Swap API has already facilitated over $7M in Zora coin swaps through the Base App. In total, $59M in trading volume for Zora coins has been routed through Swap API across 352k trades, with a high of $27.5M in July.

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Zora’s creator economy represents a continuation of a pivotal evolution in the Web3 ecosystem, where financial and social identities are becoming intertwined, and where value and culture move together. It’s a deeper reconfiguration of how value is created, discovered, and distributed online. We can’t wait to see what comes next.

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Start building with 0x

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