Base Tops Solana for Daily Token Launches Thanks to Zora Surge

Zora, a token launchpad on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network Base, accounted for more tokens created than Solana’s big hitters Pump.fun and LetsBonk on Monday. Last month, Zora created approximately 6,500 tokens every day, per Dune data, but on Monday it exploded to an all-time high of 51,575 tokens created in a single day. By comparison, LetsBonk created 22,554 and Pump.fun just 4,173—with Zora accounting for 67.7% of all token creations across Base and Solana. “This is the first time since early 2023 that a chain has had more tokens launched on it than Solana,” Coinbase director Conor Grogan tweeted.

Pump.fun’s market share has shrunk significantly since the beginning of the year, with rival platform LetsBonk surpassing it for Solana token creations. Now Zora, a social media platform that turns every post into a token, has surpassed both platforms following massive growth. After its January 2024 launch, Pump.fun quickly became the go-to app in crypto, spawning almost 5 million tokens by the end of the year. To put that into perspective, Etherscan can only find 1.6 million ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum.

“What’s crazy is that these AREN’T just bots launching tokens,” head of DeFi at Base, simply known as Johnny, tweeted. “These are USERS creating CONTENT. And instead of that content going viral AND THEN being tokenized and traded.” Adam Tehc, data analyst and Dune dashboard creator, previously told Decrypt that he believes that of the top 50 most profitable Pump.fun wallets, per his dashboard, only one of them is a human—the renowned trader Cupsey.

Wallets controlled by bots, Tehc explained, mass deploy tokens, buy up supply on launch, and rug pull it within minutes or seconds. In January, one trader bagged $840,000 over three months by creating 17,000 tokens and selling their supply within seconds. The strategy only became more profitable with the implementation of the creator revenue-sharing feature—which splits a portion of trading fees with the token deployer.

Zora is a very different platform to Pump.fun. Instead of creating tokens for the sake of it, Zora turns every post on the social media platform into a token on Base. Traders then buy and sell the post, essentially betting on its virality—in this sense, it is similar to Pump.fun. While bot activity on Zora is still possible, its fans and creators argue that the platform encourages authentic posts to perform better. On Pump.fun, part of the charm is that anything silly, funny, or relevant could skyrocket.

For example, the Pump.fun created TsunamiInu coin peaked at a $16 million market cap on Wednesday as news spread of a Tsunami in Hawaii. It was launched by a wallet that has created more than 370 coins, many of which are news-relevant and are duplicates of the wallet’s own tokens. Scrolling down the Zora feed, while there is the occasional post that seems low effort, the majority of posts are either art or seemingly genuine depictions of everyday life.

One of the most successful projects on Zora is artist Jack Butcher‘s series Lemonade Stand. The 10-part artwork initially showed prices ranging from $1,000 down to $0.00001, but was recently changed to slices of a pie chart. It has left spectators puzzled but engaged with the piece.

Terron Gold