In Brief:
- Base opened applications Sept. 2 for a Creator Grant Program paying independent creators up to $4,000 to make content about the network, its ecosystem and its builders.
- The grants are straight funding with no tradable creator tokens and no engagement-based token payouts attached, a break from the model Base ran through its social products.
- Base hasn’t said how large the program’s budget is, how many creators it will fund, how individual grant sizes get set or when applications close.
Base is paying content creators in cash again.
The network opened applications Sept. 2 for a Creator Grant Program offering independent creators up to $4,000 to produce content about Base, its ecosystem and its builders, according to a post from the official Base account on X.
Introducing the Creator Grant Program
We're backing independent creators with up to $4,000 to make great content about Base, our ecosystem, and builders
Learn more ↓
Money isn’t the only thing on offer. Selected creators get access to a pipeline of builders they can feature in their work, and what they produce may be picked up by Base’s regional accounts.
Who qualifies
Writers are eligible if they produce deep dives, memes, analysis or social media threads. Base is also taking applications from streamers, live show hosts and creators running recurring shows, plus independent video creators.
Educators can apply for grants to make Base content in their own languages.
Separate from the main grants, emerging creators can qualify for “Creator of the Week” bounties worth up to $500.
What Base didn’t say
The announcement left most of the mechanics blank. Base didn’t specify whether every successful applicant receives the maximum amount, or disclose how individual grant sizes will be determined.
There’s no published quota, no stated review cycle, no total budget and no application deadline. The post pointed applicants to a form rather than a dedicated program page.
The model that came before this one
The program follows Base’s retreat from content coins and its earlier Creator Rewards scheme, and it carries none of the token mechanics that defined them.
Base App launched in July 2025 with Farcaster powering its social features and a Zora integration that turned posts into tradable assets. Zora activity peaked in August 2025 with more than 1.6 million creator coins minted, nearly 3 million unique traders and more than $470 million in volume. ZORA rose nearly five times in a month.
It didn’t hold. Tokens auto-generated from posts by the official Base account crashed 95% within hours, and ZORA later fell 95%, wiping roughly $500 million from its market cap. Base’s total value locked slid from about $5.3 billion in January to roughly $3.9 billion by mid-February, a $1.4 billion drop.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong addressed the strategy on July 13 in a reply on X to user @smileyXBT, who had argued Base spent over a year pushing Zora without building a user moat.
“They didn’t work and we pivoted early this year. We messed up, time to turn the page,” Armstrong said of content coins. He added that Base has been focused on “trading, payments, and agents (in that order),” with most resources going to trading infrastructure.
Grants are the current playbook
Base has leaned on grant programs to answer criticism from its own ecosystem. On Aug. 24 the network replied publicly to a builder’s complaint by listing three builder-support programs launched since Aug. 6, a builder call, a builder grant program and the fourth cohort of Base Batches, and pointing to an Ecosystem Fund that has backed more than 30 teams.
Its retroactive Base Builder Grants have run since March 2024 across more than 20 cohorts, typically paying 1 to 5 ETH per recipient. Weekly Builder Rewards pay 2 ETH.
Creator Rewards, by contrast, is gone. Base shut it down in February along with the Farcaster-powered feed, ending the program Feb. 15 with final payouts Feb. 18. It had distributed more than $450,000 to over 17,000 creators across roughly six months, an average of about $26 each. Creator Coins, the ERC-20 tokens tied to Base App profiles, survived the cut, with claims and earnings still handled on Zora.
Base founder Jesse Pollak, who stepped back from leading Base App and handed it to Jordan Fish, said the bets on Farcaster, Zora, miniapps and creator coins “disintegrated completely” in Q1 2026. The app needed one primary focus, Pollak said, and “that thing is trading.”
