ZORA Soars 44% Amid Frenzy Over Balaji Srinivasan's New Token!

Holy smokes, ZORA shot up like a rocket, peaking at a wild 44% surge on May 26! The crypto world's buzzing about a fresh token dropped by none other than Balaji Srinivasan, the ex-CTO of Coinbase. Talk about making waves!

ZORA (ZORA) hit the roof at an intraday high of $0.0135, pushing its market cap over the $38 million mark. And get this, trading volume exploded by a whopping 256%, topping out at over $48 million in just 24 hours. Insane, right?

The hype train gained steam when X users started buzzing about Srinivasan launching a new token called "The Network State" on the Zora platform. Named after his 2022 book, this token hit the scene on May 26, 2025, and instantly got everyone talking.

Not familiar with Zora? It's this wild platform where you can turn your social media posts into ERC-20 tokens. We're talking text, images, videos, audio—you name it! Once minted, these "content coins" can be traded like hotcakes on places like Uniswap.

All you gotta do is upload your stuff, slap a title and price on it, and let Zora do its magic. Once it's live, your content turns into a tradable asset in a decentralized marketplace, and the community's demand sets its value. Crazy cool, right?

Within hours of going live, the Network State token's market cap was swinging between $2.7 million and $7 million. That's some serious early interest right there!

Even though it's a different asset, the shared platform and Balaji's big name seem to have given ZORA a major boost too.

Investors are probably betting big on the Zora platform getting more attention from all this hype. X users are saying that ZORA might be the safer, more liquid way to get in on the action without jumping straight into the brand-new token.

What is Zora?

Launched back in May 2020 by three ex-Coinbase folks, Zora's all about empowering creators through NFTs. It started as a way to mint and trade NFTs, but then evolved into tokenizing on-chain content from decentralized social apps.

In 2023, they rolled out their own Layer 2 network to make things faster and cheaper for content creators.

By 2025, Zora went even bigger, launching their native token, ZORA, dubbed "a memecoin for the Zora community." Even though they have their own chain, they launched it on Base, Coinbase's Layer 2, on April 23 to tap into a wider audience.

The token's got a capped supply of 10 billion. They're distributing it with a 10% airdrop to early users, 20% for community incentives, and 5% for liquidity. The rest goes to the treasury, team, and strategic contributors, all on a vesting schedule.

In May 2022, Zora snagged a $50 million funding round, valuing them at a whopping $600 million. Haun Ventures led the charge, with Coinbase Ventures and Kindred Ventures backing them up. That's some serious backing!