In Brief:
- On Sept. 2, Base began accepting applications for a Creator Grant Program that pays independent creators as much as $4,000 for content covering the network, its ecosystem and its builders.
- These are cash grants only — no tradable creator tokens, no engagement-based token payouts — marking a departure from the approach Base used across its social products.
- Still undisclosed: the size of the budget, the number of creators to be funded, the method for setting individual grant amounts, and the closing date for applications.
Cash is back on the table for creators working with Base.
According to a post from the official Base account on X, the network started taking applications Sept. 2 for a Creator Grant Program that offers independent creators up to $4,000 to make content about Base, its ecosystem and its builders.
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 ↓@BaseView on X ↗
The package extends past the payment itself. Those chosen also get plugged into a pipeline of builders they can feature, and their work stands a chance of being amplified by Base’s regional accounts.
Who qualifies
Eligibility covers writers turning out deep dives, memes, analysis or social media threads. Applications are open as well to streamers, hosts of live shows, creators behind recurring programming, and independent video makers.
Grants are also available to educators who want to produce Base content in their own languages.
Outside the main grants, there’s a “Creator of the Week” bounty track worth up to $500 for emerging creators.
What Base didn’t say
Most of the operational detail went unaddressed in the announcement. Base stopped short of saying whether each accepted applicant collects the full amount, and it offered no explanation of how individual grant sizes will be set.
No quota has been published, no review cycle stated, no overall budget disclosed and no application deadline given. Rather than a dedicated program page, the post directed applicants to a form.
The model that came before this one
This program arrives after Base backed away from content coins and its earlier Creator Rewards scheme, and none of the token mechanics that defined those efforts carry over.
When Base App debuted in July 2025, Farcaster drove its social layer while a Zora integration converted posts into tradable assets. Zora hit its high point in August 2025: over 1.6 million creator coins minted, close to 3 million unique traders and upwards of $470 million in volume. Within a month, ZORA had climbed nearly fivefold.
The run didn’t last. Coins spun up automatically from posts by the official Base account lost 95% of their value in a matter of hours, and ZORA itself would later drop 95%, erasing roughly $500 million in market cap. Over the same stretch, Base’s total value locked fell from around $5.3 billion in January to about $3.9 billion by mid-February — a $1.4 billion decline.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tackled the strategy question on July 13, replying 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
Grant programs have become Base’s standard response to criticism from within its own ecosystem. When a builder complained on Aug. 24, the network answered in public by rattling off three builder-support initiatives started since Aug. 6 — a builder call, a builder grant program and the fourth cohort of Base Batches — while noting an Ecosystem Fund that has supported more than 30 teams.
The retroactive Base Builder Grants have been running since March 2024 through more than 20 cohorts, with payouts that typically land between 1 and 5 ETH per recipient. Weekly Builder Rewards come in at 2 ETH.
Creator Rewards, on the other hand, no longer exists. Base pulled the plug in February alongside the Farcaster-powered feed, closing the program Feb. 15 and issuing final payouts Feb. 18. Across roughly six months it had handed out more than $450,000 to over 17,000 creators — an average of about $26 apiece. Creator Coins, the ERC-20 tokens attached to Base App profiles, made it through the cull, with claims and earnings still processed on Zora.
Base founder Jesse Pollak, who stepped back from running Base App and passed it to Jordan Fish, said the wagers on Farcaster, Zora, miniapps and creator coins “disintegrated completely” in Q1 2026. What the app needed, Pollak said, was a single primary focus, and “that thing is trading.”