Our "Farcaster 2026" writing contest has ended.

It's been a lot of fun - from the first announcement, through the podcast with Chris Carella where we recapped some top ideas, up to yesterday's final jury voting.

In the end, we received over 40 submissions from a diverse group of authors. There's been people from Nouns (Bradq), long-time Farcaster users (Pichi), artists (Pierre Pauze), founders (Mike from Abundance), marketers from top crypto projects (Shamanov) and many many more.

In this contest, we had two paths, as described in our announcement post:

The first track is called “Popular Vote” and its winners will be determined by the number of upvotes received on Kiwi.

The second track is called “Jury vote” and its winners will be determined by the jury from the Purple & Kiwi teams.

(...)

The "Jury Vote" track is meant to reward posts that we consider good but didn't receive too much attention, so we are leaning into having 6 different winners in these 2 tracks. But if we see some outstanding work, it is not impossible for an author to win prizes in both tracks.

Let’s start with the Popular Vote winners.

You can find below 5 most popular essays that won ETH from the prize pool. The results were calculated based on eligible votes cast before the 17th of February at 18:00:00 CET.

The reason we have 5 essays instead of 3 in TOP3 is because two posts reached the #1 spot and two other posts reached the #3 spot. So we just split the rewards accordingly.

[$] 3rd place: Farcaster 2026: A planetary onchain economy
by 183aaros.eth (9 upvotes)

Aaros describes how Farcaster aims to create a decentralized, onchain society and how their creators and wallets might build a planetary economy.

Prize won: 0.1 ETH

[$] 3rd place: Farcaster and the new narrative machine
by auditless.eth (9 upvotes)

Peteris shows how Farcaster becomes a new narrative machine, where decentralization, AI agents, and memes redefine social media’s role in collective sense-making.

Prize won: 0.1 ETH

[$] 2nd place: Why Farcaster needs Extended Reactions
by 0xabundance.eth (10 upvotes)

Mike shows how Extended Reactions (ERs) could integrate responses beyond simple likes and recasts, and make Farcaster a more cozy place.

Prize won: 0.2 ETH

[$] 1st place: Growth Is About People, Story, & Onboarding
by bradq.eth (14 upvotes)

Bradq proposes that Farcaster put their most active and valuable users in the center of storytelling, because users join social networks to meet other interesting people.

Prize won: 0.3 ETH

[$] 1st place: Why Farcaster should learn from Voldemort
by pierrepauze.eth (14 upvotes)

Pierre shows how Farcaster should diversify by embracing not only builders but also traders, meme lords, and artists which would help it gain cultural depth.

Prize won: 0.3 ETH

As we mentioned before, the "Jury Vote" track was intended to highlight essays that might not have been that popular but are still very interesting. The jury consisted of Mac from Kiwi, Chris from Nouns, as well as Jihad and Six. It wasn't easy to choose the winners, but we finally made it.

Here are the results.

[$] 3rd place: Main Street vs. Wall Street: The Battle for Farcaster’s Soul
by mkkstacks (2 upvotes, 8 jury votes)

Mkkstacks says that Farcaster faces a choice: emulate Wall Street’s extractive, speculative culture or embrace Main Street’s collaborative, community-driven approach.

Prize won: 0.2 ETH

[$] 2nd place: Game-changing potential of AI agents
by abhijithg (5 upvotes, 9 jury votes)

Abhijithg shows how AI agents might reshape Farcaster, accelerating decentralized social innovation.

Prize won: 0.3 ETH

[$] 1st place: Farcaster is a car
by tombeck.eth (4 upvotes, 10 jury votes)

Tom shows that Farcaster is a new social protocol that, like early cars, requires a transformative test drive to show its value.

Prize won:  0.5 ETH

These were the winning posts, but we received over 40 submissions. This means that there are over 30 other essays that we haven't mentioned in this recap. You can find all of them here.

Thanks to all the participants for sharing your takes!

We also want to thank Purple for sponsoring the prizes and co-organizing the event. We also want to share a shout-out to media that helped us spread the word about the contest, such as Metaversal newsletter, Paragraph, GM Farcaster, bountycaster, trpplffct & ted, and everyone who promoted our casts and voted in our contest.

PS: If you won, please DM @macbudkowski on Telegram to learn about the next steps.

PS2: And if you would like to learn more about Kiwi, you can dig in here.