What's Changed?

• Airdrop 2, Season 5 kicked off Tuesday, 28 May 2024 at 05:00 UTC time; it will likely end in 4 weeks

• Tip Allowances:

  1. The over-tipping safety margin has been removed; all tips going over your allowance are now ignored

  2. The allowance multiplier, based on the number of casts you've made, has been removed

  3. The retroactive boost, based on the age of your Farcaster account, has been removed

  4. The minimum cast count has been removed

  5. Channel boosts, i.e. the 50% bonus points in certain channels, have been removed

  6. Disqualified users have been reinstated (unclear if this is temporary or not)

  7. To qualify for an allowance, you now need to have tipped at least 5 times in the preceding 7 days

  8. The refresh time, when allowances are topped up, is 00:00 UTC (it used to be 07:35 UTC)

  9. The algorithm for calculating tip allocations has completely changed (more details below)

  10. There is a new dependency on OpenRank for daily data on Dune, which is a potential source of allowance data issues.

  11. A fix was put in place for users impacted by the missing profile display name issue

  12. Deleting a tipping cast no longer invalidates the tip i.e. you can't undo a tip. Beware making a mistake that results in over-tipping, as you will be unable to undo and will not be able to tip again until the next tipping day.

• Raindrops: a new ability to rain $DEGEN down onto repliers of your cast (more details below)

• Everything else:

  1. Restructured and rewrote pretty much everything to include various pieces of information that hasn't been presented before. It's now also possible to link to specific questions/answers.

  2. Added a section about the Roadmap: @jacek has hinted at what will change in late June/July (more details below), but this also includes the big picture from Season 4 through 5, and then 6

  3. Added a section on Being Seen with information about Warpcast Priority Mode & Power Badges

  4. Added a note about @paybot compatibility

  5. Updated Degen Tips Data Status page to include OpenRank

  6. Added note about support and the new /degentokenbase channel

  7. Added useful links (see the full FAQ for the links):

     • @nikolaiii's OpenRank frame for checking your rank

     • @ds8's Rain Check frame

     • @degenfan's Tip Allowance frame

     • @compez's Who Tipped You

     • CastSense

     • OpenRank data on Dune

     • and more!

Tip Allowance Changes

• To combat tipping spam and reward authentic engagement, your tip allowance is now based on a complex engagement metric designed to be more robust against Sybil clusters and gaming than the previous reaction-only based metrics.

• In practice what this means is that your allowance is now based on multiple engagement actions (likes, replies, recasts, mentions, follows), where the impact of each action is adjusted up or down based on the reputation of the person performing the action.

• This calculation runs off the OpenRank protocol, and the specific algorithm being used is the Karma3Labs EigenTrust 2024-03-14 "engagement" strategy (pretrustTopTier, l1rep6rec3m12enhancedConnections).

• Full details of what this means exactly and how it fights bots are in the full FAQ, but here is a summary:

  • Karma3Labs runs their algorithm every day to come up with an engagement score per Farcaster

  • $DEGEN Tips loads that score each day, keeping only the users with a 10K $DEGEN balance, and nerfing 10,000x down the score of users who haven't tipped at least 5 times in the past 7 days

    • These two rules act as an explicit opt-in commitment to the tipping game

    • This is also why your OpenRank will not match your Degen Tips Rank, and why at the start of Season 5 people seem to be jumping ahead of your ranking suddenly throughout the day: the 10,000x nerf on highly-ranking-but-inactive-tippers gets removed as those users start becoming active tippers again (largely owing to news spreading that the tip allocation algorithm has changed)

  • Finally, the adjusted score is then used to rank users from highest score to lowest, and then mapped them to an initial points distribution using an exponential decay function. This is then adjusted per person so that there are a minimum number of points, and adjusted again so that no more than 5 million $DEGEN can be tipped per day.

  • In English: only users < 1000 rank are going to receive a meaningful tip allowance

  • There is a significant problem with the current strategy being used: the top-tier users are all English. @jacek seems to have a plan in mind to switch a custom strategy, and as part of that perhaps this will be addressed.

Raindrops

• Raindrops are a new feature introduced in Season 5 that can be used to promote your cast

• Raindrops involve the following steps:

  1. Fueling Up: sending $DEGEN on Base to the raindrops wallet (a 2% fee applies)

  2. Casting: post a cast with rain <amount> $degen anywhere in the text

  3. Reply: other users reply to the raindrop cast

  4. Rewards: author likes replies to distribute rewards evenly among them

  5. Distribution: recipients of the raindrop receive rewards during regular airdrop claims

• FAQ has a few more important details

Roadmap

• @jacek indicated on his Alfafrens channel that the increased sophistication in measuring engagement will continue through to July, when $DEGEN tips will switch to "Degen native rankings based on channel activity and tipping behavior"

• Broadly, this appears to mean incorporating $DEGEN tip data into the engagement calculation (which would include who receives tips, who those people tip, and so-on)

• He also indicated that he is aiming to get tip airdrops and raindrops on the Degen L3 chain by the end of June, in which case season 5 claims will take place on the Degen L3 chain

• FAQ has a huge writeup on why/how!