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Farcaster Fridays: My Top 3 Highlights from This Week

A Noice World, The Leaderboard, and Precoin

The tipping culture and mechanics has gone through a few iterations on farcaster. First was $degen. You got an allowance. You replied “69 $degen” to a cast. Tip sent. Everyone saw it. It worked because it was simple, loud, and more importantly free. (You couldn't claim the allowance for yourself)

Then came Moxie’s version. Tipping was automatic. You didn’t send anything and the moxie tokens streamed quietly based on engagement you received and could be claimed later. It was clever although had a lot of complexity which made it hard to understand. That plus I guess the whole way it worked it felt more like the protocol rewarding you for good content as opposed to people showing their appreciation for your work.

More recently, Farcaster introduced a native tipping feature. Every Tuesday, it shows you people you interacted with the most. You can tip them with USDC using the farcaster native wallet. It is manual but fast and seamless. Plus, farcaster has designed it in a way that people talk about the tips they have sent and received which brings the visibility back.

Noice takes it further. Every interaction becomes a tip. You don’t think about it. You just interact. The tip happens in the background. The best UX are often invisible and that's what in my opinion makes Noice super cool.

However, there is a tradeoff. Visibility. Good deeds such as generosity and gratitude should be seen. Not just for product visibility, but because it makes people feel good. When you know your gesture landed, it means more. And I feel that’s something worth designing for.

The Leaderboard is cryptic and maybe that’s what makes it fun.

You open the mini app and, true to the name, you see a leaderboard. I'm still not sure though what the leaderboard is about. But it’s got this oddly satisfying flow that nudges you through a bunch of actions like sharing the frame or tipping random people 69 $degen (actual wallet-to-wallet transfers). As you go through it, your rank keeps updating. The notifications are well-timed. You’re not entirely sure what you’re chasing. But it works.

I have seen quite a few folks sharing this frame. I do hope it evolves into something more.

I've so got very mixed feelings about this one. I absolutely love the concept here. The execution though leaves a lot to be desired. Precoin lets you book coins that people of farcaster haven't launched yet.

The first one was Phil’s. You could buy Phil precoins, and when the real token launched, the app would auto-snipe it for you. You’d get your share based on how many precoins you held. The catch? You’re hoping Precoin snipes early before the actual snipers show up and dump it on you. That’s exactly what happened. And yeah, I and many got rekt. Down 90% in minutes of launch and it wasn't fun.

That said, it’s a hard problem. But also an interesting one with a pretty interesting proposition baked in.

I shut down Tasseo towards the end 2024. Isn't easy letting go of things you had been working on for years. Since then I been experimenting and trying to figure what I should be working on next. Clanker happened in November and I got pulled into trading tokens. It has been an intellectually stimulating exercise. Last few months, I and Puneet had been iterating and building tooling for ourselves to trade a bit smarter with automatic controls such as stop loss and laddered sells in place.

This month, we took part in the Base Builds hackathon (results drop today ) and shipped a mini app that scans your wallet, looks at your trades, and shows how things could’ve played out with controls like stop loss and laddered sells.

You can check it out here:

I think I’m a little happier than I was in the tail end of 2024. There was a bit of a fog back then. But I’ve started building again and I been writing code after a long long time. It’s been fun. Feels good to feel like myself again.