Zora co-founder Dee Goens appointed CEO, team reduces to fewer than 10 members

ChainCatcher report: Dee Goens, co-founder of Zora, has assumed the role of CEO, succeeding Jacob Horne, who served as co-founder for over six years. In a post on Wednesday, Goens stated that Horne is leaving the company to embark on a new chapter but “won’t be far from crypto.” Goens revealed that Zora has undergone layoffs this year, reducing its team size to fewer than 10 people and shifting toward an operational model more reliant on AI agents. On the product side, Zora has pivoted from its Creator Coins model, launched on Base in June last year, to supporting trading pairs across other networks. The Custom Pairs feature, launched on August 20, allows users to create custom token pairs and has already generated over 4,000 such pairs. Zora also expanded to Robinhood Chain and Solana this summer, enabling cross-chain trading and eliminating fees for DMs and comments. According to DefiLlama data, fees generated by Zora’s deployment on Base amounted to only $14,800 in August, a 99.4% decline from $2.51 million during the same period last year. Goens outlined five key priorities, with the top focus being aligning business incentives with ZORA token holders through the implementation of buyback and reward mechanisms—though no specifics regarding scale, funding sources, or timelines were disclosed. Other priorities include rebuilding community trust, focusing on mobile app user acquisition, and restarting community incentive distributions. As of press time, ZORA is trading at $0.00814, with a market cap of approximately $36.3 million—down 94.4% from its all-time high of $0.1456 set on August 11.