9: Jacob Horne - Markets for What Matters

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Feb 19, 2025

Jacob Horne, co-founder and CEO of Zora, previously led product at Coinbase and helped create USDC. He dives into the significance of memes in social coordination and their role in the digital economy. Horne discusses the challenges of discerning quality content in an abundance of information while exploring the dynamics of patronage in the attention economy. He also touches on the differences between speculation and gambling, the future of tokenized identities, and how creativity intersects with blockchain technology, providing insights into evolving market landscapes.

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INSIGHT

Markets for Attention

Markets for attention are needed to navigate information overload transparently, unlike opaque algorithms.
They provide an adversarial environment with skin in the game, promoting more valuable content.

INSIGHT

Democratizing Speculation

Markets for media meet people where they are, allowing anyone to express opinions financially and potentially profit from their insights.
This democratizes speculation and aligns markets with individual interests, expanding participation.

INSIGHT

A Coin for Every Piece of Content

Zora is moving towards a model where everything is a coin, instantly tradable like a prediction market for attention.
This model will price content based on both short-term attention and long-term information value.

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Jacob Horne (Website, Zora, X, Farcaster), is co-founder and CEO of Zora, a platform that allows the tokenization of media.

Jacob started his career at Coinbase where he was a product lead and helped create USDC. Five years ago, he left to wade deeper into the waters of internet and crypto-native coordination and creativity and co-founded Zora.

His central interest is how people coordinate together using the internet—the includes currencies, markets, ownership, art, speculation, and memes. We discuss how memes and symbols enable coordination, "The Meme and the Memo," words, money, and laws, Zora's premise built on Stewart Brand's "information wants to be free but it also wants to be expensive," a case for markets around attention, the new version of Zora and "a coin for every piece of content," speculation vs. gambling, token-powered brands, Ethereum and Solana, Coinbase and USDC, and a wide-ranging personal section that showcases why Jacob is so generative.

The parting prompt I hope this conversation leaves all of us with is this: while information is ~free today (and also abundant, infinite), it is also quite expensive to consume in terms of time. We ought to think carefully about what content we spend our precious time consuming and rewarding. That you would spend some of yours listening to Dialectic is as always a privilege and I hope you find it worthwhile.

Transcript available here.

Timestamps

(3:03): Obsession with Memes: How do you get people to organize?
(8:46): The Meme and the Memo via Balaji Srinivasan
(11:32): Three Fundamental Questions: Words, Money, Laws
(12:39): The Midwit Meme and other Favorites
(15:55): What makes media and information valuable?
(19:26): Zora, Tokenized Media, and Information wants to be Free and Expensive
(22:53): Provenance
(28:30): Why Do We Want Markets for Attention?

Deeper Crypto Section

(37:08): A coin for every piece of content: prediction markets on attention
(42:49): Investing in People or “Creator” / “Social”Tokens
(44:14): Not fighting internet gravity: NFTs, “utillity,” 1 of 1s, and skeumorphic ideas along the way
(47:52): Speaking to potential concerns and incentivizing more durable and useful information
(52:23): Speculation vs. Gambling: positive sum vs. zero-sum
(56:00): AI: Market Data as an input for for Models
(58:56): Speculating on how a future of AI and attention markets will be good for creatives
(1:04:50): Small market cap content can still be meaningful
(1:08:11): Crypto-optimism and regulation
(1:13:52): Saint Fame, Nouns, and Ideas for Future Token-Coordinated Orgs
(1:22:32): Reflecting on “Hyperstructures”
(1:28:55): Jacob's shift toward market-oriented thinking for solving coordination problems
(1:30:40): Ethereum, Solana, and Blockchain Competition

Coinbase

(1:36:23): The Coinbase Internship that Never Ended
(1:40:49): Starting USDC
(1:49:14): Bloomberg Terminal's Design

General Jacob

(1:50:09): Bezos and adoption of technology
(1:52:47): Tokenized Identity
(1:55:41): Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon and ...