Crypto Exchanges
By Steven Anderson
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How the Zora Bet Fell Apart. Back in 2025, Zora had been around since 2021, originally built around NFT minting.
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Zora's Numbers Tell the Real Story. The metrics are brutal. Zora's daily trading volume hit nearly $63 million in May 2026.
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Brian Armstrong came out and said it plainly. Coinbase messed up by pushing content coins and the social crypto app Zora, and now the company has moved on.
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SmileyXBT's criticism was pointed. Base, Coinbase's own blockchain network, had leaned hard into Zora and creator coins tied to individuals whose reputations were, to put it…
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The Zora experiment started with genuine ambition.
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NFT artists were the first to get loud about it. Many had depended on Zora for minting and felt abandoned when the platform pivoted away.
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And then there was the Tyson Fury incident. A fake account tied to the boxer was promoted on Zora, and the whole thing got linked to Sahil Arora, someone the crypto community had…
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More context: Coinbase Smart Wallet Update Targets Multi-Chain dApp Confusion for Base Users
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Pollak's own token on Base suffered serious devaluation during this stretch. The creator coin launches that were supposed to generate excitement mostly generated skepticism.
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The metrics are brutal. Zora's daily trading volume hit nearly $63 million in May 2026. By recent months, it had dropped below $100,000 per day. That's a 99.8% collapse.
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It's probably worth noting that content coin platforms across crypto have struggled broadly.
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Coinbase now seems to want distance from the whole chapter. The company's stated focus is AI agents alongside its core trading and payments business.
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Read also: U.S. Government Moves Nearly 4,000 Bitcoin to Coinbase Prime in $250M Transfer
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The reputational damage from the fake Tyson Fury account and the Sahil Arora connection didn't help Coinbase's standing with the NFT and creator communities it had been trying to…
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