Coinbase didn’t launch a #Base# token, they launched an app.

Base app and #Zora# is starting to look like the strongest proof-of-concept for this appcoin thesis everyone’s been circling around.

Instead of spec money rotating into infra, it rotated into Zora, into creators, into the people building or memeing or just vibing.

Zora showed what happens when you plug a working, fun social app into clean UX and let people cook.

20k posts minted daily, $20–30k/day in creator earnings, post-token trading volume hitting $6M/day.

It’s all backed by Zora as the shared liquidity layer, and $ZORA did a 10x in a week.

You get this weird flywheel where Coinbase is onboarding normies into a social app, and without knowing it, they’re interacting with real economic systems.

Zooming out, there’s a clear shift in where value’s flowing. Onchain apps are doing $400M+ in monthly revenue and taking more fee share than the chains they run on.

We might be entering the phase where application layer tokens, these appcoins start outperforming the rest of the market.

Because they’re tied to real activity. We’ve spent years building infra, and infra’s still critical but the money’s starting to sit with the apps, the businesses, the ones with real user behavior.

We’ve got trading tools pulling in $100M/month, dexes still doing $80M. Perps, wallets, social, even launchpads get real volume, some with better margins than the chains themselves.

Unlike a lot of L1s, apps don’t need to pay validators or deal with emission-heavy security budgets. A good app’s more like a lean saas biz with low cost, sticky users, recurring revenue.
I think the Base app moment just gave us a signal about the next catalyst play.

It’s gonna be which apps got usage, which tokens sat at the center of it, and which ones actually earned a cut when people showed up.

So now degens are out hunting the next $ZORA. Appcoin narrative is about capturing attention, and turning it into markets.