Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase exchange, officially admitted that the concept of creator coins (or content coins) has effectively failed. Previously, the company and the team behind its Layer 1 blockchain network, Base, faced severe criticism from the community for actively supporting such digital assets and promoting the SocialFi economy narrative. These tokens represent digital versions of specific publications by famous authors that can be traded on the market. The peak popularity of this trend occurred in August 2025, when the daily number of created tokens surged from four thousand to over fifteen thousand, periodically reaching thirty-eight thousand units. The number of unique traders during this period approached three million, and the ZORA platform token grew by almost eight hundred percent in a few weeks, reaching a price of twelve cents, although by the time of this material, its value had plummeted to six-tenths of a cent.

The Base team first encountered a serious wave of backlash following an experiment with the tokenization of a post titled "Base is for everyone" on the Zora platform in mid-April 2025. Later, the company clarified that this asset was not an official token of the network or the exchange itself, but this did not prevent a sharp spike and an equally rapid collapse of its price and market capitalization. The crypto community deemed such actions unethical, and prominent on-chain experts, including crypto detective ZachXBT, expressed serious suspicions regarding potential insider trading. The situation worsened in late December 2025, when influencer Nick Shirley's token crashed following a similar scenario, after its market capitalization briefly exceeded fifteen million dollars. Users fairly pointed out that the team promoted assets with dubious reputations, leaving many investors with nothing and causing them to lose their funds.

On July 13, 2026, amidst growing hype around the Robinhood Chain network, a user publicly criticized the Base team for past mistakes. In response, Brian Armstrong personally replied, agreeing with the criticism regarding content coins. He stated that this experiment did not work, the company made a mistake, and earlier this year they changed their development direction, deciding to turn the page and focus primarily on trading, payments, and AI agents. However, the community's reaction to this admission was restrained and skeptical. Commenters immediately pointed out to Armstrong that in 2026, Coinbase had not supported a single token related to AI agents. Furthermore, users expressed well-founded concerns that the company would once again chase another popular trend, forgetting about the real needs of its clients and practical use cases for the application, thereby repeating the mistakes of the past.