Zora updates app after ‘Tyson Fury’ account sparks rugpull concerns
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Zora cofounder Jacob Horne said yesterday that “process changes” are happening internally as a result of a public controversy around a supposed “@TysonFury” Zora account being created to represent the British heavyweight boxer on the crypto social app.
Horne seemingly promoted the celebrity’s account in an X post (which, like all Zora accounts, has a coin tied to it). But both Horne’s post and the Zora account in question have since been deleted.
Artemis engineer Crystal Tai flagged the issue after reportedly seeing her Fury creator coin tokens and trade history disappear from her Zora wallet after the celebrity account was taken down.
Blockchain analyst ZachXBT said that the short-lived @TysonFury Zora account was a “celeb coin rug” brought forward by a trader known as “Sahil.”
The analyst shared a screenshot showing a thread of emails from Sahil’s inbox around scheduling a meeting between Sahil and the Zora team, which Base’s Jesse Pollak said was ultimately cancelled.
Sahil has been previously tied to celebrity coins and openly advises traders to “just rug and rug again.”
“Keep extracting and keep rugging,” Sahil said in a video clip shared by Coffeezilla as part of an exposé published in June called “I got this celebrity scammer to confess.”
Despite Sahil’s reputation, Pollak said he was “willing to hear him out.”
“Sahil reached out and said he was interested in onboarding people to Zora,” Pollak wrote. “I told him he had a bad rap, bad actors aren’t tolerated on Base, and he’d need to demonstrate positive impact.”
But that didn’t last long.
“Less than an hour later Sahil revealed that he was in fact lying and a bad actor and Zora removed the profile,” Pollak continued.
Horne appears to have jumped the gun on posting about the Fury account. It’s unclear to what extent Fury himself is aware of the account’s brief existence, and neither his Instagram nor X account have posted about the issue.
I’ve reached out to Fury’s reps for comment, but have not yet heard a response.
Horne noted that Zora has been facing “an increased rate of accounts connecting legitimate socials and then removing them quickly,” and said the team is “working on mitigating this issue generally” to prevent future incidents.
“Zora needs to better distinguish between verified and unverified accounts,” Delphi Digital research analyst Jordan Yeakley observed in a post about the incident.
Last night, Zora announced that it’s updating its app to hide coins that break rules, and is making it easier for holders to sell or transfer hidden coins.
More broadly, “creator coins” and “content coins” might sound like a fun purchase — until the account you bought from gets banned and your bags go to zero.
As an obvious reminder: Buying any micro-cap token like those on Zora is a big risk if your goal is to make a profit.
Zora’s content coin approach has led some artists to criticize it for offering little more than “memetic speculation,” while fans of the platform see it as a new creative outlet and a natural next step for the future of social crypto tools.
For what it’s worth, Fury himself posted a video on Instagram of himself jogging outdoors on Monday, encouraging his 6.7 million followers to, as they say in crypto, go out and touch grass.
“You’ll feel much better,” the boxer said.
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