Author: Claude, Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Guide: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong publicly admitted on X platform that the content coins strategy pushed by Base for more than a year has failed, stating, "We messed up, it’s time to turn the page." The core carrier of this strategy, the ZORA token, has plummeted about 95% from its peak last August, causing substantial losses for many participants. Base has completed its pivot earlier this year, currently prioritizing resources in the order of trading, payments, and AI entities.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong rarely admits mistakes.

On July 13, Armstrong responded to community user @smileyXBT's criticism on X platform, saying, "I agree with your point about content tokens. They did not succeed, and we pivoted earlier this year. We messed up, it's time to turn the page."

This is one of the rare cases in recent years where a top executive in the crypto industry publicly admitted the failure of a core strategy. This statement puts an end to the narrative surrounding content tokens built around the Zora platform over the past year.

A year of promotion leads to a 95% crash, community criticism points to resource misallocation

The response from Armstrong was triggered by a sharp criticism from X user @smileyXBT. This user pointed out that Base spent more than a year pushing the Zora creator token platform, yet failed to establish a real user moat, instead skewing more resources towards projects founded by former Coinbase employees, "Many people got cut in the process."

According to The Defiant, the critic mentioned by Armstrong included tokens promoted by investors Balaji Srinivasan and Base head Jesse Pollak, stating "many people got trapped."

The price trend of the ZORA token, the core carrier of the content token strategy, is the most intuitive annotation of this failed experiment. According to CoinMarketCap data, ZORA hit an all-time high of $0.1471 on August 11, 2025, and has since dropped to about $0.0067 as of the time of publication, a decline of about 95.4%.

From official token launch failure to creator token chain collapse

Looking back at the timeline, Base's content token experiment has been controversial from the very beginning.

In April 2025, the official X account of Base released a post on the Zora platform, automatically generating an ERC-20 token according to Zora's mechanism. Since the post came from the official Base account, many users mistook it for an official token, temporarily driving the market capitalization above $17 million, before plummeting over 99% within hours.

Despite this, Coinbase doubled down. In July 2025, Coinbase rebranded its wallet as Base App and integrated Zora's token tools into the social information feed. The day saw a surge in the number of tokens created, momentarily surpassing Solana as the chain with the highest new token issuance.

However, the excitement did not last. By December 2025, even the firm supporters within the Base community began to abandon content tokens. The creator token of journalist Nick Shirley plummeted by about 80% within two days of its launch, becoming a symbolic event of confidence crushing. In February 2026, Zora deployed its latest product "Attention Markets" on Solana rather than Base, with some community members interpreting this as a withdrawal signal.

Armstrong rebuts AI entity criticism, insists on three-pronged approach

While admitting mistakes, Armstrong also set boundaries.

The latter part of @smileyXBT's criticism pointed to Base's current focus on AI entities, claiming this was a repeat of the old habit of chasing trends. Armstrong clearly disagreed. He responded that Base's focus has always been "trading, payments, and entities (in that order)," and that the three are "inseparable," with most resources currently concentrated on building trading infrastructure.

Base's roadmap for 2026 was published in March, confirming trading, payments, stablecoins, and AI entities as core priorities. On the product side, Coinbase has launched the x402 payment protocol (developed in collaboration with Microsoft, Google, and Mastercard and open-sourced), as well as the "Coinbase for Agents" platform launched in June, allowing AI assistants to connect user accounts for transactions and payments. The main trading volume is settled on Base.

The signal for this pivot appeared earlier in January. Jesse Pollak publicly stated at that time that the Base App had become "too much like traditional web2 applications," and the team needed to refocus on trading.

Base remains the largest L2, but whether the shift in trading can regain users is unknown

Base's TVL dropped from around $5.3 billion in January this year to about $3.9 billion by mid-February, evaporating about $1.4 billion. According to CoinGecko data, Base currently has a TVL of about $4.58 billion, still the largest among all Layer 2s.

Coinbase's revenue in the last quarter fell 31% year-on-year to $1.41 billion, with spot trading volume down 37%. Whether Base can re-attract users hurt by content tokens after the pivot in trading is the core issue to be validated in the upcoming financial report cycle. Coinbase expects to release its second-quarter results in the coming weeks.

From a broader perspective, Armstrong's admission of mistakes is significant. The crypto industry is accustomed to silently pivoting after failures in experiments, with very few top companies openly admitting "we messed up." But for ZORA holders, this statement comes too late; mistakes can be admitted, but the tokens will not rebound.