Base's "Content Coin" Rashomon

Author:Token Dispatch, Thejaswini M A Article Compiler：Block unicorn

Foreword

One ​​tweet. 69 minutes. $17 million. Then there was chaos. What happened next to the official account of Base made the entire crypto community have questions about "content coins", insider trading, and the responsibility of major platforms.

Three mysterious wallets somehow knew exactly when to buy, and pocketed $666,000 in profits, while thousands of retail traders lost money.

Base claims this was just a harmless experiment in “on-chain culture” — but the on-chain evidence reveals a more complex truth. Is this a new frontier for creator monetization, or a pump and dump with a new name?

In today’s deep dive, we’ll dissect crypto’s most controversial “non-token-token” launch from every angle.

What Happened

On a perfectly ordinary Wednesday afternoon, Base — Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network — posted a seemingly innocuous tweet:“Base is open to everyone.”

What happened next is a perfect example of the still-evolving etiquette in the cryptocurrency space, where the line between experimentation and irresponsibility remains frustratingly blurred.

Sixty seconds after the initial tweet, Base included a link to a Zora post in the comments that contained the exact same content as the tweet. For those who don’t know, Zora is an “on-chain social protocol” that automatically turns any content posted to its network into tradable tokens. Post something clever, and people can buy and sell yourclever tokens.

Base’s leadership likely saw this as a harmless “on-chain culture” experiment. What the crypto community saw was something else entirely: a $17 million memecoin that appeared out of thin air and bore the name of one of the most recognizable brands in crypto.

Here’s where the story gets interesting — and complicated.

The market reacted as you’d expect when a major layer-2 network “launches” a token:

• Market cap surged from 0 to $17M in just 69 minutes

• Before plummeting nearly 90% (to under $2M)

• Recovered somewhat in the following hours, peaking at $20M

• left;">As of this writing, it has stabilized at around $8 million to $10 million

To the onlooker, this looked a lot like a classic pump and dump. For Base,it was an object lesson in the law of “unintended consequences.”

For the thousands of retail traders who bought at the high, this was an expensive educational lesson in the difference between "content coins" and "meme coins" - a distinction that means nothing to those who just lost money.

Base founder Jesse Pollack tweeted.

Anatomy of a Controversy

What makes this incident particularly noteworthy is not just the price fluctuations, but what the on-chain detectives subsequently discovered.

Blockchain analysis platform Lookonchain shows that three wallets bought a large amount of the token before Base’s official announcement and then sold it at the high point, making a total profit of about $666,000. These wallets hold a total of 47% of the token’s supply.

Meanwhile, Base, as a content creator, received 10 million tokens (1% of the total supply) and earned about $81,000 from transaction fees. Although Base promised never to sell these tokens, it didn't look good.

So we see three wallets:

1. Somehow knew to buy before the public announcement

2. Together holding nearly half of the supply

3. Sold at the high, making over $666K in profits

The community is very unhappy with this mess.

So, even though Base claims they never sold 1% of their allocation, they still profited from the frenzy they themselves sparked through trading fees.

The timing of those pre-purchases raises serious questions about whether anyone knew about Base’s post in advance.

Of course, maybe three random wallets just happened to buy in large quantities of this particular token before it was promoted by one of the biggest brands in crypto. Maybe I’ll win the lottery tomorrow, too.

If the “Base is open to everyone” event wasn’t confusing enough, Base launched a second token on the same day:

“Base @ FarCon 2025”

This token was also created on Zora to promote Base’s appearance at FarCon, the annual conference of decentralized social media platform Farcaster.

FarCon also experienced a drop like its “brother”.

Playing with Words

Faced with criticism, Base and its supporters have adopted a defense reminiscent of Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence that Facebook is not a media company: “This is not a memecoin, this is a contentcoin.”

Base’s founder Jesse Pollak offered this distinction: Content coins represent “single content” with “single value” and “no expectations,” in contrast to memecoins, which aggregate content and carry high expectations.

Another Base developer, Charis, was more direct: "This is not a meme coin. This is not even a token issuance. Base did not launch a token to pump and dump or hype the market. This is a content coin - this distinction is important."

The reaction of most cryptocurrency traders to this was tantamount to rolling their eyes.

Content Coins vs. Meme Coins: What’s the Difference?

Let’s dissect the “content coin” vs. “meme coin” debate, as it’s at the heart of Base’s defense.

Jesse Pollak says a content coin is defined as “if it represents a single piece of content and is created in a context where the expectation is that the coin is the content, and the content is the coin — no more, no less.”

He argues that content coins can help creators go viral, and that explicit financialization isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Zora co-founder Jacob Horne wrote in February that content coins can solve the contradiction between free information and high production costs. In his vision, content coins create open markets that reward creators, distributors and consumers while keeping information free to access.

In theory, this sounds good. But in practice, the story for the “Base is open to all” token looks a lot like a pump and dump: Tokens launched with implicit endorsement from big brands Price skyrocketed Early buyers (who mysteriously knew about it in advance) sold out Later buyers suffered heavy losses Everyone argued about its wordplay afterwards

Zora’s post retweeted an anonymous user, Larp von Trier, who succinctly summed it up: “The newbies at Solana had no idea how Zora worked, so they got hammered.”

Our View

The Base Open to All incident reveals a critical gap in how we think about responsibility in the crypto space. Traditional finance has clear lines of accountability — if an investment promoted by a bank fails, there are consequences. In crypto, these lines are fuzzy at best. When Base tweeted a link to create a token and the market value soared to $17 million before plummeting 90%, who was held liable? Base for posting the link? Zora for automatically tokenizing the post? Traders who didn’t understand what they were buying? Wallets that jumped the announcement early? Frustratingly, the answer seems to be “it’s complicated.” This ambiguity is both crypto’s greatest strength and its most enduring weakness. The field moves fast because the barrier to experimentation is so low. But that same freedom has also created an environment where chaotic events like the “content coin” have occurred frequently.

The mere association with Base/Coinbase was enough to cause millions of dollars to pour into a token with no utility, no roadmap, and no future.

This is not unique to Base — we’ve seen similar phenomena involving tokens allegedly associated with Solana, Bitcoin, and nearly every other major crypto project.

With this kind of influence comes responsibility. Base’s core mission — “to build a global on-chain economy that fosters innovation, creativity, and freedom” — is laudable. Their technological innovation is impressive. Their growth numbers (900k DAAs, $2.4B in TLV) suggest legitimate potential. This makes this memecoin misstep particularly puzzling. Base doesn’t need to chase short-term wins or social media hype. They’re building something that will have real long-term significance. The “content coin” defense rings particularly hollow considering Base just released an ambitious Q2 roadmap. The plan outlines impressive technical innovations like Flashblocks (which cuts block times to 200ms), Base Appchains (a third-layer chain for specific apps), and enhanced privacy features.

The contrast between Base’s serious technical ambitions and this seemingly frivolous attempt to tokenize social posts is hard to ignore.

The line between innovation and irresponsibility may be blurry, but successfully navigating that line is the difference between truly transformative projects and fun but ultimately failed experiments.

In crypto, as in life, good intentions are not enough to solve problems. “Base is open to everyone” is a nice slogan—but only if “everyone” includes retail traders who don’t understand the difference between meme coins and content coins and who shouldn’t become collateral damage in an experiment in “on-chain culture.”