Zora updates coin guidelines after ZachXBT calls out Sahil collab
Zora is now “hiding” sketchy coins under new guidelines after the Coinbase-backed crypto firm was ridiculed for promoting a fake Tyson Fury account and apparently planning to collaborate with an alleged serial rug artist.
Zora announced on X that any coins breaking community guidelines will be hidden and yet remain available to buy, sell, or transfer.
If you own one of these coins, it will appear in your wallet with a scam warning that says it is hidden “due to impersonation, offensive content, or your settings.”
Zora is on damage control after the crypto sleuth ZachXBT revealed screenshots showing higher-ups from Zora and Coinbase planning to collaborate with Sahil Arora to onboard users onto the platform.
Read more: Caitlyn Jenner says Sahil Arora ‘f*cked with too many powerful people’
Arora is known in the crypto space for his various celebrity-linked rug pulls involving the singer Jason Derulo, media personality Caitlyn Jenner, and rapper Iggy Azalea, to name a few. He reportedly made $30 million last year, and he has bragged about his seemingly safe position under Donald Trump’s lax crypto regulation.
Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak willing to look past scams
Screenshots of an alleged exchange between the head of Coinbase’s “Base App,” Jesse Pollak, and Arora show Pollak recommending that Arora should drop the “bad guy positioning,” and later said he was excited to see Sahil’s “positive impact.”
In one apparent email with Zora co-founder Jacob Horne and Head of Partnerships Zak Krevitt, Arora claimed he onboarded the boxer Tyson Fury. Arora also allegedly told Pollak over X direct messages that he was onboarding Fury, and Pollak allegedly discussed Zora’s plans to gain users with Arora over email.
Horne then seemed to share a screenshot of the fake Zora Tyson Fury account, promoting the account and its tokenised post that he “just saw.”
Unsurprisingly, the account was inauthentic, and when Zora’s team deleted the page in response, users began to complain that they could no longer trade the token.
Pollak’s defence ridiculed
ZachXBT then shared what he claims are the dealings between Pollak, Horne, and Arora, before Coinbase’s Pollak defended his actions, arguing that he was keeping an “open mind,” remained “optimistic,” and that “we are trying to onboard the world.”
Pollak said, “I told [Arora] he had a bad rap, bad actors aren’t tolerated on base, and he’d need to demonstrate positive impact. I was also willing to hear him out.”
He then claimed that no “live meeting” ever happened and that they weren’t “working together.”
This response was then slated by users on X, who called it “objectively bad practice” and ignorant of Arora’s involvement with past rug pulls.
ZachXBT also responded with a copy and paste of Pollak’s response that replaced Sahil’s name with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and its hacking collective, Lazarus Group, highlighting the absurdity of Pollak’s argument.
Zora is a crypto-based social media platform that tokenises every single post the user makes in a sort of memecoin (sorry, creator coin) market. The crypto exchange Coinbase, via Coinbase Ventures, joined a $50 million funding round for Zora back in 2022.
Indeed, both Coinbase’s Pollak and CEO Brian Armstrong frequently promote Zora and have a vested interest in the platform’s success.
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