Nicholas from Seed Club has spent the last few months quietly proving that the future of product development isn't about building the best product. It's about building where people already are. Crowdfund, a no-fee USDC crowdfunding protocol, hit #1 on Farcaster's mini-app rankings not because it reinvented crowdfunding, but because it understood something most builders miss: distribution beats features every time.
The insight sounds obvious until you see how few people actually execute on it. While most crypto teams obsess over tokenomics and technical architecture, Nicholas identified three ingredients already mixing in Farcaster's ecosystem:
social accounts building authentic relationships,
wallets attached to every account, and
mini-apps that deploy software directly into feeds.
Put those together and crowdfunding becomes inevitable. It's not about building a better Kickstarter; it's about building where the community already trusts each other.
why farcaster is the perfect petri dish for ambitious projects
The numbers tell the story differently than you'd expect. Farcaster injects at least $25,000 USDC weekly into the ecosystem through rewards and developer prizes. Los Fomos raised $10k in 2 days for their podcast by treating their campaign like performance art, planning different themes for each of 14 days with prepared content across multiple formats. A dog account successfully crowdfunded veterinary bills before Crowdfund was officially launched, run by someone who turned out to be a professional fundraiser for Planned Parenthood in her day job.
link in the comments.
"The opportunity I saw was that if you have social accounts that have authentic relationships with one another and they have wallets and you're able to deploy software for them, that crowdfunding was inevitably going to naturally come out of those ingredients," Nicholas explained.
These aren't charity cases or random internet kindness. They're proof points for what happens when you eliminate friction between social proof and financial backing. When someone shares a Crowdfund link, you see exactly who in your network has already supported it. Trust becomes algorithmic. Due diligence becomes social. Traditional crowdfunding suffers from cold start problems because how do you trust a project with no social proof? Farcaster solves this by making every campaign inherently social through donor context and relationship mapping.
seed club's distribution-first product strategy
What makes this approach fascinating is how it inverts traditional product development. Instead of building products and hoping for distribution, Seed Club builds what Nicholas calls "distribution-first software that meets people where they already are." This isn't just smart product strategy; it's survival strategy for crypto products that typically fail not from technical inferiority but from complete inability to get anyone to use them.
The mini-app model doubles down on this thinking. Crowdfund works as a standalone app in any browser, but adding Farcaster's SDK transforms it into something fundamentally different. Instead of wallet addresses, you see people's entire social histories. Instead of push notifications, you get native app notifications. Instead of cold traffic, you get warm introductions through shared connections and visible social proof.
"We develop distribution-first software, which is software that meets people where they already are, and that means being in the feed, chat apps, et cetera," Nicholas said. "It made a lot of sense for us to go after building something that we thought we had a pretty good shot at doing a good job of and that people would want."
Building on Farcaster gives you built-in distribution, social context, and payment rails from day one. You're not competing for attention in an empty ecosystem; you're plugging into an existing social fabric where people already spend time, already trust each other, and already have money ready to move.
beyond charity: building for ambitious projects
Nicholas gets visibly uncomfortable when Crowdfund gets framed as charity infrastructure and sees the real vision for the product as targeting solopreneurs and dev teams raising money for MVPs on the path to seed rounds or launches. The most sophisticated campaigns prove this potential through coordinated strategies that treat fundraising as content marketing.
Los Fomos demonstrated this by launching a complementary Clanker token called "Spice Must Flow" that funneled fees back to their crowdfund. They raised $2,500 through the token alone, making it their single largest funding source. This isn't charity; it's coordinated capital formation using crypto-native tools for genuine product development.
"Really excited to sort of push the brand more in the direction of solopreneurs and teams that are building apps, open source projects, public goods, want to do IRL activations for their cultural projects," Nicholas said. "It's a really cool way to raise an amount of money for either an ambitious cause or a new project you're doing, not dilutive, it's just a no fee crowdfunding protocol."
V2 will make this vision more explicit by building tokenization directly into the platform. Creators can optionally launch tokens during campaigns with fees flowing back to crowdfunds, and successful campaigns will distribute reserved tokens proportionally to donors as thank-you rewards. It's speculation infrastructure wrapped around genuine project funding.
the composability thesis
What makes Farcaster compelling for builders isn't just the existing user base but the composability with other protocols that creates funding mechanisms that don't exist elsewhere. V2 will integrate with Noice app for tipping redirects and Clanker for token launches. When you like a post mentioning a crowdfund, your tip goes to the project instead of the poster. When you launch a token, fees automatically flow to your campaign.
Instead of building isolated products, you build products that compose with the entire ecosystem. Nicholas points to Clanker as the model: "Use Farcaster as a springboard, use its social coherence to build momentum, and then ultimately create assets that can transition to relevance."
Today Seed Club is announcing Crowdfund, a no-fee crowdfunding Mini App designed for Farcaster and the web! Crowdfund helps Farcasters fund good ideas. Crowdfund creators declare their USDC funding target and deadline up-front, and can launch their campaigns in just a few taps.
For Clanker, what started as "send a cast to deploy a token" now generates tens of millions in fees across the broader Base ecosystem. Tokens originate in Farcaster but trade everywhere. The social context launches the project; the broader crypto ecosystem scales it. This is how you bootstrap network effects rather than waiting for them to emerge organically.
the ethics of free infrastructure
At its core, Crowdfund represents a philosophical bet about how funding should work in crypto-native communities. When transaction costs approach zero and social verification is built-in, adding a fee layer becomes extractive rather than value-additive.
"Given the bounty of Farcaster, stable coins like USDC and really cheap transactions, the L2s, I believe that free, no fee public goods funding should be free," Nicholas said. "You should just be able to raise money in USDC without paying any fees beyond the gas fees or whatever it is on the networks themselves."
The V2 features reflect this philosophy through infrastructure improvements rather than revenue features. Open-ended crowdfunding turns successful campaigns into permanent tip jars. ERC20 forwarding contracts enable integration with any protocol deployed on Base. Optional tokenization provides speculation upside without changing the core free model. These make the entire space more valuable rather than extracting value from individual transactions.
the future of building in public
Start with distribution, not features. Build for existing communities, not hypothetical users. Compose with ecosystem protocols rather than competing against them. Make infrastructure free when extraction adds no value.
"The core belief behind the core product is that we shouldn't have to have a fee-bearing layer getting in the way of the benefits that these super powerful tools provide us," Nicholas said. In a world where everything has a fee, building free infrastructure becomes the ultimate competitive moat. When you eliminate extraction, you eliminate the incentive to build competing platforms. You just build better integrations.
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