Zora has changed the game. By sharing mint fees, they have created a flywheel for positive sum effects throughout Z Net, Base, Optimism, and Mainnet. The offchain equivalent would be AMEX sharing part of their merchant fee with store owners…

Mints

From my perspective, mints are everything - at least at this stage of the game. The more mints you can amass, the more your work can proliferate. The more your network can expand. The more you can develop onchain.

Some have claimed that the auction amount takes precedent, and until a few days ago, I was hard pressed to provide a valid counter beyond intuition.

Z Net

To mint on Zora’s L2 you pay around $2 (gas and mint fee). Compared to Mainnet this is paradigmatic. And to compound it further, ~$0.80 is now sent directly to the nft creator (if their mint was made available for free).

It needs mentioning that Zora doesn’t have to do this. No corporation has to provide services beyond the standard consumer agreement. And to curious minds, eighty cents may seem inconsequential, but, contextualized in the market, I can now vouch for it.

With the launch of Base I happened to gain favor in the serendipity machine. A free open edition with the following intentions:

• memorialize the moment

• test out zora rewards

It’s been beyond my imagination. A free piece of art has resulted in the largest sale, by many multiples, I’ve had in my three years here. There’s something about free and Zora has found a way to leverage that.

Creators

It’s challenging to gain offchain social leverage (likes, retweets, follows). Mints have proven to be an even greater feat.

Free has arguably been the best incentive. And in such cases, creators were left with little to no leverage. Now we have tangible inroads at remedying this; a positive sum mechanism to its deepest core.

Currently it feels like we may see a small-to-medium sized bull run. Creators continue to adopt L2s at breakneck speeds, mint free editions, and earn rewards that they pump back into the ecosystem (like I have done with Based).

From there, we could run into some friction, as degens in the guise of collectors grow envious of the liquidity injection. This leads me to believe we may soon discover solutions that add value to the collector side of the equation as well.

“It’s Onchain Summer”

Coined by Jesse Pollak, onchain summer does feel different. A layer 2 on EVM is sharing revenue with their power users. A monolith, in Coinbase, is incubating a decentralized vertical outside of their own control.

We now have:

• Base Chain

• Zora Network

• Zora Rewards

• mint.fun

• an interesting nouns-bartering potentiality (post fork)

• portfolio-as-a-product 1155 collection trends

• nouns builder fully supporting L2s

• and account abstraction + token treasuries at our front door