Zora draws criticism over centralized token distribution and casual ’for fun’ branding

The NFT platform faces community pushback regarding its governance token allocation model, with critics highlighting concerns over supply centralization. Zora’s lighthearted ’for fun’ positioning has further fueled debates about project seriousness amid tightening regulatory scrutiny.

A token ‘for fun’

Karbon further speculated that Zora’s “for fun” characterization may be an attempt at legal risk mitigation or expectation management. 

However, he asserted that such messaging signals to the market that the token is “worthless,” which he described as counterproductive at a time when the industry seeks to build legitimate tokenized products.

ZachXBT assessed that the narrative of a token created solely for fun only works through a fair launch, where the entire supply becomes tradable on the market simultaneously.

Kevin Mills, head of research at Triton, said that by creating a token without rights or revenue claims and assigning large allocations to the treasury and investors, Zora was allowing retail users to invest real money into an asset with no intrinsic value. 

Mills criticized the structure as enabling pre-launch marketing efforts to drive price appreciation without delivering substantive utility to token holders.