Author: Claude, Shenchao TechFlow
DeepOcean Summary: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong publicly acknowledged on X that Base’s content coins strategy over the past year has failed, stating, “We messed up; it’s time to move on.” The core vehicle of this strategy, the ZORA token, has plummeted approximately 95% from its peak in August last year, causing significant losses for many participants. Base has already shifted focus earlier this year, with current priorities now being trading, payments, and AI agents.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong rarely admits fault.
On July 13, Armstrong responded to community user @smileyXBT’s criticism on X: “I agree with your view on content tokens—they didn’t succeed, and we shifted away from them earlier this year. We messed up; it’s time to move on.”
This is one of the rare instances in recent years where a top executive in the crypto industry has publicly acknowledged the failure of a core strategy. The statement brings an end to Base’s narrative over the past year and a half centered on content tokens built around the Zora platform.
A year of promotion led to a 95% crash, with community criticism pointing directly to misallocated resources.
The response from Armstrong was triggered by a sharp critique from X user @smileyXBT, who pointed out that Base had spent over a year aggressively promoting Zora’s creator token platform, yet failed to build a genuine user moat—instead diverting more resources toward projects founded by former Coinbase employees, leaving many participants behind in the process.
According to The Defiant, the critic Armstrong responded to mentioned that the tokens promoted by Base include creator tokens from investors such as Balaji Srinivasan and Base lead Jesse Pollak, stating that "many people got stuck."
The price trajectory of the ZORA token, the core vehicle of the content token strategy, serves as the most direct indicator of the experiment’s failure. According to CoinMarketCap data, the ZORA token reached its all-time high of $0.1471 on August 11, 2025, and has since declined to approximately $0.0067, a drop of about 95.4%.
From official token launches going wrong to a cascade of creator token failures
Looking back at the timeline, Base’s content token experiment was controversial from the start.
In April 2025, the official Base X account posted on the Zora platform, which automatically generated an ERC-20 token according to Zora’s mechanism. Due to the post originating from Base’s official account, many users mistakenly believed it to be an official token, causing its market cap to briefly surge above $17 million, before plummeting over 99% within hours.
Nevertheless, Coinbase doubled down. In July 2025, Coinbase rebranded its wallet as the Base App and integrated Zora’s token tools into its social feed. The daily number of newly created tokens surged, causing Base to briefly surpass Solana as the chain with the highest volume of new token launches.
But the momentum did not last. By December 2025, even staunch supporters within the Base community began abandoning content tokens. Creator tokens for journalist Nick Shirley plummeted approximately 80% within two days of launch, becoming a symbolic moment that shattered confidence. In February 2026, Zora deployed its latest product, "Attention Markets," on Solana rather than Base—a move some community members interpreted as a sign of retreat.
Armstrong refutes criticisms of AI agents and insists on pursuing three parallel lines of development.
While Armstrong admitted his mistake, he also drew a line.
Following @smileyXBT’s critique, the latter half targets Base’s current emphasis on AI agents, viewing it as a repeat of its old habit of chasing trends. Armstrong explicitly disagrees, responding that Base’s priority has always been “trading, payments, and agents—in that order,” and that all three are “inseparable,” with the majority of resources currently focused on building trading infrastructure.
Base’s 2026 roadmap, released in March, confirmed trading, payments, stablecoins, and AI agents as core priorities. On the product side, Coinbase has launched the x402 payment protocol—developed and open-sourced in collaboration with Microsoft, Google, and Mastercard—as well as the “Coinbase for Agents” platform, launched in June, which enables AI assistants to connect to user accounts to execute trades and payments. The majority of x402 transaction volume is settled on Base.
Turn signals appeared earlier in January. At the time, Jesse Pollak publicly stated that the Base App had become "too much like a traditional web2 app," and the team needed to refocus on trading.
Base remains the largest L2, but it's uncertain whether a shift in transactions can win back users.
Base's TVL dropped from approximately $5.3 billion in January to around $3.9 billion in mid-February, a decline of about $1.4 billion. According to CoinGecko data, Base's current TVL is approximately $4.58 billion, making it still the largest among all Layer 2 networks.
Coinbase's revenue for the last quarter declined 31% year-over-year to $1.41 billion, with spot trading volume down 37%. Whether Base, following the shift in trading, can re-engage users harmed by content tokens is the key question to be tested in the next earnings cycle. Coinbase expects to release its second-quarter results in the coming weeks.
From a broader perspective, Armstrong’s admission carries symbolic significance. The crypto industry typically remains silent and shifts direction after experiments fail; publicly acknowledging “we messed up” is rare among leading companies. But for ZORA holders, this statement comes too late—mistakes can be admitted, but the token won’t rebound.