One of my favorite places to hang out in Warpcast is the chess channel. There are a lot of people talking about current events in chess and posting tactics for others to solve. People will respond to the tactics by writing out their answers move by move in a new cast. Usually, the first person who responds correctly will be awarded $degen for their efforts. It's a lot of fun.
I thought it would be even more fun if you could interact with tactics in a Farcaster feed. Frames are the perfect way to experiment with making this happen. I think of Frames as interactive applications that can be embedded into a Farcaster feed and usable in any FC client. The first Frames have been relatively simple, but it doesn't require a stretch of the imagination to see how these can evolve into full-blown games and social interactive experiences over time. They are very reminiscent of Zynga's Farmville infiltrating Facebook years ago.
I wanted to create a Frame where you could solve tactics within it instead of having to post a picture in a cast, reply with answers, and wait to hear if you were correct. These types of web applications exist (
chess.com
has a great tactic application), but why not make it an experience inside the chess channel feed? I created a
and a caster responded to it with a quick and dirty version of a Frame. We worked together over a couple of days to refine the experience, and ultimately got to a good place.
While it's not perfect, my goal was to make something that was fun for people who like chess on FC to use, and to hopefully inspire people to push the envelope of what Frames can do. Can we build real interactive games inside them? Can they be social or multi-player experiences? When can I play chess against another FC user in a separate client but an audience could follow along in real time in a Frame? Are these ideas even possible?
This was a fun experience for me because it helped push my thinking around two areas. The first is the idea of Frames as interactive applications, or "programmable anythings" as I call them in my head. We are really at the very beginning of what is possible here. I haven't seen many instantiations of Frames that have actual inputs other than pressing a button. The Frame we created through this bounty has a text prompt, but there will inevitably be other modes of interaction within them over time. The skeuomorphic expression of this is Farmville in the FC feed, but something weird and native to the onchain experience will emerge and be very special, and it will happen after a lot more collective experimentation.
The second area is around the future of headless applications. When I created a bounty on bountycaster, I did not use a bountycaster client. Everything was done entirely within the Warpcast feed. I simply crafted an initial post, someone responded, and a job spec was fulfilled.
This experience reminded me of a post I wrote about agent native applications. The premise is that in the near future, agents will act on our behalf and existing marketplaces or services that require your eyeballs to visit their website or specific client will not be compatible with them for a whole host of reasons, but headless ones will and they'll emerge to fill this need. These headless applications are already emerging onchain. Sometimes they are referred to as headless marketplaces. Using them is pretty magical and the implications are profound when we think about the future architecture of internet services and marketplaces.
Bountycaster is an example of a headless application that has emerged in the FC ecosystem. You can think of it like Fiverr or Upwork, but instead of having to do everything through a specific website, I can initiate or fulfill a job request from anywhere within Farcaster. This means that as a job-doer my reputation is not tied to Fiverr or Upwork. It's portable across any onchain application and I can bring it with me. And when I want some work to be done, in this example the creation of my chess tactics Frame, I can post it anywhere onchain and it can be distributed and responded-to through any client built on FC. Being headless enables a job post to proliferate and be accessed everywhere onchain, and any job-doer now has a portable and self-owned profile, work history, and reputation. This is an architecture that is also compatible with an AI agent-centric future. I invested in an iteration of this Bounty concept years ago with a project called Ahoy, but bountycaster pushes this several steps further into the future.
There are some obvious holes I encountered in the bountycaster experience, but those will all be patched (eg escrowing payment at the outset of a job and having a network of arbiters that can subjectively determine when a bounty has been fulfilled to spec). The whole process felt familiar but entirely novel. It was a taste of things to come in the future and yet another reason to be excited about the pace of rapid experimentation onchain that's creating fun and useful consumer experiences in entirely new ways.
Social media platforms have evolved in a variety of different ways. Some are about sharing things with friends, and many of them have become a way for creators to put content into the world to entertain an audience. It very much feels like the dominant platforms today have become sterile. We use them, but they’re not fulfilling, nor do they have the pioneering sense of adventure and wonder they did as they emerged many years ago.
Recently I wrote about how something magical is happening onchain in consumer social. The Warpcast community feels like the early days of Twitter, and the openness of Farcaster has made the feed an experimental playground similar to early Facebook when third-party apps like Zynga could build companies on top of the FB social graph.
There’s an emergent playbook for building consumer social apps in web3. It begins with a skeuomorphic version of the web2 counterpart that the crypto community embraces. People onchain have a real willingness to experiment with new things, so acquiring early users is much easier in web3 right now than it is or was in web2. During this first phase, it’s important for application developers to hone in on what makes their product uniquely differentiated from their offchain comp. What are some of the defining characteristics that are only possible onchain, and how will that create preference amongst users so it can cross the chasm to a non-crypto audience? Here are some early and obvious ideas:
Applications that enable creators to monetize have the ability to offer meaningfully lower costs. This is the “your margin is my opportunity” play. Why pay Patreon a high rake when you can use Hypersub? Why Substack when you can use Paragraph which is 50% cheaper? Less extractive fees will create economic preference amongst creators, and these savings can be reinvested in their art and livelihood.
Financialization is a major feature of crypto. With onchain social media, creators can do things like allow their audience to benefit and participate in a creator’s growth and upside economically. That’s something that has never existed before and a real incentive for fans to help creators expand their audience and flourish.
We talk a lot about the ability to own your audience and bring it with you wherever you go. This is one of the pillar features of web3. Farcaster cannot shut down your account the way Elon Musk can. Your audience belongs to you which means that you can distribute an infinite variety of content to them through a multitude of different applications and interfaces.
Open data and composability enable a lot of experimental things to happen in crypto. Usually when someone shares media to a platform, it stays within the confines of that platform. It’s hard for it to proliferate across the internet and make its way into a variety of different applications. The only place this really happens in web2 is when a publisher embeds a tweet, instagram, or video. In web3, an atomic piece of media or data can be reshared across any onchain platform, and a creator can and will consistently be compensated for its distribution regardless of where it was originally posted. Because media is tied to your identity instead of a specific platform, it can live in many different places simultaneously, wherever you choose to go. That is immensely powerful.
There are still plenty of hurdles to deliver a UX that will draw in an offchain user base. Current onchain social applications are too insidery. Connecting crypto wallets is not something the average internet user understands. Paying with tokens is not a widespread behavior. These things will need to ultimately be abstracted away from UX in order to onboard billions of people. Fortunately, many tools that help solve these issues are being developed and adopted.
Ultimately, users go where their friends and content creators are, and creators go to pockets of the internet where they can get distribution. Right now, given the lack of a scaled onchain social network, robust distribution is a missing link for offchain creators looking to make the migration. Perhaps the rapid experimentation and composable nature of onchain consumer applications will help to solve this problem. We may very well find that sooner rather than later web3 offers a much richer distribution opportunity across a variety of different networks and platforms, and there’s an argument that it’s easier to be early to a network and build an audience as opposed to arriving late to the party. It seems that the right approach is not to try to convince web2’s biggest creators to drink the kool-aid, but to make sure that the onchain gravity is so strong that tomorrow’s biggest creators emerge on web3.
For a long time, the web3 ecosystem had to organize and communicate on web2 platforms. From the memes of crypto twitter to the project-specific communities that congregated in Discord and Telegram, there were no dominant web3 platforms. That is changing quickly and there is something special happening in web3 social right now.
Over the past several years, we have seen a series of new projects emerge that finally give the web3 community a place of their own. They are unique, constantly evolving, and growing quickly. These projects have real tailwinds because people who like crypto have an explicit preference to use crypto-native products instead of web2 ones (even if they are less convenient to use), they are willing to experiment with and try new things, and nascent communities are always more fun than big ones with a lot of noise.
The trend for a lot of these projects is that they begin as a skeuomorphic representation of their web2 counterparts to attract an initial audience, and then they rapidly experiment to introduce weird and crypto-native features. This is just the beginning of what we are seeing:
I’m sure there are plenty of other examples I am missing here. In all of these instances, the web3 version initially mirrors the web2 counterpart, but then they quickly diverge. A lot of times this divergence is marked by some crypto-native feature: financialization and minting as a web3 version of “liking,” things that can only happen because of web3 composability like Frames, the emergence of memetic tokens that transcend applications like DEGEN, etc. All of these things are new, they are weird, and they are uniquely web3. The other characteristic they share is they are simply more fun and entertaining than anything that exists in web2.
We are now beyond the hand-wavey language and posturing and pounding the table on “everything needs to be open and portable and LOUD NOISES” We are seeing applications emerge that are fun, have real DAU and utility, are birthing products and memes that transcend beyond those communities, and represent the beginning of a new wave of emergent social networks that are fundamentally different. And while it’s still early (when will it not be“early?”), things feel more promising, useful, and engaging than they ever have.
At the very least, it’s a joy to see so many people rapidly experimenting together, building new products and features that could have never existed before, trying new things, and having a good time. It’s very reminiscent of early Twitter where an early community of curious people took a platform and morphed it to their liking. Now it gets to happen all over again, just with a new set of tools, functionality, and a permissionless and open system to ensure its future belongs to everyone.
