Understanding Wow: Zora's New Memecoin Platform

🪙 Zora has been a dominant force in NFTs for years, and now the team is eyeing memecoins with Wow, a memecoin platform and protocol combo on Base.

• Context: Earlier this year, Zora introduced onchain secondary markets with its new ERC-20z protocol, which allows ERC-1155 NFTs to be seamlessly shifted into fungible ERC-20 tokens and vice versa.
• What's new: Wow is open for business and has fielded its first token launches this week. It stands out in the current memecoin launcher landscape for graduating successful tokens to Uniswap on Base via ERC-20z tokens, which is a first-of-its-kind approach in memecoins.

• Wow 101: Reminiscent of Pump.fun on Solana, Wow makes it easy to create a new memecoin whose initial token supply is managed by a bonding curve. This bonding curve adjusts a token's price based on demand, minting new tokens when users buy and burning them when users sell.
• Token graduations: Once a token reaches an 800 million supply, i.e. a $69,000 market cap, its trading shifts to a Uniswap liquidity pool, accompanied by minting 200 million more tokens for liquidity for a final total supply of 1 billion. At this point, $12,000 worth of ETH from the Wow pool is deposited to kickstart liquidity on Uniswap, and the associated LP tokens are burned to permanently lock these funds in.
• Wow fees: Every buy or sell of a Wow token incurs a 1% protocol fee, deducted from the ETH involved. This fee is distributed with 50% to the token creator, 20% to the protocol, and 15% each to platform and order referrers. This approach makes it so memecoin creators can earn an income stream over time from successful token launches.

• The first tokens: A handful of the initial wave of memecoins on Wow have already graduated to Uniswap, including $DREAM, $WOW, $HIGHHORSE, $BALDO, and $CRAZYFWOG. The combined market cap of these 5 tokens is just over $3 million right now, so these are certainly still "micro-caps," but they offer a taste of what's likely coming here: a surge of ERC-20z memecoins on Base.
• Composability potential: Keep in mind that Wow is an open protocol, and we've already started to see other projects building on top of it. One such project is dreamcoins, an AI-powered token launcher that turns text prompts into quick memecoin deployments. Notably, the platform uses its 0.5% creator fee earnings for $DREAM buy-and-burns, suggesting more community tokenomics experiments are on the way here.

• Big picture: Base memes, memecoins that can turn into NFTs, automated secondary rewards, an ecosystem of creator-led platforms. It's no secret that many token launcher platforms are arriving these days, but the Wow vision is currently distinct and has the potential to usher in a new wave of crypto social experiments that meld community, entertainment, and finance. And if you combine this vision with the wallet-less UX that Zora has helped pioneer around collecting NFTs, things can get really interesting here going forward!

More about Wow

✨ Wow Mechanics | Twitter Account