Trends
What's up with $ZORA?
Winners of this cycle were apps: Pump.Fun and HyperLiquid. $ZORA is another app token that went up 800% in the last week.
What is ZORA? It's a web3 social media app.
The exact mechanics of the app have changed over time. It was an NFT minting platform. Then it launched's own L2. And now, they have a flywheel with ERC-20s.
Let's look into why ZORA is pumping.
#1. New flywheel.
Zora recently updated their tokenomics. And it has a very interesting flywheel.
Each creator will have a single Creator Coin. Every Creator Coin will be paired with $ZORA. So every new creator on Zora will increase the $ZORA demand.
All the posts from a creator will have coins attached called content coins. These content coins will be paired with Creator coins. So buying these content coins will indirectly pump creator coins as well. Additionally, 1% of the trading fees from these tokens will go to the creator.
This vision is to allow creators to earn from trading fees. (Creators can obviously sell their tokens as well, but it won't be sustainable long-term.)
This model allows users to speculate at many different levels.
- If you think a specific post will go viral, buy its content coin.
- Creator Coin is for betting on a creator long-term. It'll accrue value from all his content coins.
- $ZORA is the coin for the whole platform. Pairing it with all Creator Coins increases its demand. Plus, 1% trading fees on Creator coin LPs goes to Zora. You can learn more about their reward structure here.
This new tokenomics structure creates an ecosystem of creators, speculators, and the platform.
#2. The app is gaining traction.
All the metrics are up and to the right.
- Zora coins did ~$75M in token trading volume last week.
- Daily new posts have gone from 4.6k on July 16th to 40.7k yesterday.
- On July 1st, the aggregate FDV of all Zora coins was only $10M. Right now, it's ~$99M.
You can review a lot more data from these dashboards: Dune & Blockworks.
The chart tracking the source of new posts on Zora is informative for the current traction.
Current Zora wave started on July 17th. And 75% percentage of the tokens were minted from The Base App. It's the new everything app from Coinbase. Every post on the Base app can be tokenized via Zora. They'll soon integrate the creator token as well.
The Coinbase team members, like Jesse, were heavily promoting this app. It was the catalyst that attracted users to Zora. Soon, big names like Gary Vaynerchuk and Balaji were also creating Zora coins.
Many people made money from the charts of these big creators. The creators themselves made a lot of money from trading fees. For example, Visualize Value made $81k in the first three hours.
Zora is becoming an ecosystem with many apps building on top of them.
Base App is a big example. Many people are using $ZORA as a way to get exposure to the Base App. Noise is another app that enables tipping creator coins on Zora.
The best way to trade Creator Coins is to buy Coins of big KOLs as early as possible. Zorascan tracks launches of Creator Coins on Zora. You can create alerts to notify you any time someone with 5k+ followers launches a Creator Coin.
Now, this doesn't mean I'm blindly bullish on ZORA. Flywheels are reflexive. The juicier the pump, the more violent the unwinding will be.
This app still hasn't gained traction outside the crypto niche. That's something to monitor. If it manages to attract more creators from other platforms like TikTok and Instagram, it can keep the flywheel running.
Public launch of the Base App could be a catalyst for Zora. There are rumors that MrBeast invested in Zora pre-TGE. Any big mainstream creator pushing the narrative of Zora as a social media platform to earn will be big for Zora.
For now, this should be another project on your radar.
Sponsored Deep Dive By Mezo
Mezo: Finance App For the Bitcoin Age
Bitcoiners believe BTC is the best asset.
And if you truly believe you're holding the best-performing asset of our time, why on earth would you sell it?
Especially when selling triggers a taxable event. Ouch.
So here's the trillion-dollar question:
If you don't want to sell your BTC, how do you actually use it?
How do you live your life, pay your bills, buy your coffee — all while HODLing?
Enter Mezo. It's a financial platform that lets you live off of your BTC without ever selling it.
Yep, you read that right. No offramping, no capital gains tax, no sleepless nights. Just pure Bitcoin exposure with real-world utility.
How? Welcome to the world of BitcoinFi.
Instead of selling your BTC, you can borrow stablecoins against it. And use it for your daily life. Here's how you can do it with Mezo.
- Deposit your BTC. Mezo will accept native BTC. Or they can also just bridge tBTC from ETH mainnet.
- Borrow MUSD at a fixed 1% interest rate against your BTC. You can spend it however you want.
- Get your BTC back when you pay the loan and interest back. So you still have the BTC exposure.
MUSD is a USD-pegged stablecoin created through the Collateral Debt Position (CDP). It's a proven, battle-tested mechanism for stablecoins. Maker's DAI was the original CDP stablecoin, with Liquity LUSD being another popular example.
But unlike the above, MUSD is always 100% backed by BTC. And because arbitrageurs are incentivized to keep it stable, it stays reliably pegged to 1 USD.
Compared to the variable interest rate in DeFi, a fixed 1-5% rate is very low. So instead of selling BTC, you can rely on MUSD to finance your expenditures.
But you do have to keep the liquidation risks in mind.
A Loan-to-Value (LTV) ratio represents the size of your loan relative to the value of your collateral. The maximum LTV ratio of Mezo is 90%. It means that if the value of your loan crosses 90% of the value of your BTC collateral, then your collateral will be liquidated.
If your BTC drops in value and your loan crosses that 90% threshold, your BTC can get liquidated. So don't play it too close to the edge — give yourself room for BTC's wild mood swings. With active management, a 40%-50% LTV should be fine.
Just having cash to spend is great, but you also want to grow your wealth. Mezo has something for that, too.
Earn stablecoin yield
You can deposit MUSD into the MUSD vault to earn yield.
The vault is managed by August through Upshift, a yield platform that lets some of the best-performing funds run strategies for depositors. August is a DeFi prime brokerage that handles $7 billion in monthly volume.
Earning high yield often requires running sophisticated strategies. Below are some of the strategies August uses to earn yield.
- MUSD saver's rate pool, when it goes live.
- Deploying to Tigris pools, Mezo's native DEX infrastructure
- Various loops (for example, powered by Gearbox), both in Mezo and the Ethereum DeFi ecosystems
With this Mezo vault, you don't have to spend energy implementing all those strategies. You can get the high yield just by depositing in this vault.
Right now, users earn base yield from the above strategies, Upshift Points, and Mezo Mats. As of writing, it averages to ~30% in APY. With this, users can earn yield on a stablecoin that's fully collateralized by Bitcoin.
From July 16, 2025, through August 31, 2025, they're running an additional tBTC rewards campaign as well. $80,000 in tBTC will be distributed among two categories.
- 20% of the pool is split equally among those who mint MUSD, deposit into the vault, & hold it.
- 80% of the pool is distributed using a time-weighted model based on how much you deposit and how early you do it.
You can learn more about the program here.
But what if you don't want to hold MUSD? Can you still earn yield?
Earn yield on BTC
There's an upshift vault that accepts BTC as well.
You can deposit tBTC, WBTC, or cbBTC into the vault. August manages this vault and is targeting 15% APY as well. Strategies like minting MUSD and providing liquidity will be used to generate yield for the BTC. Nearly $20m is already deposited and earning interest with this vault.
Mezo's ultimate vision is to create and lead the Bitcoin circular economy.
They want BTC to be your long-term store of value. And you should never have to sell it to finance your life. Instead, you'll be able to meet your financial needs via MUSD, for everything from day-to-day purchases to larger purchases, such as a home.
On Mezo Market, you can already buy hardware wallets and gift cards. In Mezo's ideal world, all of your needs will be accessible from the Mezo market.
But that's a distant future. For today, Mezo provides a great opportunity to grow your wealth via the MUSD vault.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
Ethena is partnering with Anchorage to convert USDtb into an onshore stablecoin that's federally regulated by the U.S.
Angstorm went live. It's a decentralized exchange built on top of Uniswap v4 that redirects MEV value back to liquidity providers..
Polymarket is apparently considering launching its own stablecoin. It can potentially be a new revenue source for the application.
Succinct Labs has opened the registration window for its $PROVE airdrop. It'll only be available until August 3rd.
Aave shared the "Risk Premium" concept, which'll be part of Aave v4. It'll enable low borrowing costs for high-quality collaterals like ETH.
Dogecoin devs are discussing the enabling native on-chain verification of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). It'll be the first major PoW chain to do so.
Euler Finance introduced EulerScan. It's an explorer for Euler v2 with complete historical yield data for every vault.
Fogo is the new L1 chain built using Solana's firedancer client. Fogo has opened its testnet to the public.
📰 Industry News
Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, raised its Stretch preferred stock offering from $500M to $2B, pricing shares at $90 with a 9% annual dividend.
Binance introduced RWUSD, a principal-protected Earn product. Users can earn up to 4.2% APR backed by RWAs such as Tokenised US Treasury Bills.
🐦⬛ X Hits
- The human premium.
- Is HyperLiquid undervalued?.
- The Stablecoin neobank opportunity.
- How to find Bonk insider wallets with Axiom?
- Thoughts on wisdom posting.
😂 Meme
Until next time,
Edgy
Today's email was written by Edgy and Yayya.
DISCLAIMER: I'm NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
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