In brief
- Adult film brand Fake Taxi is behind one of the top creator coins on Zora.
- The brand promises exclusive perks for top holders and a long-term vision for the token.
- Zora has clawed its way into the token launchpad wars, launching thousands daily alongside Pump.fun and LetsBonk.
The taxi rides may be fake, but the coin is real. Reality porn company Fake Taxi has launched a “creator coin,” a new spin on social tokens and meme coins, via Zora on Base. And it’s speeding up the charts.
Since rebranding to become the home of creator coins on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network Base, Zora has introduced thousands of diverse creators to its platform, which “coins” or creates a token for each post and profile created.
None have been as successful as the Fake Taxi Coin, which trades as FAKETAXI, the token launched by the U.K.-based adult film company Fake Taxi. The company has been around since 2013, and makes roughly $8 million in yearly revenue from its content, according to data from RocketReach and Zoominfo.
Trading at a $10 million market cap as of Thursday afternoon, Fake Taxi’s token tops the Zora’s creator charts, more than doubling the market cap of tokens for popular creator and artist Jack Butcher and the Zora co-founder Jacob Horne.
“FAKETAXI is the official token of FakeTaxi.com. Fully backed and supported by the original founders and owners,” an X account associated with the official Fake Taxi account posted in its “Backseat Manifesto,” the official declaration of its token goals. “As lovers of crypto and all things on-chain, we have been in the trenches alongside you, and now it is time to carve out our own path on the blockchain.”
According to the manifesto, owning the token will provide holder perks like content leaks and storyboard discussions, with behind the scenes content and video chats with performers. The content will be made available to those in the “Backset Billionaires Club,” a collection of holders that maintain at least 1,000,000 FAKETAXI tokens, or around $10,500 worth at current prices.
The token has quickly gained in popularity, attracting more than 1,000 individual holders according to on-chain analytics tool DEXScreener since launching a couple weeks ago.
The attention comes at a critical time in the token launchpad wars, as Zora aims to gain launchpad market share from leading platforms like Pump.fun and LetsBonk, which have been dueling for supremacy on the speedy Solana network for the last few months.
Though previously dominated by Pump.fun, LetsBonk surged to a leading market share in daily tokens created in early July, and has extended its lead since then. But that share has diminished, ultimately being flipped emphatically by Pump.fun on Wednesday when the platform launched 24,081 tokens, or six times more tokens than LetsBonk, according to data from the Memecoin Wars Dune dashboard.
Zora has frequently surpassed that number since its pivot to creator coins, but not all tokens are created equal.
Leading tokens from Pump.fun and LetsBonk, like FARTCOIN and USELESS, hold $995 million and $205 million market caps, respectively–far surpassing the $10 million market cap that FAKETAXI boasts for Zora.
That’s unlikely to deter FAKETAXI community members though, who have adopted the slogan, “Don't ask where we're going, just get in.”