Welcome back to the Now Newsletter. I’m Matt Medved.
I’m writing to you live from the TIME100 Summit in New York. The speaker lineup is as eclectic as it is star-studded — from Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and Ryan Reynolds to Demi Moore and Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos. However, the most interesting talk of the day concerned the future of finance.
Legendary hedge fund manager Ray Dalio issued a stark warning: we’re watching the global monetary order break down in real time. Bonds are falling, gold is rising, and faith in traditional currencies is fading fast.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire called it a once-in-a-generation reset — one where digital dollars could become the new financial foundation by creating ongoing demand for U.S. treasury bonds.
And Senator Kirsten Gillibrand? She says Congress still hasn’t woken up, and stablecoin regulation remains the lowest-hanging fruit.
It’s worth noting that the panel was preceded by a video explaining Bitcoin, stablecoins, and — believe it or not — NFTs. Welcome to the new world order.
Which brings us to the latest evolution in onchain experiments: “content coins.” Here are my thoughts on the topic du jour.
🪙Are Content Coins a Thing?
The idea of “content coins” is having a moment.
Thanks to Base’s recent moves on Zora — minting media into tradeable tokens with a single post — a question is rippling through crypto circles: Are we witnessing a meaningful shift in how we value media, or just another flavor of memecoins masquerading as innovation?
To begin, let’s clarify some terms.
Memecoins thrive on narrative and virality. They’re tokens with no intrinsic utility, pumped by vibes, communities, and often chaos. Their value comes from attention and speculation, not fundamentals.
NFTs, on the other hand, represent unique assets. They’re well-suited for media: visual art, music, essays. They’re non-fungible because each carries context and meaning.
Content coins try to bridge these worlds. They’re fungible tokensminted from media — tweets, posters, images. You can buy, sell, or trade them like any other ERC-20. But instead of promising future roadmap value (à la traditional projects), each coin reflects a single moment, and its value lives or dies on what the market makes of it.
The difference is intentionand execution.
There’s a compelling thesis behind the movement. As Base’s Jesse Pollak argues, the internet has long failed to value content properly. Likes don’t pay the rent. Paywalls gate creativity. Algorithms extract value rather than reward it.
In this light, content coins offer a radical alternative: an internet where media is free to access, but ownable, tradable — even investable. They propose a market-native way to reward creators and rewire value flows in the attention economy. Speculation becomes a discovery engine. Culture becomes currency.
This is the ideal.
But crypto doesn’t operate on ideals. It operates on reflexes.
When Base minted two content coins within an hour — both via Zora — the first surged to a $13M market cap, only to crater by 90% after the second launched. No context. No communication. Just confusion. What was framed as infrastructure felt indistinguishable from a memecoin drop — and carried the same risks.
Crypto markets don’t reward nuance. They reward focus. Which is why memecoins work best when there’s only one. The entire community rallies behind a single narrative, concentrating liquidity and attention around a unified idea—think $DOGE, $PEPE, $MOG. Launching more than one fractures both the meme and the market.
That’s what happened to Base’s first token. And to $TRUMP when $MELANIA launched. The meme got cannibalized. And people lost money.
Pollak’s vision rejects that model. He believes every piece of content can, and should,be its own coin. Post, mint, move on. No roadmaps, no Telegram groups, no cult of personality. Just an open protocol for coining culture.
In theory, this could normalize onchain creation. But in practice, it collides with crypto’s most scarce resources:attention and liquidity.
When every post becomes a coin, each one competes not just with other creators,but with your last one. You fragment your narrative. You dilute liquidity. You flatten meaning into momentary price action.
Crypto doesn’t scale well with infinite inputs. It needs:
- Liquidity concentration to sustain depth
- Attention funnels to drive discovery
- Narrative clarity to anchor belief
Without those, the experiment risks becoming noise — fast. Especially when its biggest proponent is muddying the waters withproblematic messagingand tone-deaf missteps.
While content coins explore new territory, NFTs remain a better fit for media. Yes, they’re speculative too — but they’re built to preserve authorship, context, and originality. A photo, article, or song isn’t interchangeable, and NFTs reflect that through metadata, provenance, and design. Content coins may reference original media, but they don’t preserve its meaning, context, or authorship — they flatten it into something that feels disposable.
Content coins are a provocative idea with real long-term potential. They offer a new way to think about value, ownership, and the internet. But right now, they’re being launched into a speculative environment that isn’t built for nuance, context, or saturation.
Pollak may be right that one day, coining content will feel as natural as posting it. But in the current meta, where speed trumps story and hype trumps history, minting many tokensrisks fracturingtrust before it’s earned.
As I argue in ourrecent op-ed, not every piece of content needs a coin.
