How Conduit Enables Zora to Run the Top Rollup for NFT Minting: $3.0M in Creator Rewards, 1 ETH Per Month in Onchain Infra Costs

Zora enables creators to get paid for posting onchain. At the heart of it all is the Zora Network, a rollup powered by Conduit. 

At up to 5.5 million unique minting events per month across the web and its native mobile app, Zora is by far the number one rollup for NFT minting. Since launching Zora Network in June 2023, Zora has even at times surpassed minting activity on NFT marketplace juggernauts like OpenSea. All of this has added up to huge earnings for Zora creators at over $3 million in protocol rewards on Zora Network alonem on top of over $7 million in rewards on other chains. Rewards have grown even more following Zora’s introduction of onchain secondary markets. And, with Conduit handling infrastructure, Zora Network is one of the highest-performing rollups in operation.

The Zora rollup stack

Rollup framework: OP Stack 

Settlement layer: Ethereum

Data availability: Ethereum

Zora’s Conduit Marketplace integrations

Onboarding: Privy

Interoperability: Relay

ERC-20 minting: Decent

Dev tools: Tenderly

Indexing: Goldsky

Zora’s growth and support of creators

Zora’s mission is to make creating on the internet free and valuable, with a platform on a purpose-built rollup where creators can earn rewards by posting onchain. In addition to the Zora Network, the Zora ecosystem consists of:

1. The Zora web and native mobile apps
2. The Zora Protocol powering minting and protocol rewards
3. Developer tools and SDKs for creating, collecting, secondary markets, reward claiming, and metadata

Since launch, Zora Network has grown to become the top rollup for NFT minting, and gained over 250,000 daily active users.

Source: Dune

Zora Network has also taken substantial market share from earlier entrants like OpenSea, and during periods of heavy traffic has surpassed all of them to become not just the top rollup for NFT minting, but the top platform overall regardless of onchain setup.

Source: Dune

What separates Zora from other platforms is its native mobile app and unique rewards model. Depending on where exactly the mint occurs (e.g. Zora’s homepage or another platform via Zora contracts) and the token in which the NFT is priced, creators receive between 50% and 95% of mint fees paid by fans. Zora also recently rolled out onchain secondary markets for mints powered by Uniswap, allowing creators to earn secondary royalties as collectorscontinue to buy and sell mints The onchain secondary market model is further supercharged by the recently added support of Zora Network on DEX Screener, one of the top DEX analytics platforms. 

Source: Dune

All in all, Zora creators have collected $3.0 million in protocol rewards from Zora Network since the rollup launched in June 2023.

How Conduit helps Zora scale when traffic spikes: Maintaining performance through 25,000 RPC requests per second

As we covered in our earlier blog on the rollup deployment process, Zora Network went from a self-serve testnet on Conduit to deploying on mainnet in under a month. But deployment was just the beginning. Zora partnered with Conduit to build the rollup in large part because they knew that our all-in-one platform would allow them to offload all ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and infrastructural scaling work so that they could focus on building the best platform possible for creators and fans.

Scaling a platform like Zora Network is no easy feat. In addition to keeping up with the platform’s steady long term growth, the rollup infrastructure also has to withstand the sudden spikes in traffic that come with big mints.

We saw this multiple times in April 2024. While Zora’s usual TPS of 1.5 to 3.0 generally places it in the top three of all OP Stack rollups, April 8 saw one of the platform’s biggest ever mints for the Total Solar Eclipse NFT, in honor of that day’s eclipse on the United States’ east coast. The mint saw TPS shoot up to over 13.3 TPS on Zora’s chain. 

Weeks later on April 29, Zora and Coinbase launched support for the chain in the Coinbase Wallet, leading to a huge influx in traffic. Both events led to rapid increases in the number of RPC requests made to the nodes Conduit maintains on Zora Network.

The Eclipse mint saw RPCs shoot up to 12,900 per second, while the Coinbase Wallet launch led to a whopping 25,000 per second. In both cases though, Conduit Nodes ensured Zora Network continued to perform, with its autoscaling nodes functionality dynamically increasing the number of available nodes as traffic spiked, ensuring users didn’t see increases in latency or failed transactions. “Conduit Nodes allow us to always maintain performance so that our biggest mints go off without a hitch,” said Tyson Battistella, CTO of Zora.

Data availability costs fall to 1 ETH per month following blobs implementation

One issue Zora Network faced initially was data availability costs. While Zora’s onchain revenue from gas fees always exceeded these costs, the chain still had to spend as much as 179 ETH per month to publish transaction data on Ethereum. 

That changed when Optimism released its Ecotone update in March 2024, which allows OP Stack rollups to publish transaction data using the cheaper, more efficient blobs framework. Conduit upgraded Zora’s chain as soon as Ecotone went live, and the network’s data availability costs fell instantly. "Ecotone made Zora much cheaper to run, and Conduit handled the whole upgrade process for us," said Iain Nash, Protocol Lead at Zora.

Since its first full month with blobs in April 2024, Zora Network now pays between 1 and 3 ETH monthly in data availability costs. The decline in fees opens up new possibilities for Zora, and the team didn’t have to lift a finger to implement the upgrade.

End-to-end rollup support and strategic partnership

Deploying a rollup is one thing, but scaling it and maintaining its performance is quite another. Conduit’s partnership with Zora perfectly exemplifies how we act as a complete rollup platform and full-lifecycle partner for our customers. 

"Conduit is a true partner, and does a ton of work in the background to ensure Zora runs smoothly,” said Nash. “That allows us to just focus on building the best experience for creators."

We look forward to supporting Zora as it continues to grow and empower creators.

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