Dee Goens has assumed the role of chief executive at Zora, succeeding co-founder Jacob Horne, who is departing after more than six years at the helm. Goens announced the leadership transition in a post on Wednesday.
Leadership Change
“After more than six incredible years as the company’s co-founder and CEO, Jacob is transitioning out of Zora and onto his next chapter,” Goens wrote. “I will be stepping into the CEO role as we continue building and stewarding Zora.”
Staff Reductions and AI Integration
Goens said Zora reduced headcount earlier this year and now operates with fewer than 10 people, a smaller team than at the start of the year. He did not disclose the previous headcount or the number of departures.
“As a result, we’ve gotten more AI native with agents running throughout Slack, writing code, and resolving incidents,” he wrote.
Shift to Custom Pairs
The company has pivoted from the Creator Coins model it launched on Base last year to a focus on trading pairs across multiple networks. Zora opened Custom Pairs on August 20, allowing users to choose the asset a new token is paired against rather than defaulting to $ZORA or a Creator Coin. The feature is live on Base, Robinhood Chain, and Solana and carries a 1% trading fee, of which 0.70% goes to the token’s creator, according to Zora’s documentation.
Goens said more than 4,000 pairs have been created since launch; Zora reported over 2,000 as of August 28. Over the summer, the protocol expanded to Robinhood Chain and Solana, added cross-chain trading across those two networks and BNB Chain, enabled trading through its agent in direct messages, and removed fees previously applied to DMs and comments. Zora also launched attention markets on Solana in February.
Fee data from DefiLlama shows a steep decline on Zora’s Base deployment, the only one tracked. Fees totaled $14,768 in August, down 99.4% from $2.51 million in August 2025. Over the past 30 days, the deployment collected $14,971 in fees, of which $6,165 went to Zora, while its pools traded $551,284 in volume.
Buyback Plans and Priorities
Goens outlined five priorities for the remainder of the year, starting with “aligning our business with $ZORA token holders by implementing buybacks / rewards.” He provided no details on size, funding source, timetable, or mechanism. The remaining priorities are:
- Rebuilding community trust by over-communicating progress
- Onboarding new users with an emphasis on the mobile app
- Restarting distribution of community incentives
- Acting on feedback
“There’s a ton of work for us to get through as we eye the end of the year,” he wrote.
ZORA Token Performance
$ZORA traded at $0.00814 at 19:52 UTC on Wednesday, down 8.5% over 24 hours, up 11.5% over seven days, and up 55% over 30 days, for a market capitalization of $36.3 million and a fully diluted valuation of $81.3 million, according to CoinGecko. The token remains 94.4% below its record high of $0.1456 reached on August 11, 2025.
In the five minutes before Goens’ post at 18:02 UTC, the token was at $0.00831, implying a roughly 2% move since the announcement. Daily trading volume stood at $21.4 million. Ether traded at $2,466.98, down 0.4% over 24 hours.
Horne’s Departure
Horne describes himself on his personal site as “cofounder of Zora, previously at Coinbase.” He and Goens have worked together for more than six years. Horne led Zora through an NFT marketplace, an Ethereum Layer 2, and the June 2025 shift to Creator Coins, which made every Zora profile a tradable token. The Defiant reported in December that $ZORA slipped to $0.038 as the model’s highest-profile launch, the creator coin of journalist Nick Shirley, fell 79% from its record within 48 hours; the token has lost a further 79% since.
“I’ll be sharing more on what I’m spending my time on next in the near future,” Horne wrote. “In the meantime I’m eternally grateful for the community, experiments, lessons and crazy journey over the past few years.”
Goens said Horne is “not going too far” from crypto.
