Zora is an onchain social network revealing new opportunities to create, connect, and earn from your life online.
In May 2024, Zora acquired the Mint Fun platform, a daily platform of choice for hundreds of thousands of collectors who conduct millions of mints per month across many networks.
Zora Blockchain
The Zora Network secured by Ethereum, powered by the OP Stack. Although Zora deployed the Zora Network software, Zora doesn't operate the Zora Network itself.
Zora now supports only ERC-721 and ERC-1155 non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Zora Network unveiled a slew of new features like paying via credit card, support for HTML drops, ERC-20 minting, and support for AI layers in Canvas, a media remixer tool for putting anything onchain.
Alchemy brought Account Abstraction support to Zora Network, and Conduit rolled out the ability to deploy L3s over Zora Network. On the app side of things, platforms like Warpcast, Interface, and Surreal are becoming new gateways for collecting and commenting on Zora mints, especially with the rise of scenecoins.
Mint
Posting on Zora allows information to be free and accessible to everyone, while minting and selling accrues value to the creator and collector.
Here’s all the different things you create on Zora today: Pictures, Songs, Canvas, Notes, Slides, Videos, 3D Renders, Websites.
Zora NFT also supports a wide range of media. Besides JPEGs, NFTs can be video, PDF, HTML onchain, etc.
Creators can sign up and create on Zora without a wallet and without crypto.
Artists can create and customize NFT drops on contracts they control on any of the supported chains, currently Ethereum, OP Mainnet, Base, Arbitrum, Blast, and Zora Network. Splits let groups of creators automatically distribute earnings from mints among themselves.
Fans can collect any NFTs minting on Zora with ETH from any chain Zora supports without waiting for bridging. You can mint NFTs on it without having ETH for gas. Instead, you can pay for gas from another network. Connect on the chain where you have ETH, mint the NFT, and it will be sent to you on the Zora Chain.
The mint in Zora is the distribution of value and ownership that acts as likes, bookmarks, reposts, upvotes, donations, purchases, and other behaviors.
Minting, in essence, is revealing the value of attention.
Mint as a means to save your work for yourself... Whymint? Because it’s important to build a pure internet where we own our content and our experience. If we don’t have this direct value capture available for the creators of media across the internet, then the media will get monetized for us on the platforms we engage with. This will bring us right back to square one—with advertisers and platforms as overlords. That’s not something the internet should desire, and that’s why you should mint.
Zora's Sparks
An increasing number of prices are represented in smaller units of Ether (ETH) with more zeros after the decimal point. At first glance, it can be quite difficult to notice the difference between something valued at 0.00001283744 ETH and 0.0000093847 ETH. Not only are they painful to read, they are even harder to pronounce.
Currently, the smallest unit of Ethereum is the wei. A wei is one quintillionth of an ETH. A quintillionth. This means that 1 ETH is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 wei. We need a new unit that regular people can use in both name and number.
Zora proposes Spark - one millionth of an ETH - as the new name for this unit. They have chosen ✧ as the Unicode character for this unit.
With Sparks, Zora is contributing to the ecosystem by creating a simple way to communicate prices in a new paradigm that will be convenient for anyone already familiar with ETH, but also making it more accessible to anyone who isn't already here.
Zora's Protocol Rewards
This module allows you to support creators with a small amount of ETH as easily as liking an Instagram post.
It's both tipping and not tipping at the same time. It's a tip in as much as it's a micropayment to the creator, but it's not a tip in as much as you, as a supporter, get back a piece of media and a new strong connection to the creator - a chance to participate in their next moment.
Onchain Secondary Markets
When creating a secondary market is important:
- Find a model that will benefit both creators and collectors in the long term
- Utilize the current timed minting model
- Provide a way for collectors to buy and sell after a mint period ends
- Build in creator royalties (now called secondary rewards)
- Provide a permissionless and onchain market
- Provide global and programmable liquidity
Zora did this by bringing secondary markets onto the blockchain using Uniswap.
The default duration of the minting is set to 3 days: short enough to capture the essence of the moment, but long enough for everyone in the world to see it. Anyone who is there during that time can mint. But now that the minting ends, the market begins.
This is made possible by using a small percentage of the mint fee to maintain liquidity on Uniswap. When the mint runs out, that ETH goes to Uniswap and then the LP position is burned and the creators are left with only the ability to claim fees.
This new model is putting forward a new form of creator royalties called Secondary Rewards—they are onchain, built into each Uniswap market, and cannot be taken away.
Every time a collector buys and sells on Uniswap, the creator receives a percentage of that transaction. The nature of Uniswap means that the relative percentage may change over time, but it will always be non-zero.
Instead of earning only during the mint, content creators can now earn over the life of the market.
With this new model, collectors can now easily buy even after the mint is over. It may be at a higher price (it may be at a lower price), but at least it is now obtainable.
With a more efficient and liquid marketp, there is the potential for a collection to accumulate value and realize value over time. Price discovery is automated and the buying and selling process is simple and instant. There is no need to manually list or bid, simply buy and sell at the best current price onchain.
This adds a new dimension to the experience once the minting is complete. As things spread and become more popular and contextualized over time, we will see the value of things change with it, and a more dynamic and flexible experience for collectors who may have missed the initial minting.
Zora have developed an extension to the ERC1155 standard to make them compatible with Uniswap. Each token in the collection has an embedded ER20 deterministic contract. ERC1155 can be easily wrapped and unwrapped into the ERC20 form directly in the contract.
This allows developers to easily interact with whatever mode is most beneficial for their particular use case. For example, the website and app they use mints in the ERC1155 mode, and whenever collectors buy and sell through the app, the contract simply wraps and unwraps them as needed for trading on Uniswap.
For developers who want to interact primarily with the ERC20 mode, they've extended the standard (called ERC20z) to inherit all the metadata from ERC1155 so you can accurately attribute it to the creator and display media directly from IPFS. This is the richest ERC20 media that exists onchain.
As of February 2025, every post on Zora is an instantly fungible coin (ERC-20 token).
Older posts remain collectible as NFTs.
Now, when you post on Zora, you create a coin on the Base blockchain with a total supply of 1 billion, from which you instantly receive 10 million coins.
Also support for 3D, MP3 and PDF files has been canceled.
