Coinbase's Base Promotes Unofficial Meme Coin—Traders Ape In and Get Rekt

Base, Coinbase's Layer 2 network, posted content that automatically minted as a tradable token through Zora, an onchain social protocol, triggering a trading frenzy before the asset quickly collapsed.

The "Base is for everyone" token originated from Base's official X account. Base said they had "coined it" on Zora at 3:12 PM ET.

Despite a webpage disclaimer on Zora that it is not an official Base token, traders drove its valuation to $13 million before it crashed to just $1 million three hours later, marking a 92% decline.

The asset has since clawed back losses, up 20% in the last hour to $0.007, data from DEXScreener shows.

By early evening in New York, Base had posted a response.

"Base is posting on Zora because we believe everyone should bring their content onchain, and use the tools that make it possible," the Base account stated on X. "If we want the future to be onchain, we have to be willing to experiment in public. That's what we're doing."

Zora, meanwhile, echoed the sentiment with a pithier statement: "study Zora"

Zora's post retweeted a pseudonymous user named Larp von Trier (a play on the Danish filmmaker's name). The user provided a TL;DR of the situation: "Solana manlets had no idea about how Zora works and got rekt."

But documentation from Hantao Yuan, co-founder of the quest-to-earn platform Moku, backed by Sky Mavis, a16z, and others, tells a different story.

The top three holders "had 47% of the supply," Hantao noted.

Some 2500 holders, who were "potentially new Base users," were allegedly rugged, Hantao claimed.

In a separate postHantao claimed that a "bunch of volume bots" were being run on the chart, noting that one of the top three wallets controlled 25.6% of the supply.

The incident occurred through Zora's feature that turns social posts into ERC-20 tokens. Base automatically received 10 million tokens (1% of the supply) as the post creator, though the company pledged never to sell these tokens.

A representative from Base responded to Decrypt, confirming that Base did not sell the token, nor was it official in any way. The representative pointed to the disclaimer posted on the token's webpage on Zora.

A Zora representative acknowledged Decrypt’s request but could not provide specific comments by press time.

Onchain data shows the token has generated close to $28 million in trading volume and over $60,000 in creator earnings for Base.

Content coin ≠ meme coin

Jesse Pollak, founder and creator of Base, distinguished "content coins" from traditional "meme coins" through a series of educational posts.

In a response to a thread on X, Pollak described content coins as representing "one piece of content" with "singular value" and "no expectations," contrasting with meme coins that aggregate content and carry high expectations.

"If you're wondering where we're going, highly recommend this piece of writing," Pollak posted three hours after the Base post on the token that crashed, pointing to an essay by Jacob Horne, co-founder of Zora.

The essay argues that the internet faces a tension between information wanting to be free and the expense of producing it, with business models like paywalls and subscriptions restricting access to value creation.

Horne proposes that crypto, specifically content coins, can resolve this by creating open markets that reward creators, distributors, and consumers while keeping information freely accessible.

"Coins unlock a free and valuable internet—one where information can be freely accessed and shared while the value of that information finds its way into all of the hands that help create, distribute, and consume it," Horne wrote.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair