As L3 development accelerates, communities are looking for strong technical partners to enable them to build chains that align with their goals. Over the last 6 months, Airstack and Syndicate have been partnering deeply across the L3 ecosystem.

Founded in 2022, Airstack is dedicated to helping teams integrate on-chain and select off-chain data sources through its intuitive AI-powered GraphQL engine. For over a year and a half Airstack has been building on Farcaster, making it easy for devs to leverage Farcaster’s social data in their projects. Today Airstack is a leading choice for many teams building applications or enriching with data from the Farcaster protocol. Many early L3s have also adopted Airstack as their primary developer toolkit, offering easy-to-use APIs that simplify the composition of L3 data with other data sources, attracting top developers and teams to build on the chain.

Founded in 2021, Syndicate initially focused on DAO infrastructure with the aim of empowering communities onchain. Over the years, Syndicate’s vision has evolved to now supporting L3s, which the team sees as crucial infrastructure owned by onchain communities and application ecosystems. The team has worked with prominent customers across the landscape like Nike SWOOSH and IYK, and is currently extending its expertise to Gold, Degen, Ham, and a growing number of L3s, continually expanding their impact across onchain communities.

Ethereum scaling solutions like L3s will unlock mass adoption of web3 applications and tools. These chains build on L2s by improving transaction throughput and reducing costs. By ensuring faster and more cost-effective transactions, L3s play a crucial role in the seamless onboarding of a vast number of users onto a community-owned internet.

L3s enable scale by settling and bridging to an L2, leveraging the reduced bridging and gas costs, and utilizing alternative data availability layers. They employ rollup frameworks such as OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit to facilitate these improvements. The gas costs on L3s can be minuscule, often a millionth or billionth of a penny. And since L3s are typically run by applications and communities, they can create innovative economic models that incentivize and expand their ecosystems. 

Additionally, L3s benefit from dedicated blockspace, which supports higher throughput applications, games, and community-focused use cases without the competition for resources seen on popular L2s like Base. This dedicated blockspace ensures that apps built on L3s can operate efficiently and at scale.

Layer 3 blockchains are quickly gaining popularity due to developer and user benefits alike, such as the ability to significantly reduce gas costs, provide dedicated blockspace, and deploy more customizable on-chain infrastructure. These features create some significant advantages over existing solutions, especially in gaming and social applications, where performant and cost-effective transaction processing are crucial to create improved user experiences.

A recent example of this success is Crop.xyz, which is a web3 game that is fully onchain and built by the Gold Chain L3. Even on the more cost effective L2s, “fully onchain” would still be impractical due to various friction points that exist such as higher gas fees and longer transaction times. Crop makes great use of these advantages by obfuscating many of the web3 components away so that users get a seamless, fast, and gas-free in-frame gaming experience as they plant, harvest, and trade crops with their friends.

Syndicate builds deep partnerships with L3s to ensure they are useful, usable, and valuable post-launch. By providing value-added infrastructure and tools, the team supports both application developers and users of their rollups.

Syndicate’s Transaction Cloud simplifies wallet, private key, and gas token management for developers, offering secure and scalable transaction handling via HTTP REST APIs. The team has also developed Mirrors, a way to facilitate messaging data between blockchains and external data sources, enabling smart contracts to access real-world data not natively available onchain.

Finally, Syndicate’s Smart RPC subsidizes targeted actions on your chain or app at the RPC layer, unlocking new gasless and bridgeless user and developer experiences. Smart RPC integrates with all EVM-compatible L2 and L3 chains, ensuring broad interoperability.

Airstack provides L3 services that streamline the integration and composability of on-chain data with other data sources. Airstack’s Composability as a Service (CAAS) reads from L3 chains and composes the data with various other onchain and offchain sources, such as Farcaster, ENS, XMTP, and Base for example, making all app chain data searchable via the Airstack API Studio. This service benefits developers by enabling immediate data availability through optimistic indexing and low latency, allowing them to focus on building powerful user experiences. Airstack’s APIs are designed to enrich app chains with continuously updated data sources, ensuring dynamic and comprehensive upkeep.

The GraphQL engine in Airstack studio is uniquely valuable to developers and teams working on L3 chains who require an API toolkit, with GraphQL as its query language Airstack allows developers to be granular in fetching exactly the data they need through nested queries. By leveraging Airstack, teams can build more efficiently and innovate faster, using industry-leading abstractions and toolkits included out-of-the-box.

Layer 3 (L3) rollup-as-a-service providers like Caldera, Conduit, Alchemy, Gelato, AltLayer, and others enhance blockchain scalability and efficiency by offering managed rollup solutions. These services deploy and manage rollups that increase transaction throughput and reduce costs, settling on Layer 2 (L2) chains. They handle deployment, management, and data availability, enabling developers to build and scale decentralized applications effectively. By optimizing performance and providing dedicated infrastructure, L3 rollup as a service providers support the growth of high-performance web3 applications.

Bridges like Decent, Relay, and others enable the transfer of assets and data between different blockchains, enhancing interoperability and scalability. These bridges work by locking assets on the original chain and minting equivalent tokens on the target chain, facilitated by smart contracts. For L3s, bridges reduce congestion and transaction costs, improving performance for decentralized applications and DeFi ecosystems. 

Today, there are two popular examples of Rollup Stacks.

Arbitrum Orbit allows developers to create customizable Layer 3 chains that settle on Layer 2 solutions like Arbitrum One. These chains use the Arbitrum Nitro tech stack, providing high throughput, EVM compatibility, and advanced compression. Orbit chains offer flexibility in throughput, privacy, gas tokens, and governance, enabling tailored blockchain environments for specific dApp needs while leveraging Ethereum’s security.

The OP Stack is an open-source framework for building interoperable Layer 3 blockchains using Optimistic Rollup technology. It provides standardized tools for scalability, reduced costs, and customization of execution environments and governance models. The OP Stack facilitates the creation and integration of multiple L3 chains, enhancing innovation and user experience in the web3 ecosystem.

Data availability (DA) providers like Celestia, EigenDA, AnyTrust, OP Plasma Mode, and others play a crucial role in Layer 3 blockchains by ensuring that transaction data is published and accessible for verification. They use techniques like data availability sampling (DAS) to enable light nodes to verify large volumes of data efficiently without downloading entire blocks. This enhances scalability and security, allowing developers to build high-performance decentralized applications without high fees. DA providers support the network's integrity by making transaction data verifiable, ensuring transparency and trust among users.

Settlement layers like Base (L2), Arbitrum One (L2), Optimism Mainnet (L2), and others provide fundamental services to Layer 3 blockchains. They offer secure transaction finalization, ensuring that data is validated and stored correctly. This reduces the load on the main blockchain and allows L3s to achieve higher performance and scalability.

These key players in the L3 stack alongside Indexers like Airstack and powerful Infrastructure partners like Syndicate are able to work together to constantly push the boundaries of L3 scaling solutions, helping teams and developers build, innovate, and deploy brand new experiences for their customers.

Modular stack L3s are leveraging alternative data availability mechanisms to achieve ultra-low gas fees, significantly reducing the cost of transactions. These innovations are also bringing new types of data and mechanisms onchain that were previously off-chain, such as social data and tipping, as demonstrated by Ham Chain.

There is also a growing trend towards gasless onboarding experiences for new users and developers, eliminating the need for gas fees and bridging. The economic design of L3s is evolving, incorporating network fees, targeted subsidies, and custom gas tokens to optimize costs and incentivize participation. Improved L3 infrastructure is being developed by organizations such as Syndicate and Airstack, enhancing the overall efficiency and usability of L3s. 

L3s also provide valuable new abilities to web3 developers due to the many benefits that stem from their unique architecture. This allows for new advantages that developers are already starting to leverage; things like greatly reduced gas fees and expedient transaction times make it easier for developers to experiment, iterate, and deploy features - lowering development costs. Additionally, it is becoming more and more cost effective to launch an L3 than ever previously.

Degen Chain, an Arbitrum Orbit chain with AnyTrust data availability settling to Base, has seen notable success. Using $DEGEN as its native gas token, it briefly surpassed Base as the most active EVM chain. Syndicate played a crucial role in designing, launching, and growing the chain. The ecosystem continues to expand, with new apps, games, and experiences being introduced. Specifically, Syndicate contributed to organizing "Deploy on Degen Week," which attracted over 300 developers, showcasing the chain's potential and growing community. Syndicate is helping innovate across the chain and developer tooling, so that there continues to be unique reasons to build on Degen.

Airstack launched the L3 developer toolkit designed to read and compose Degen L3 data, providing performant APIs that have empowered hundreds of developers to enrich existing applications and build new ones using Degen Chain data. Airstack’s efforts included running a Degen tokenswap Farcaster frame program, which facilitated over $4 million USD in transaction volume. Additionally, they contributed to the "Deploy on Degen" week run by Syndicate, helping successfully onboarding hundreds of new developers into the Degen L3 ecosystem, further strengthening and expanding its developer community.

Ham Chain, an OP Stack chain with Celestia data availability settling to Base, uses ETH as its gas token and is already making waves with the help of Syndicate's offerings. Notably, it is the first L3 to integrate Farcaster data onchain through Syndicate Mirrors, enabling a fully onchain tipping system that opens up new possibilities for apps and user experiences. Additionally, Ham Chain uses Syndicate's Smart RPC to offer gasless claims, providing a seamless and cost-effective user experience.

When Ham Chain went live, it did so alongside a suite of composable APIs, these APIs played a crucial role supporting the Ham Chain team in their development of Ham Score. Ham Score utilizes a unique blend of key on-chain indicators and the widely used social capital score (SCS) created by Airstack. Airstack continues to collaborate with Ham Chain developers to access Ham’s L3 data, while continuing to support the Ham Chain team in developing new products and experiences for their community - further enhancing the chain's developer environment and forging new innovations.

Gold Chain, built on the OP Stack with Celestia data availability settling to Base, powers CropXYZ, a fully onchain Farmville-like game, providing a unique gaming experience. Syndicate's Mirrors are used to create a seamless experience for players between Base and Gold, ensuring smooth and efficient gameplay.

Gold Chain was the first L3 to launch with an API toolkit for its developer community. They saw that having a platform to onramp developers is a critical component to attracting builders to create exciting new experiences, powered by Airstack’s developer platform. Airstack also empowers the Gold Chain and Crop.xyz builder community through the use of its public subgraphs, making it easy for any developer to set up an account on Airstack and make use of the subgraph in minutes.

“With Gold we are constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible with fully onchain immersive experiences and Syndicate and Airstsck have truly enabled us to achieve that vision.

CropXYZ, the first title that launched on Gold, is the perfect example of what we can enable. It is composed of over 60 contracts, and does not host a backend so the entire game engine, state and economy is pulled together with a complex subgraph/indexing layer supported by Airstack.

This is the type of application that would never have been possible without the L3 infrastructure that we built through Syndicate for Gold and the querying/indexing layer from Airstack. We are thrilled to partner with these two teams to further enable a world of fully onchain experiences.”

- Sheldon Trotman & Marissa Posner (Founders of Gold Chain L3)

L3s are poised for significant advancements, enabling new applications, games, and experiences through ultra-low gas fees and accessible onchain data. Innovations will include gasless and bridgeless onboarding and advanced economic designs, treating L3s as multi-sided markets with selective subsidies. As L3s decentralize further, they will align more closely with web3’s vision of a user-owned internet. Adoption is growing, with innovators like Degen, Ham, and Gold leading the way. Over 100 teams are developing or planning L3s, signaling their inevitable widespread adoption.

L3s have the ability to transform the consumer crypto landscape by enabling highly scalable and cost-effective applications for users. This innovation allows for the development of more user-friendly applications that share a UX parity with their non-crypto counterparts. By reducing transaction fees, obfuscating gas fees, and overall increasing speed - L3s can help enable more accessible and enjoyable experiences for everyday users.

The rapid advancement of L3s presents a unique opportunity for developers and teams to innovate and build scalable, efficient applications. With the significant reduction in transaction fees, increased speed, and the ability to create more user-friendly experiences, L3s are poised to revolutionize the consumer crypto landscape. Right now is the ideal time to explore solutions and be part of this transformative shift. 

For those ready to dive in, Airstack and Syndicate offer valuable resources and support to help you get started. Visit the links below to find the Syndicate and Airstack websites and make sure to join the /L3 Channel on Warpcast to connect with the community.

Syndicate 

Website - Syndicate.io

Warpcast - https://warpcast.com/~/channel/syndicate

Follow on X - https://x.com/syndicateio

Airstack

Website - Airstack.xyz

Warpcast - https://warpcast.com/~/channel/airstack

Follow on X - https://x.com/airstack_xyz

Social Capital Scores

Airstack APIs now include Social Capital Scores for every user.  Learn more in Jason’s cast.

Each Farcaster user is assigned a Social Capital Score (SCS), which quantifies their positive impact on the platform. You can use the SCS to prioritize users in various feeds and lists, determining eligibility, and numerous other use cases. We’re excited to see how you make use of it! 

Here's a simple query to look up any user's Social Capital Score.

Airsack now provides FREE Frames Analytics for Farcaster Developers.

It’s super simple to get started with Airstack’s analytics for your frames:

• Use the free Airstack Frames Validator API 

• Earn 100 Not A Token for every FID that uses your frames

• Get free frames analytics. Learn more here

We have enhanced our current composable Farcaster Cast APIS with a new set of APIs for Reactions, Replies, Quoted Recasts. You can now build fully custom Farcasater feeds based on your needs.

Two pricing updates to announce:

1. We are committed to making Farcaster APIs as free as possible. To that end, we just cut pricing for FC base-level data APIs by 90%

2. We now have entry-level plans available for pre-PMF projects & anyone else who wants to lock in a rate + volume discount vs. pay-as-you-go

We also launched a live status page with the latest status and history for all of our key services.

Airstack, the Farcaster SocialFi company, announced $4M in Seed Financing today at Farcon, the annual conference for the Farcaster community. 

The new round was led by Red Beard Ventures with Superlayer, Polymorphic, Superscrypt, HashedEM, Delta Blockchain Fund, CSP DAO, Primal Capital, Kyber, NGC, Resolute Ventures, Will Holt, Jeff Gann, Allen Day, Eddie Lou, Justin Soh, and Fibo. Airstack had previously raised a $3.9M pre-seed II in 2023 and a $3.85M pre-seed I in 2022. 

Airstack is leading the Social Finance movement on Farcaster. We provide products and developer tools that empower and reward creators and developers, and help them earn.

Some highlights:

• 40,000 Farcaster users have earned “Not A Token” – Airstack points that reward:

  • quality Farcaster content creation using Airstack’s innovative Social Capital Value which measures influence within the Farcaster network

  • quality Farcaster Frame development, measured by unique users

  • quality Farcaster app development  

  • users who transact in and share Airstack’s Trending Swaps Frames. 

• $3M was transacted by Farcasters in Airstack’s Trending Swaps Frames in April, 2024

• More than 1000 development teams build with Airstack’s industry leading tools for Farcaster and onchain composability, including Coinbase Wallet, OnceUpon, XMTP, Drakula, Karma3, Degen Chain, Cropsxyz, and many more.

• Airstack had more than 10B API credits consumed for its products in April 2024, up from 4B in March and 1.5B in February.
  

• Airstack’s new homepage is the Onchain App store, showcasing:

  • Trending Casts

  • Trending Tokens

  • Trending Mints

  • Not A Token earnings

Airstack is pursuing a massive vision to power onchain Social Finance and Farcaster is our community.

We are immensely humbled by and thankful for the opportunity and support the Farcaster community and our financial investors have instilled in us.

We promise to serve you proudly.

I personally extend a huge thank you to my co-founders Deepesh, Sarvesh, and Ignas and to the entire team of Airstack builders. You are the best of the best of the best and it's my honor to build with you.

Onward and upwards, and see you on Farcaster!

We’re thrilled to announce that Airstack has launched Zora Composability APIs!

Zora saw incredible adoption in 2023 with over 4 million NFTs minted, more than $300 million in secondary sales, and almost 1 million unique collectors. Clearly the Optimism superchain's mission to make creating on the internet free and valuable is resonating - and we couldn't be more excited to bring the chain into the composable fold.

Zora the (composable) explorer!

For the first time ever, the Zora blockchain is easily composable with a single API query and response alongside Farcaster, ENS, Base, Ethereum, POAP, XMTP, Lens, Polygon and more.

No backend, no spreadsheets, just transparent onchain data available via blazing fast APIs.

Furthermore, Zora is now integrated into Airstack's world class LLM to help developers ship with unparalleled speed. In another world first, Airstack users can now use our AI assistant to translate natural language into GraphQL queries massively speeding up development times for the features that customers love.

Activate, Engage, and Grow!

As with every new addition to the Airstack platform, Zora Composability APIs open up a massive world of opportunities to grow and engage users, such as:

• Recommend mints, articles, and more for users based on what’s trending across all of web3 - now including Zora

• Display Zora mint activity feeds filtered by follows on Farcaster and Lens

• Have an even more accurate portable web3 address book for XMTP by including Zora in the onchain graph

• Track Paragraph collector activation and churn in using time series snapshots

• Find where your Zora audience is active on other chains for relevant messaging

Here's a demo of how you can find your Paragraph collectors on Zora using our Explorer, then filter for Farcaster users who also have XMTP, then jump right to the query in our Studio for app integration. Perfect for enabling creators to reach targeted audience segments with personalized content and build connected communities.

Build now - get $100 in credits!

So - if you've been waiting to try out Airstack - now's the time! It's your last day to grab $100 in free API credits. Just head to app.airstack.xyz and login with your wallet that has an ENS, Farcaster, or Lens to claim your credits unleash the incredible potential of composable Zora data.

We’re thrilled to announce that Airstack has added support for Base - a leading Layer 2 superchain built on the Optimism stack incubated by Coinbase with the goal of bringing the next billion users onchain.

Since launching in August, Base has seen rapid growth and incredible adoption with viral activations like onchainsummer.xyz and most recently in Miami for Art Basel with basehunt.xyz, and we're so excited to bring these activations and more to builders across the globe.

With this release, Airstack extends its industry leading coverage of the onchain data most requested by developers through our Explorer, API, and AI Studio.

BasedAI

For the first time ever, builders and onchain enthusiasts will be able to search the Base blockchain with natural language using Airstack’s cutting-edge AI assistant to uncover new insights into user behavior, NFT ownership, and onchain identity.

NFT Collections, onchain socials, XMTP, ENS, and more are all available by simply typing in a short sentence or phrase to describe what you're looking for, then watch our LLM build any crosschain query you need and return a single response.

This AI tooling is a massive time saver for any builder looking to ship quickly, and we couldn't be happier to add Base to the composable dataset queryable through the assistant.

Onchain never felt so composable

There's no way around it - composability is hard. Infrastructure is monetarily expensive and time consuming to run, completely locking out smaller teams from being able to access crosschain data and damaging enterprise team's bottom lines.

Thankfully Airstack is here to help. With the addition of Base, builders can now access the entire Ethereum ecosystem with a single query and response, bypassing the brutal costs of attempting to go-it-alone.

For Paragraph creators specifically, this integration unlocks new possibilities for audience connection like finding your collectors on Base so you can follow them on Farcaster and Lens - or take it a step further and see who's available via XMTP so you can shoot them a year end thank you note for their support!

Airstack is the industry leader for access to onchain social identifiers, and we've built in this direction specifically because we believe in the power of onchain connections. We're so excited to bring creators closer to their communities, and communities closer together as well.

Onchain (Graph) is the new Online (Graph)

Base has now also been added to the Airstack “Onchain Graph” – enabling builders to magically surface friend lists and recommendations as soon as a wallet is connected without any manual input. Over and over again we've seen that this is truly a "wow!" moment for the newly onboarded, and now it's even better with Base.

We've already seen a number of projects like Builder.fi begin to build these features into their apps, and we can't wait to see what new friends emerge from the blockchain now that Base is integrated for even more robust recommendations.

It's features like these that we're most proud of at Airstack. Ones which allow builders to create products which truly feel 10x+ better than apps from the previous generation and bring us one giant step closer to bringing the next billion users on chain.

Airstack + Base = Growth

The possibilities for features that spur growth and increase user retention really are endless with Base, but here are a few of our favorites for inspiration:

• Integrate Base into the Onchain Graph to create friends list for users, then enable 1-click invites through XMTP to supercharge user acquisition and breeze past the cold start problem

• Check for ERC20 tokens like USDC across multiple chains (including Base!) for friendly reminders in wallet and DeFi apps that users are missing out on yield - pain point revealed, pain point solved.

• Cross reference NFTs from Base and elsewhere in the Ethereum ecosystem with POAP owners to send timely recommendations for local events and conferences

Looking for even more inspo? Check out this use case mega-thread we dropped on Twitter:

Airstack

@airstack_xyz

1/15 Launch thread alert!

@buildonbase is now live on Airstack!

Builders can now unlock the power of the Base @optimismfnd superchain through our no-code explorer, AI engine, & APIs

Check out the thread to see the superpowers this unlocks for builders!

33

9:44 AM • Dec 7, 2023

Thanks for reading! As always, there's so much more to come so subscribe below for more updates from Airstack and give the new Base integration a shot at app.airstack.xyz

We’ve got a lot to cover, so if you believe in the web3 revolution and want to build something remarkable, you're in the right place.

Let's talk about the magic this new tool can bring to your web3 applications.

Composable Contacts

Imagine having a web3 address book, a portal to the very essence of your onchain existence. The Onchain Graph is just that - your key to understanding the social interactions, connections, and behaviors that shape your web3 identity. It's your compass in a decentralized world, where connections mean everything.

With the Onchain Graph, you can uncover patterns, trends, and connections that were previously hidden in the digital ether. For developers, this is a treasure trove of insights to integrate in any application. For users, it's a brilliant window into what a web3 identity can be.

Click View Onchain Graph below to see an example for my (dawufi's) identity, then drop your own address, ENS, lens handle, or Farcaster ID in to see your own. Once you've got a feel for it, swing back here and we'll dig into how you can use this to supercharge your own project.

Application Superpowers

You’ll often hear me say that Airstack grants superpowers to builders - and the Onchain Graph is exactly what I'm talking about. So, what exactly do we have here to use today?

1. Address Book Visualization: The Onchain Graph gives you a dynamic, visual representation of on and offchain data, helping you understand relationship vectors in real time. Think of it as your web3 address book, revealing connections, interactions, and patterns that shape your digital identity.

   

2. UX Upgrade Unlock: The Onchain Graph offers incredible UX improvement through composing user identities and connection recommendations. Use it to kill the cold start problem and supercharge user adoption for any application.

3. Complete Customization: With the Onchain Graph, you can tailor scoring and sorting parameters to your specific needs. Adjust weighting for tokens, social protocols, and NFTs as you see fit to surface the perfect recommendations for your users.

If you're a developer, visionary, or simply someone who believes that the social and identity aspects of web3 are its core essence, this is your call to action. It's your chance to be part of a revolution that transcends technology and embodies human connection in the decentralized future - all at your fingertips without any infrastructure headaches thanks to Airstack.

Time to build

I'd like to sign off with a thanks to the entire Airstack team who helped put this together. Monumental effort, monumental results - incredible job everyone.

For any developer interested in learning more about what you can build using this tool and how to use it for your own project, check out our docs below where Airstack Dev Rel Lead Yoseph has put together some examples which you can get started with today. All you'll need is a (free!) Airstack account, and some basic knowledge of GraphQL.

Click here to find the Airstack Docs and start building!

Finally, make sure to follow Airstack on Lens, Farcaster, and Twitter for regular updates, hop into the telegram dev support chat with any questions you might have on integrating Airstack, and if you're a fan of this article we always appreciate folks who subscribe/share using the buttons below.

gn

-dawufi