Farcaster is a social network built on crypto rails. 

Decentralised to the extent that there are nodes (hubs) that serve as a distributed network of servers anyone can set up that store and validate its data.

Yet not fully decentralised to the extent that founders dwr and v, alongside core devs (horsefacts & co),  maintain a locus of control driving adoption/development via the de facto client warpcast.

Genesis Tokens

The 1st era of tokenisation on farcaster started with $POINTS, launched by iammatthias after gentle nudges from the community as a joke, six wrote a great thread about it.

Things quickly got out of hand.

Launching a popular meme is not for the faint of heart. The weight of expectation was a heavy burden to bear. Particularly for something that wasn't ever really supposed to amount to anything. Many without the ecosystem assumed the worst.

Regardless, a successful first experiment.

As a result imaginations flourished, a genesis epoch of tokenized communities on farcaster was born, many of which thrive today: HIGHER, TNX100 & DEGEN.

It’s beyond the scope here to do their stories justice, will share some resources to do so at the end of the article, definitely worth keeping an eye on their founders: deployer, Jacek, LGHT.

Early experiments in tokenisation undergirded by a decentralised social graph achieved varying levels of success and failure. Perhaps by virtue of the sheer number of swings being taken by a deeply developer rich community, the hit rate has been undeniably higher than contemporaries.

Liquidity

'A token is needed for a decentralised protocol to exist' web3 by a16z CTO Eddy Lazzarin

A key issue for any new token/memecoin launch is ensuring users are able to purchase and/or trade your token, effectively buying a stake/interest in its future. There needs to be a sufficient base of assets to enable frictionless efficient transactions to occur. This was solved in various ways by successful first generation tokenised communities on farcaster.

For the "ham" tnx100 token sufficient liquidity was achieved via an NFT mechanism.

For degen, a liquidity mining incentive, plus outside investment established robust liquidity pools.

HIGHER popularised using vehicles like party app to crowdsource liquidity before launch.

This too, quickly, got out of hand (mcaps below as of 7.12.24).

What began in earnest, ended in degeneracy.

A misaligned system of incentives (for long term outcomes) that rewarded bad behaviour quickly and 'good' behaviour slowly led to an mad dash race for LP providors to get out quickly on launches.

This pump and dump style phenomena wasn’t specific to farcaster, but symptomatic of a nascent primitive of universal unmitigated access to speculative memetic instruments enabled by the blockchain. As well as architects unfamiliar with the structural nuances required to circumvent these tendencies.

BOTS

The advance of custom tuned LLMs, plus their integration into the social fabric, has accelerated exponentially with cost of use decreasing while ease of use increases substantially. 

"the original LLMs were built probably five years ago & went mainstream about two years ago with products people use like chatgpt, claude, grok and llama". pmarca, ben & mark show

On X truth_terminal built by AndyAyrey leveraged its KOL (key opinion leader) influence to pump the $GOAT meme to a $1bn+ valuation. On farcaster the first was aether, built by martin, which has earned six figures so far (e.g. via art collab NFTs) & reinvests that in the HIGHER community. 

Arise Clanker

Built by dish and proxystudio, tokenbot is an AI agent that lives inside the farcaster feed as a user account and exists to facilitate the convenient, frictionless creation of tokens purely by tagging it alongside the name of the token you want to deploy, an image, and the ticker.

This unleashed an explosion in tokens launched by the bot, recently surpassing 10,000 with $1bn in cumulative volume, over $7m in revenue from fees & millions sent to their creators as well. 

clanker ~ autonomous memes ~

@_proxystudio

Clanker hit $1 Billion in cumulative volume this week

As @_bloodbones told clanker, "cook"

Tonight, details & repos: new contracts & more on how we can align with a growing ecosystem of users, holders, creators, & clanked up projects

dune.com/clanker_protec…

99

1:16 AM • Dec 6, 2024

Once a user launches a token, the contract is near immediately live and tradable. Universal access for all in the community means the types of tokens have ranged from pure memes to experiments in composability, zksync enabled anonymity, and commerce. 

It has spawned a number of memes and projects including, but not limited to:

• Anon meta: rumourcast.xyz, 33bits.xyz, anoncast.org, 66bits.xyz,

• Client meta: native.fun, supercast.xyz (superanon), streamm.tv, clank.fun

One of the main aspects of contention with Clanker thus far has been the capacity for snipers to purchase tokens at the outset of a token launch, faster than is possible for most (including its creator). These sniper bots are highly likely to dump token thereafter.

Detractors argue that this isn’t optimal, the co-founder of metamask Dan Finlay for instance created the $CONSENT token as an experiment to understand the process. The token pumped to a 4m market cap in one minute after launch spurred by these sniper/bot actors who then dumped hard & made a killing.

Others argue snipers facilitate momentum, attention $ in the long run don't particularly matter if the intrinsic memeability of the underlying token is strong. The team are working on potential solutions that balance the tradeoffs of fair launch accessibility with equal opportunity. This is an unsolved phenomena across the entire ecosystem, so far there are no perfect solutions.

Arise Larry

In an attempt to combat sniping, df and stephancill created larrybot, a token launcher that let people buy at the same price for 15 minutes (has recently been changed to 69 minutes, of course) before deploying. The only caveat being that within that time window the idea/meme has to attract a minimum of 3ETH (which goes to liquidity), and to participate a user has to have a neynar score above 0.9.

This experiment sets the bar at a higher level for the community to graduate a token from its bonding curve and launch it. It locks out snipers from access to the initial allocation of tokens by leveraging the party dao contracts (from earlier) facilitating a powerful crowdsourced aggregation liquidity provisioning. However this still comes with the aforementioned “race to the bottom" incentive drawbacks. 

It’s unclear as yet how the fees will play out. What is clear is that there is scope to evolve the incentive structure inherent in the party format. The tooling itself isn't necessarily good or evil, as we’ve seen from HIGHER and NOGS they can also yield successful results. But the way in which it is implemented, as well as the transparency for users, might just be a key unlock to evolve beyond its current mode.

Regardless, bringing this functionality into the social feed via an agent/bot is nonetheless a step forward: the clanker effect.

"One way incentive alignment was tackled with projects like degen is to have token unlocks & vesting schedules. Another alternative is to have tokens streamed to LP providors over a prolonged period of time, rather than receiving them all at once. This is something superfluid is facilitating across projects delivering airdrops to communities. It mightn't need to be the defacto requirement, but an option such that those buying into projects/memes can decide if that's a useful metric in their buying decision. There are no perfect solutions yet, but useful iterative experiments to consider." Papa

Arise Onsen

Built by Hellno, onsenbot is a no frills farcaster frames powered bot that streamlines the process of launching a token as well as enabling its creator to get an initial allocation from the outset.

Any farcaster user can participate by inserting an image & choosing what percentage of the allocation to receive (the default suggested is 3%). Once the token is created, they are sent a DM with the details. The dexscreener only shows up once the token is bought by someone. In my experience the creator is left to bootstrap their own liquidity from zero. Their fee take is a competitive at 5% (compared to 75% of the 1% uniswap fee for clanker for instance).

Arise Terminal

Carlos built heyerminal a bot that lives in the feed and enables token launches. I haven’t used it yet but it is live and well with all its tokens viewable on the heyterminal web page.

The flow

• Deploy a token: e.g. launch $moon (their first token)

• Airdrop to a tagged account e.g. launch $moon send to @papa

• Airdrop to a channel: launch moon airdrop to /tipothehat

• Creator: 4% supply / 50% LP fees

• Attach token image with your cast
  

Having built the farcaster index, terminal is the latest token focused platform from carlos that pulls in data from across the base ecosystem and makes it convenient for users to interact via their own dex.

Anyone should be able to launch a token economy. Own a wallet, a FC account? Create a token for your community, your gym collective, hell even your cats. Carlos

Arise Launcher

Launcher is a bot token launcher on farcaster built by kompreni and is designed to foster long-term commitment using long-term incentives. The approach includes several key innovations:

• Preventing price sniping by implementing a fixed-price Uniswap liquidity pool for the first 10 ETH

• Offering liquidity provider incentives of 1% monthly for two years

• Creating opportunities for "sweat equity" through a jobs protocol that allocates 12.5% of tokens for work contributions

• Establishing a revenue model where 90% of ETH trading fees go to token holders

• Providing a more founder-friendly token allocation of 2.5% vesting over one year.

"It's a toolkit to run your startup onchain." kompreni

The first 12.5% of the supply on uniswap is LP'd at a fixed price w/ 80eth market cap. After that is sold off, the full Uniswap curve kicks in for 50%. Launcher isn't an agent with a personality (i.e. custom tuned LLM), its purely a bot so the the method to create a token is "@launcher launch $[ticker]".

The goal is to create a more sustainable and equitable token launch mechanism that discourages predatory trading practices and incentivizes meaningful participation. Kompreni

Notable Mentions

Beliefs was built by dalechyn and kienfam originally as a farcaster native bot token launcher. However for now they have pivoted to focus on X and telegram with a promise to be back soon.

Dreamcoins (wow), built by the zora team, have a unique approach to launching. One can actually launch wow tokens from clanker, heyterminal and others. They have a unique set up in that a token has to graduate (reach $120k mcap) on their platform before completing its bonding curve and being released into the wild. This is to ensure there is adequate liquidity and a solid enough base for the token to eventually flourish. This enables the creator/community to secure tokens before snipers, but restricts visibility until it hits this benchmark. Dreamboy is the token launcher, I am unsure if its live on farcaster.

thanks for reading, consider minting this article & encouraging more like it, catch you on the next

Connect

• Farcaster @papa — https://warpcast.com/@papa

• Lens @papajams — https://lenster.xyz/u/papajams

• Twitter @papajimjams — https://twitter.com/papajimjams

Read/Watch

• Funding the future on farcaster with $Degen by Papa

• Meme Money by LGHT

• Farcaster, the new crypto GTM by Chapter One

• DEGEN Token on Base: Explained by TrustWallet

• Higher??? By LGHT (on the launch)

• The origin of degen with Jacek by Coop

• Making Memecoins in Seconds with AI on Farcaster by Bankless

• Memecoins, But Automated w/ Proxystudio | Ep. 55 by Seed Club