Are Solana Memecoins or Base Contentcoins Better?

Why did the team behind Coinbase's Layer-2 Base just launch a memecoin — only to immediately launch a second one, obliterating the chart and infuriating everyone who aped in?

Because, plot twist: it wasn't a memecoin — it was a contentcoin — and they are now core to exactly how Base's Jesse Pollak hopes to help Base take on Solana's memecoin-fueled lead.

“It’s clearly not a memecoin,” the Base creator said about Base's first contentcoin launch in a recent Bankless interview. “Let me be 100% clear: this is not a memecoin.”

So what exactly is a “contentcoin" and can it really be any better than a memecoin? Or, is it just new branding for the same bag-holding game? Let’s rewind.

Memecoins have been on a tear since migrating to Solana from Ethereum. Solana’s pump.fun gave anyone the ability to spin up a token in minutes, and users leaned in hard. Some estimate more than 40,000 new memecoins are created a day — and that kind of activity has been a huge boost for Solana. For speculators, however, it can be a hit or miss endeavor at best. And for many creators, the risk of seeing their fans lose money or being labeled a scammer isn't worth the potential upside that could come from launching a memecoin.

One need not look much further than Argentina President Javier Milei to see the potential harms a memecoin could cause. A massive scandal ensued and he was almost impeached after he endorsed the LIBRA memecoin project back in February. After tweeting it out, LIBRA collapsed in value and he had to face all kinds of allegations. Point being — creators aren't necessarily eager to throw themselves into that line of fire.

Base has seemingly picked up on that. For better or for worse, speculation is a double-headed monster. While it can make people happy when they win, it can also make them sour when they lose. But Base is taking a more moderate approach with contentcoins — hence why they launched two coins in such quick succession. As Pollak explained in the aftermath, it was a predetermined plan to lower the expectations (and stigma) for creators.

"The fact that we've created a context where people can experiment I think is fundamentally good," he said. "And I see that as my primary role as the leader. Kind of creating a space where people can experiment."

Instead of launching a memecoin tied to an abstract meme or trending topic, Base is encouraging creators to “coin” individual pieces of content — akin to a tweet, a video, or an image — as a collectible asset on the Instagram-like platform Zora. On the backend, those assets trade like memecoins, but the speculation is more hidden. The charts are buried. The tokenomics are abstracted. It puts content first and speculation second. In fact, while Zora displays a price to "collect" a piece of content (which is really just buying a bit of the underlying memecoin) it doesn't display a chart that shows how that piece of content is performing.

To a crypto native, it might feel like smoke and mirrors to abstract away the main reason why anyone actually cares about memecoins. To Jesse, it’s all about reimagining the way the internet works. But which strategy is right: memecoins or contentcoins?

To answer that, it's important to first establish who your audience is. Considering the fact that Solana and Base are two vastly different blockchains with vastly different objectives, it shouldn't be shocking to see them land in two different places on this for their users. For Solana, a blockchain that has never been shy about its "NASDAQ at the speed of light ambitions, it has attracted many users who are quite familiar with trading. (Sam Bankman-Fried was an original Solana promoter.) And traders love speculation.

But for Base, an Ethereum Layer-2 whose main reason for exiting stems from a future where Ethereum is used for everything and gets so crowded it needs multiple Layer-2 blockchains to help carry the transaction load, you might not build a memecoin the same way. Instead of prioritizing speculation, maybe you'd prioritize collecting, or encourage creators to feel free to post anything. (Even Instagram launched "stories" after seeing Snapchat's rise to fame, after all.)

And suddenly, if creators don't feel crippled by the fear of alienating fans when price goes down, maybe they'd feel inclined to post more contentcoins. And in theory, that means more activity, which means good things for Base. But what about the actual memecoin or contentcoin creators, or users? Is it good for them?

We decided to put contentcoins and memecoins to the test. As Coinage readers and members already know, we recently created a whole series around the launch of our PLYBTN memecoin. After Solana's co-founder Anatoly shared our fair launch on X, interest spiked and the Coinage DAO wound up raising around $80,000. But with that attention came exactly what Base is potentially offering creators the chance to avoid: backlash when price went down as people outside the Coinage community sold after launch. And admittedly, as a creator, disappointing people is no fun. So, I actually did start to wonder if a contentcoin might offer a different opportunity.

To test the contentcoin playbook, I posted a clip of Coinage's viral Mantra interview on Zora. It had racked up 170,000 views across YouTube and X, so it seemed to be a great candidate for a contentcoin. Jesse retweeted it, and the piece started trading. Thanks to Zora’s fee model, I personally earned about $40 from people collecting the clip — essentially buying into the tokenized version of the content. But just as with memecoins, price eventually declined as collectors moved on to the next pieces of content emerging on the platform. Notably, however, we didn't get any one tweeting at me or Coinage about a rug simply because the price went down. And maybe that's the point?

"If we're not experimenting when there's less than 1% of the world onchain today, how the F are we going to get to 100% of the world onchain?" Pollak said. But that might beg the question, should we bring 100% of the world onchain?

While making $40 is certainly more than I've made for any single post on Instagram, or more than I've been paid in creator rewards on X, it's unclear if that's sustainable. Activity on Zora has already dropped back down below its weekly averages following the spike that came from the contentcoin and the platform's token airdrop last week. Zora's token is now down by about 50% since launch last week — granted it's still very early days.

Point being, I can understand why bringing a creator's activity onchain the way that Base and Zora have devised it might serve their mission. And I can understand how that might reward creators and collectors to a less volatile extent than the booms and busts seen with memecoins on Solana. But as the creator behind the first community-owned Web3 outlet in Coinage — I think there's a better way to bring creators and fans together that also leverages their shared passions.

In a way, we've already proven that once by launching the first NFT memberships that unlock a path to patronage dividends as our members have voted on our content decisions and governance. But our recent memecoin experiment opened my eyes to the power that both Base's and Solana's communities would likely agree on — fungible coins are just more liquid and tradeable than NFTs. Part of that is purely a result of speculation — and that's not necessarily a bad thing if done right.

In fact, I think most of everyone who has ever bought a memecoin would agree that the worst part about memecoins isn't necessarily the speculation part, but the lack of transparency around launches, market makers, or even fairness during a token's initial launch. (That was also why we fair-launched our PLYBTN memecoin — just as ConstitutionDAO once did — to prevent sniping and ensure everyone got the same price as even our earliest buyers.)

Base's attempt to shift speculation to the backend and re-labeling buying the underlying token as "collecting content" is certainly differentiated. However, it may take much more time to see if it leads to any meaningfully differentiated outcomes for creators or their fans. Indeed, while fandom for a creator might begin with a single like on a single post, the real value that gets built up between creators and fans of their content takes much more time than that.

Instead, Coinage is taking the best bits of memecoins, shedding the worst — and merging that with what contentcoins tried to do by linking content to a coin.

Coinage will be burning a certain percentage of our PLYBTN memecoin stash every month which will be determined solely by how many views our content receives on YouTube and X every month. We believe this is the first ever "content bonding curve" for a memecoin project. The Coinage DAO (which importantly, unlike other DAOs is based on a one member, one vote schema) also passed a proposal that will lock our PLYBTN tokens through October. That means, no net new supply hitting the market by some unkown shadowy market maker and only more tokens being burned forever, like the 86 million tokens we burned last month. All tied to the content you choose to engage with.

So what's better? Memecoins or contentcoins? We say neither.

You can agree with Solana or Base on whether speculation deserves to be at the front or the back of the user experience. If that's all you think is at play here, then your answer might be different. We just know that misaligning incentives between content creators and consumers is always going to be a losing equation. But if creators and their communities are aligned — watch more, burn more — that is inherently going to be a more powerful and sustainable model.

So maybe the best path forward is neither a memecoin nor a contentcoin.

Maybe it’s both.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s what we’ve already created.

Want to be a part of it? Go to Coinage.Media to mint an NFT and join our DAO. Or buy PLYBTN, or don't. Just know that the more you watch, the more we’ll burn. So watch wisely.

Coinage members can watch our full episode above ad-free, or later on our YouTube channel. To support our community-owned outlet, own it with us, and unlock other exclusive benefits, mint one of our Membership Passes today or Stake with us today! Chat with Coinage in our Discord.