Zora has positioned ZORA at the centre of the Zora ecosystem. Everything goes through it.
Whilst it was popular to poke fun at ZORA’s ‘just for fun’ launch, Zora weren’t exactly secret about their future plans for anyone who cared to listen
and the results were predictable. After the above interview I converted a bunch of my EVM assets into ZORA and have never looked back.
Zora’s design makes a lot of sense: online creators are the ones who drive memecoin values and much of all crypto value TBH. What else is stuff like Berachain, Monad, MegaETH, Mantel, etc.. and every copy paste DEX/lending protocol but ‘vibes’? Cause they ain’t businesses.
Zora is pitching to be the infra for value creation and distribution of that content that’s created.
We’ve seen Solcial/Kaichi attempt something similar on Solana and fail (over both iterations).
Pump(dot)fun is the most successful social app in crypto history. It’s is laser focused on being the best place to create and trade assets. It is not trying to be a social media platform as well (yet… they’ve been pretty open in saying they want to move in that direction, to anyone who bothers to listen).
But token launchpads like Pump run into a large problem: What makes an asset successful on Pump doesn’t make a social media account successful. Success on social media means growing a large and loyal audience. Ad rev and merch sales are the definition of the long game.
Winning on launchpads (both for creators and the launchpads themselves) means launching lots of assets and taking fast profits then moving on to the next asset. It’s the definition of short term thinking. It’s better if people DON’T know who you are. How does THAT work with social media creators??!! Short answer: It doesn’t.
And it doesn’t really work in crypto social context either. All successful memecoins or NFT collections? All long term plays. Just like successful social media accounts.
Least Zora has thought about this and pair long term aligned value (creator tokens) with short term aligned value (content tokens) in a thoughtful way.
But it’s still very long term risky as Zora’s bet is that you’ll want to do both (content creation and asset generation + trading) on Zora. In fact they NEED you to do that for their business to make sense.
Enter Sanctum. Sanctum deeply understands long term value. LSTs are positively anti-degen. 10% yield on an L1 token that has no chance of even a 10x???
Yet once a memecoin has become established there isn’t a lot of value capture left for them. New DEX listings will gradually outcompete their initial LPs for swap volume with lower and lower fees, leaving their fee revenue to trend to zero.
CEXs get projects to pay THEM to take all the swap fees (honestly why anyone lists is beyond me).
I propose Sanctum create a liquidity value capture mechanism that allows token creators to capture long term revenue, similar to the ZORA mechanism, but that is open to the entire Solana eco. Like the Sanctum LST swap engine but for a Sanctum token as the base token (most likely CLOUD, but it could be a new token) to further align swap traffic through this product.
It would offer competitive swap rates and liquidity and help creators keep as much of the fee revenue returning to them without needing to offer poor swap options to their users, like you see on EVM chains where memecoins get locked to one LP that has exorbitant swap fees (sometimes called taxes).
Just like Sanctum has done with LSTs, Sanctum won’t
- create assets (launchpads/validators)
- host content (social media networks/SOL stake)
But they will facilitate the best outcome for creators and their communities by providing fair fees and fair revenue distribution.
The acquisition of Ironforge makes this type of product even more achievable now.