The tipping strategy is probably one of the fundamental drivers of Degen's price, although it is not the only one. The market, the trend of Farcaster, and direct competitors within the network also play a role. However, we could say that, as expected, the strategic changes in Session 6 halted the strong downward trend of the token.

The measures were taken too late; we had been warning about this several months earlier. It was certainly a very controversial decision, especially for those actors who did not hold tokens but had a strong tipping allocation, who were partly the ones making the most noise. However, the effects have been seen in over 600 million tokens being locked, without which the price would most likely have continued to fall.

However, we believe that these measures are not enough to attract sufficient interest in the project. Additionally, the project lacks the necessary resources to be more ambitious and faces other competitors who currently have much more financial strength.

Projects like Wildcard, although they face a significant challenge in moving the community from Warpcast to their own app—since they are competing against a player that will always have updates first—I believe they can gain more traction due to their ability to customize and innovate directly around their project.

But let's analyze the proposed changes for this season and the impact we can foresee.

Shifting the balance of initial allowances back a little bit toward OpenRank

There is an intention to reinvigorate the Openrank aspect to try to involve people with more social capital within the network. It might be thought that the previous approach went to the opposite extreme, and there's a desire to see the impact of restoring some of this activity. Indirectly, this represents a further investment in branding within Farcaster. With 465K token holders and a statistic of 60K active users on this network, it seems like an investment more focused on maintaining the brand rather than significantly capturing value for the token. All of this is happening without making any additional changes to the tipping system that could have a greater impact on the brand.

All of this is happening without announcing or at least making public the participation in Openrank, which delegates a really important part of the project to a third party that adds practically no value to the project nor any ability to have a voice in that protocol. This certainly boosts Openrank significantly without Degen actually capitalizing on anything. I believe that these types of agreements are extremely asymmetrical, and in the end, they do not help the project's growth.

Therefore, from this effort, in the best-case scenario, we can only expect to maintain the Degen brand, but we cannot anticipate growth in new users, and certainly no value capture for the project.

Taking excess undistributed allowances from staking and rewarding the OpenRank casters

This modification somehow aims to penalize the inactivity of users who, despite having a token allocation, do not distribute them. Without knowing the metrics of how many are not being distributed, it's challenging to understand the magnitude of the problem. Perhaps it would make more sense for these users to delegate this type of tipping instead of it being assigned directly to the Openrank group. I believe it might even make more sense to allocate these tokens to initiatives like Gitcoin, which could apply to receive them. I think this could be an area to explore other models.

Assuming this is a significant problem, ultimately, it reinforces the outcomes of the first point.

Adding a rolling window over which tippers can accumulate their allowance

This last point perhaps indicates that the problem of non-distribution is significant, which is why a window is being introduced to give tippers a bit more time. It's an innovation that has worked well for Mask and allows users to have more flexibility. However, this goes against the recurrence of visits and comments, as it may lead to a decrease in activity, with users tending to concentrate it on fewer days. Nonetheless, it should increase tipping by providing more opportunities to spend it

Conclusions

No major changes, as the DEGEN 6 strategy largely remains intact, although there seems to be an attempt to somewhat compensate for the significant allowance change by allowing those with higher social capital to recover. It shouldn't have a major impact; the project really needs more profound strategic changes to alter the current trend. However, these changes have at least allowed for more time for the project to address the strategic shift it needs.

To add some of the strategic changes the project could undertake, I believe that starting to build a public treasury of tokens from other projects would be a really powerful move. However, this would inevitably require reaching agreements that are not as asymmetrical as the one with OpenRank. Agreements that allow for participation in projects supported by the community would be key. Another example could be securing a stake in Farcaster for the community, although I don't think that would be easy. However, it could be possible with other applications like AlfaFrens or even Wildcard. The team's ability to support other initiatives should be leveraged.