If you have recently played with Base Chain, then you must know that the hottest token on it is called $Degen, which has a market value exceeding 1.5 billion US dollars today. After the Degen channel on Farcaster was launched in January 2024, it allowed users to use $Degen to reward high-quality content creators. So far, there are over 83,000 holders and it is still growing rapidly. So how did $Degen grow into a "golden dog" with a billion dollars?
0/n New Airdrop Play (Reward)
Since January this year, $Degen has quickly become popular in the Farcaster community, and community members reward their favorite high-quality content in the form of comments + DEGEN. Degen will get the allowance to reward others daily based on the user's Farcaster activity and engagement. The airdrop quota is based on the total rewards received from others every season, so users need to post good content on Farcaster to get rewards. Many active users even reach a daily reward limit of thousands of dollars.
1/n Niche Community
The price of $Degen rose with the heat of the community, and at this time the market value of Degen rose from 10m to about 50m, and conversely, Degen also brought a wave of user growth for Farcaster.
Pingfeng's description of Degen's reward is very apt:
Degen's mutual rewards makes me feel like a group of people standing around a huge bowl. Everyone can pick up a spoon that is about the same in length and diameter and feed others but not themselves. How much they can feed depends on their own allowance. The more they interact and reply to each other, the more the allowance they get.
2/n Angel Round Fundraising
In February, Degen announced the completion of an angel round of financing of 490.5 ETH (about 1.47 million USD), led by 1confirmation, with participation from Farcaster OG and others. The funds will be used for the development of the Degen ecosystem and community. It can be seen that a portion of the share has been given to some community projects, such as Drakula, which also lays the groundwork for Degen's utility.
3/n Utility
The decentralized TikTok on the Base chain, Dracula, was launched on March 14th. Dracula was created by Alex Masmej, the issuer of the fan token $ALEX, and received investment from Paradigm.
Because of the previous 10m DEGEN grant from the Degen community (currently worth about 500,000 US dollars), Dracula's app uses degen as a token. Users can use degen to purchase their favorite bloggers, similar to the gameplay of Friend tech. Users can also earn points by publishing and watching short videos, sharing links, and buying creator tokens, and use BLOOD for rewards. In addition, similar to the NFT casting platform zora, community projects Bracket.Game and Rounds.wtf also use degen as a native token. At this time, Degen's market value has grown to around 70m-100m. DegenCast will also use Degen to buy the creator's Key.
4/n Degen L3
Degen began its impressive journey on March 20th. First, on March 29th, Degen announced a collaboration with Syndicate to develop L3 based on Base. The Gas token for Degen Chain is also DEGEN, and as of now, Degen Chain has had over 4 million transactions and more than 100k wallets.
The second piece of news is that Farcaster's parent company, Merkle Manufactory, raised funds at a valuation of 1 billion US dollars, led by the founder of Paradigm. Since Farcaster has not issued a token, the community began to view this financing as a positive development for $Degen.
Since Degen launched L3, its entire valuation space has been benchmarked against major public chains, and it can even be said that $Degen has become the token for Base. The market value soared like a rocket, rising to 2B within a few days.
5/n Inspiration from Degen
Degen originated from the Farcaster community, rooted in the Base chain, it can be said that it has mutually accomplished with Farcaster/Base. The price of Degen attracts users, and without the Farcaster community, Degen would not have been generated. The Farcaster community project also provides an application scenario for Degen.
The narrative of Degen evolved from a community project's self-entertaining token, to the core project's social utility token, and then to the public chain's gas token. From 10M to 100m to 1B, every narrative progress represents an increase in valuation magnitude.
The rise of Degen also provided a path for the development of the Farcaster community project. Subsequent projects like Drakula, DegenCast, etc. are all worth looking forward to.
6/n Accounts worth following on Farcaster
Vitalik: More active on Farcaster than X, https://warpcast.com/vitalik.eth
DWR: Farcaster founder, https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth
Varun Srinivasan: Farcaster CTO, https://warpcast.com/v
Jesse Pollak: Basechain CEO, https://warpcast.com/jessepollak
Linda Xie: Former famous investor, bountycaster builder, https://warpcast.com/linda
Nick Tomaino: 1confirmation investor, https://warpcast.com/nick
YB: Famous investor, https://warpcast.com/yb
3LAU: Musician, https://warpcast.com/3lau
Jacek, Degen founder, https://warpcast.com/jacek
Alex, Drakula founder, https://warpcast.com/alexmasmej.eth
Liang : The earliest OG of Farcaster Chinese community, DegenCast builder, https://warpcast.com/liang
7/n A few channels worth paying attention to:
Degen: No need for explanation, the birthplace of Degen coin, https://warpcast.com/~/channel/degen.
Base: Content for Base chain, https://warpcast.com/~/channel/base
Chinese: Chinese content, https://warpcast.com/~/channel/chinese
DegenCast: https://warpcast.com/~/channel/degencast
The hats always stay on.
(pic from Zuphioh@zebra on Farcaster)
