Zora Launches Attention Markets on Solana, Not Base

Decentralized SocialFi platform Zora has launched its new attention markets platform on Solana, allowing traders to speculate on which buzzwords, hashtags, trends and topics will go viral online.

“Trade what’s trending. Take positions on any topic, idea, meme, or moment before it breaks,” Zora’s newly launched platform states. 

One of Zora’s founders, Jacob Horne, said on Tuesday that it costs 1 Solana (SOL), currently $85, to deploy a “Trend,” aimed at disincentivizing spam. Trends have no creator rewards.

Zora is also enabling “Pairs” to be created under a Trend, which does offer creator rewards.

In a promotional video, Zora referenced the $redlight and $coldplunge pairs under the $longevity trend, as an example.

Traders are already testing the app, with “attentionmarkets,” “longevity,” “cats,” “dogs,” “bitcoin” and “aigirlfriend” among the most-traded tickers so far.

Dashboard of leading attention market trends. Source: Zora

The attention markets platform enables users to trade Trends and Pairs like ordinary tokens, with a dashboard to track their profits and losses in real time.

The ZORA token responded positively to the announcement, rising 6.2% to $0.022 over the last 24 hours, while the broader crypto market retraced 1.2% over the same timeframe.

The launch of Zora’s attention markets coincides with the rapid rise of prediction markets, which are now consistently surpassing $10 billion in monthly trading volume and are increasingly being marketed to the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Zora posted a job listing on Monday for an “Attention Economist,” looking for someone who lives on the internet and sees “what’s next before it has a name” by tracking cultural movements across platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and X.

Base community criticizes Zora’s Solana integration

The Solana integration disappointed some members of the Base community, because Zora moved much of its activity from its native platform to Base last year and launched its first token on the network in April.

Zora also assisted with the launch of Creator Coins linked to Base profiles in July, which even helped Base overtake Solana in daily token creation activity later that month.

Related: Base App sunsets Creator Rewards to double down on trading 

Jacek Trociński, the developer of Base memecoin Degen, said it was “really disappointing” to see Zora “pivot” to launch an attention-markets platform on Solana.

“We had to put up with your… stuff for 9 months, extracted every penny from Base with a broken model and now a final pivot to a pump clone on Solana,” Veil Cash builder Apex777.eth said.

Base creator Jesse Pollak, however, noted that Zora creator tools remain “fully operational” on Base and that he was happy to see Zora “continue to experiment to grow the onchain pie.”

Zora listed the Zora (ZORA) token on Solana in January, and Zora’s X profile location now shows up as “Solana.” It also hasn’t posted about Base in several months. 

However, it has not made any public statement indicating that it is moving on from Base. Cointelegraph reached out to Zora for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.

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