Zora is a Magic Machine
Upload Imagination, Earn ETH—no crypto required.
Zora’s mission is to make creating on the internet free and valuable.
We are doing this by creating a magical creator tool on Ethereum. It’s pretty simple. You upload your imagination: your photos, podcasts, memes, short films, music videos, gifs, thoughts, opepens, AI film, ideas, art reviews, pixel art, educational videos, animations, more memes, illustrations, product announcements, screenshots, pigeons on subways—you name it. If it resonates with anyone on the internet enough to collect it, you earn some ETH.
We like to call it a Magic Machine.
Over the past three years at Zora, we’ve helped tens of thousands of Creators share their work onchain, and earning them millions of dollars (and hundreds of millions in secondary sale volume!).
It’s very early, and there is a lot to do, but the Magic Machine is working.
There’s a lot of complex engineering under the hood to make all that Magic™ happen.
Imagination is uploaded on Zora via Creator owned smart contracts. Smart contracts with a built-in, long ranging list of powerful features. Additionally, those minting can choose to comment onchain too, leaving a permanent message on Ethereum for everyone to see. All of this is powered by Zora’s protocol.
A core part of the Zora protocol is an expansive mint fee which rewards the Zora community.
When someone mints something, they pay a singular Mint Fee that is automatically split amongst the Creator and platforms (or individuals) that helped make that mint happen. Any website or person is able to earn from helping find people who want to mint. Everyone only gets paid when the Creator does. We call this Protocol Rewards.
In the recent ancient history, creating onchain had two pretty significant barriers to entry:
1. You needed ETH to pay for the transaction to create.
2. You needed a Wallet to hold that ETH to get started.
These two barriers are very high. Buying ETH costs money and takes days to transfer to a wallet that can create onchain. Getting a wallet requires installing an app or browser extension, saving and storing a seed phrase, and the anxiety that comes with that.
Recently we launched the ability to create for free removing the need to have any ETH at all to onboard, all while still being on independently owned smart contracts. No small feat. Today we take the Magic Machine one step further, we’ve made it possible for Creators to get a wallet instantly on Zora with just their email address.
Now anyone on the internet can onboard to Ethereum with just their imagination. This is a huge breakthrough.
We’ve seen two great eras of crypto onramps:
1. The first era started in 2009 with Bitcoin, where you could onboard with computing power via mining.
2. The second was mainstreamed by Coinbase starting in 2012, with the ability to buy cryptocurrencies with money.
In 2023, we are putting forward Zora as a new onramp, allowing you to onboard with Imagination.
We will use this new onramp to onboard more people to Ethereum than have onboarded to Ethereum to date.
Doing so means we can build towards a version of the internet that allows imagination to be both universally free and easy to enjoy and simultaneously have built in value for Creators.
By channeling all of this into Zora Network, a low cost and scalable network built on Ethereum—we invite developers, platforms and protocols to explore the new possibilities that open up as a result of more people, ideas, works, energy coming onchain. Run a node, build on our smart contracts, or build on the Network with your own app for the ever increasing amount of Creators and Collectors on Zora.
In the meantime, we are spending all of our energy on making the Magic Machine as fun, easy and rewarding as possible for anyone to use.
Try it out for yourself and create on Zora today.