$BETR token has been on the tear last 2 weeks. BETRMINT mini app even more so and consistently trending in top 3 on the purple app.

BETRMINT turns supporting onchain creators into a game of speculative fun. New rounds drop Mon/Wed/Fri at 3PM EST with $1500 prize pools. They go really quick. Collect content, get a free ticket, spin the wheel, maybe hit 100x.

The app nails the vibe. Signature neon look, degen BGM, slick animations. It’s fun, chaotic in a good way, and lets you support creators while spinning for upside. The one thing I wish was different though is rotating the spin times such that some of them occur at a less ungodly hours for folks in the eastern time zone.

Pinball is a fun game. Pinball: all stars bring the fun in the form of mini app to farcaster.

There are two rooms - degen and farcaster. Each with it's own custom vibes. Look carefully and you will have degen hat, horsefacts, dwr, and more of fc in each of those rooms.

Samuel posed an important question that I believe is not discussed much in crypto space.

What if the incentive is a need for the product? Like really. Why incentivize people to use your product when you can just have it be so good they naturally do? hearing lots of adding quests and money for people to do xyz. Can't we just build good web3 products? - Samuel

The thread has some thoughtful comments and you should check it out. This is something that has bothered me for a while.

A blockchain is an economy. The incentive is there to bootstrap it. A classic example you can see in Farcaster where the degen tipping and the native rewards bootstrapped a economic wave.

Done right, it helps kickstart real usage. But today, most of the attention comes from investors and speculator, not users. This creates a weird challenge where you don't know if your product actually working or is it because someone who holds your token wants it to goes up and it is fine as long as the product works just well enough to keep the narrative going.

Eventually life catches up. The token becomes the product. The product stops mattering.
and it all collapses.

Tokens are a powerful tool and I love the principle "users becoming owners" as a feature. I just don't know if we have found the right answer yet.

We wrapped up Round 5 Echo Rally of The Clankline on Wednesday. Wednesdays have quietly become my favorite day of the week.

Right after one round ends and the next begins, I spend a few hours prompting GPT to create an artwork. We mint it and airdrop it to the top 10 rankers. Each week I pick a different artist or style. So far we’ve done Ghibli, Van Gogh, Picasso’s Cubism, Monet, and this week, Goya.

We haven’t figured out the token or economic layer yet. That comes later once we’ve nailed the fun and usefulness of the mini app. But one day, I hope we can sponsor real artists to make these commemorative NFTs.

I also scroll through the leaderboard, check what top players were up to, which tokens gave them the best PnL, what trades they made. It’s fun. We don’t surface those insights in-app yet. Hopefully soon.

That was the highlights of this week. Keep Clanking. Keep Farcasting.