Zora

Zora's origin story begins with Saint Fame in 2019, an experiment that tokenized physical goods. In 2020 it turned that idea into a product for artists, musicians and designers; $TAPE could be redeemed for one of 100 cassettes. The company later moved from objects to media and launched an onchain NFT marketplace protocol in 2022.

Open Editions followed in 2023 and mobile minting in 2024. By 2025 Zora described the app as a place where content becomes immediately tradeable coins. Its current changelog now marks ERC-721 and ERC-1155 minting, editing and comments as deprecated, so the original NFT experience should be treated as history rather than the present product.

The ZORA ERC-20 was created on Base at 0x1111...fc69. The token-generation transaction occurred March 11, 2025, and the retroactive distribution opened April 23. Official allocation material divides 10 billion units among airdrop recipients, community incentives, liquidity, treasury, team and investors; live Base calls on September 5, 2026 still returned 10 billion with 18 decimals.

Zora calls the asset a memecoin and expressly denies governance and equity rights. Its MiCAR disclosure also denies contractual claims on Zora Labs and issuer redemption or refund. The contract inherits ERC20Votes delegation and checkpoint machinery, but those technical voting units do not create a right to govern Zora. One isolated MiCAR summary says one billion; the detailed disclosure, claim FAQ, allocation, code and live supply all say 10 billion.

Creator Coins assign one fixed-supply coin to an account and pair it with ZORA. Each has one billion units: half enters the market and half vests linearly to the creator over five years. Activation cannot be disabled. Posts can also have Pair or Content Coins, and 2026 changes added custom pairs and support beyond Base, while the account-level Creator Coin remains paired with ZORA.

The economic promise needs precision. The detailed fee table edited August 12, 2026 says a new Creator or Pair Coin trade pays a total fee of 1% of the traded amount. The creator receives 0.5% of the traded amount, half that total fee. A Creator Coins page edited the same day says the creator earns 1% of every trade. Those statements conflict. Earlier creation cohorts retain different legacy fee schedules, the app can charge a separate transaction fee, and the protocol share is not an automatic distribution to ZORA holders.

ZORA's own contract has a narrow lifecycle: a designated initializer could call initialize once, mint the listed allocations and set the contract URI. The published source exposes no later mint, pause, owner or upgrade function. That supports a fixed token supply, not an immutable application or coin market.

The active Coins factory is a different contract system. It is UUPS-upgradeable and authorizes upgrades to its owner. Coin owners can update payout recipients and metadata through deployed coin interfaces. Zora's terms separately allow fee and reward changes and service restrictions. Protocol markets can remain accessible through other interfaces even when Zora's own application delists an asset.

Zora's IP guide says buying a coin tied to content does not transfer copyright in the underlying work, and Zora does not pre-screen every IP claim. Its community rules prohibit impersonation, spam, wash trading and manipulation. Enforcement can remove content, restrict accounts, and make associated tokens unavailable or non-tradeable through Zora's services without compensation.

Zora Network also must be kept separate from the token. The Optimism registry lists it as chain 7777777 and uses rpc.zora.energy for both public and sequencer RPC, while ZORA itself lives on Base. The registry does not identify the sequencer's legal operator, so assigning that role to Zora Labs would go beyond the reviewed evidence. Zora Labs, Inc. is the party to the application Terms and the Delaware corporation that filed the MiCAR paper. Those roles establish the service and disclosure entity, not the operator of every protocol component or the legal sequencer operator of Zora Network.