Today we're doing This Wednesday in Farcaster. Hold tight, because TWiF format experimentation will continue. Your forbearance is appreciated.
Anyway, if you opened the app at all today, you were bombarded with celebratory posts about Farcaster Pro. We'll get into that. Plus the ecosystem updates most relevant to builders of mini apps, startups, or whatever else you've been hacking on
By the way, the Warpcast brand is dead. That means Farcaster is the name of both the protocol and its most popular client. This is potentially confusing… but the old setup was also confusing, in a way that turned off potential users. So here we are.
Farcaster Pro is an optional subscription that costs $120/year — charged in USDC on Base, naturally, and only available to purchase on mobile. (Okay, also charged in warps, the now-deprecated Warpcast internal currency, in order to give people a productive way to unload those.)
The first 10,000 subscribers will be airdropped a hotly anticipated NFT, designed by miguelgarest.eth, sometime in the near future.
Aside from the NFT, which is purely commemorative, the Pro subscription will include some extra features, such as longer casts and the ability to post four images at once (instead of just two). However, the only Pro feature available right now is a snazzy purple checkmark next to your username.
That was enough. Farcaster sold more than 10,000 subscriptions, garnering $1.2+ million USDC. Happily, "100% of revenue will go to creator and developer rewards," in the interest of protocol sustainability. Farcaster CEO dwr.eth described his approach to protocol-based subscription features, if you're curious.
He also explained why the team shipped Farcaster Pro today, despite minimal benefits being available:
For startups, every day you delay something matters. Every time you say 'this thing is different and worth delaying' you degrade your one true advantage as a startup: speed. It compounds. And then a few years later when it ultimately doesn’t work out, you likely missed out on something like 100% more opportunities to ship. Action produces information. Your pre-product-market-fit startup is not Apple.
Crypto users love to buy on hype so this was undoubtedly the right decision. Also, "Action produces information" is a banger.
It's worth noting that the Pro subscription is not intended to elevate subscribers above all other users: "Your reach, visibility and rewards are unaffected," regardless of whether you sign up. As for the users' interpretation of their new status… well:
"silence, crypto founder. a Farcaster Pro user is speaking" — @pugson
More Pro trivia and fast-follow responses:
List of subscribers who qualified for the NFT
Dune counter of Pro members who signed up onchain (not using warps), from @ilemi
Incoming Pro purchases on BaseScan (again, doesn't include users who bought with warps) via @0x770dbeef
Neynar will support the Pro designation once it's available in the protocol
Pro subscribers are already receiving special airdrops
Paperview added an option to grant free content to Pro subscribers only
$PROCOIN is getting some traction as "the community-led governance token for Farcaster Pro users," though what they will be governing remains amorphous
The advertising mini app Amps "allows you to filter your followers based on Farcaster Pro subscriptions"
As Phil noted when announcing that new Amps filter: "Onchain credentials = permissionless integration."
Various updates and announcements that might be useful to you. This is less "absolutely everything since the last newsletter" and more "things of particular note for project creators."
Another new filter from Amps: IRL location.
With Buoy, "anyone can create a telegram channel and get farcaster keyword notifications sent to it in realtime."
How Kasra Rahjerdi spent $2,205.56 on running his mini apps this month. (It can be done for much cheaper if you don't need to scale much.)
The Farcaster usage metrics dashboard has been updated. DAUs = 46.5k users, if you were wondering.
Meanwhile, Neynar's data on active developers hit an all-time high
The top holder of a Zora coin gets to pin a comment on the coin page. See this feature in action.
Coinbase Wallet, still in limited beta, flipped the switch to support Farcaster mini apps.
Bankr added social airdropping functionality. Here's a demo.
The future of Farcaster channels remains in flux.
Quick rundown of "how to post a batch of assets to Arweave."
Celo Public Goods "is distributing 100k CELO to apps for incentive budgets."
The Noice tipping app took Farcaster by a storm. Base chief Jesse Pollak shared a quick breakdown of the launch campaign, calling it the "new playbook." And here's a Dune dashboard of Noice activity, thanks to @dammydee.
Not to be outdone, Noice competitor Tipn announced that an appcoin is right on the horizon.
A timeline testimonial:
idk who needs to hear this but ThirdWeb account abstraction embedded wallets and Farcaster social native integration are pretty good.
I got passkeys, cross-platform multi-factor logins, and state-of-the-art gas-funded wallets for less than half a day of coding.
Another quickstart resource: hellno/mini-app-ui is "an open-source collection of components, hooks and utilities for mini apps," offering "clean, reusable, working components." Live demo.
Farcaster supports Solana now, so Solana things are happening:
Neynar is always on it: "possible to now input a solana token address and see who in your network holds it — results are personalized for each viewer"
"Having at least $10 of SOL in your Farcaster wallet increases your chances of qualifying" for upcoming Solana airdrops
That's all for today! Did I miss anything important? Hit reply and let me know.
Cheers,
Sonya
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