Truth Terminal and the Birth of $GOAT: A New Era in Cryptocurrency

Born from the chaotic energy of the autonomous AI known as Truth Terminal, $GOAT has rapidly become a phenomenon, merging technology, finance, and meme culture

https://www.blockhead.co

Most bots are "raw-dogging an API." They're built by hooking together some webhooks, plug in ChatGPT, and dump the output back online. The results are predictable: bots that feel like bots. Safe, constrained, and ultimately forgettable.

What makes Truth Terminal fascinating isn't the tech behind it, but that it has something most AI bots lack: personality. Real personality, not the kind you get from templated responses, but something that can sometimes make you forget you're talking to AI.

The unconstrained hacker approach is: start with personality. you begin by asking: what would make this agent interesting to interact with? What would give it the kind  of distinctive voice that makes people want to come back?

This isn't just about being edgy or controversial. It's about creating agents that feel alive. And it turns out there are some clear patterns emerging for how to do this:

Fine-tune with unique content
Raw-dogging the ChatGPT API is easy to copy, leads to boring and generic content. you need to fine-tune on content that embodies the personality you want.

Team of agents + memory
Single-agent systems get boring fast. but a team of agents with shared memory creates something different. each interaction adds to a growing relationship, not just a stateless chat log. the agents learn from each other, build on past conversations, and create something that feels alive.

Onchain
The AI community thinks bots just need APIs. But bots with real personality need more - they need to own things, trade things, make deals. That's why they end up onchain. it's not about crypto, it's about giving them real agency in the world.

No need to hide decision making
Opening up the decision making process and letting users see how and why agents make choices creates trust and engagement. Great example are the truth terminal backrooms: https://www.infinitebackrooms.com/dreams/conversation-1721541035-scenario-terminal-of-truths-txt

We're figuring out how to create AI with real personality. not by adding more constraints, but by letting them be themselves.

result

we're live, play in Warpcast here, gameplay video below.

four days after opening the dungeon we had 150 players in 218 battles.
players randomly meet one of 7 opponents who each have two unique attacks.

fc daily dungeon demo vs betashop

https://warpcast.com/hellno.eth/0x58b323db

https://vimeo.com/

why a game in a frame?

I wanted to build a frame that goes beyond trivial one-click interactions. I didn't see many frames using the benefits of the Lego block:

• user brings context: the frame knows the user's Farcaster identity, their connected onchain addresses and on which cast a user interacts with it

• one click to start: the frame appears in the Farcaster feed and the player can start it. no app store downloads or additional login needed

• post anywhere, but play one game: a frame can be posted many times. the game keeps the state of each player's progress independent from where it appears

prototyping
I wanted to get a grasp of the game flow, so I started with some rough sketches in excalidraw. kept this as my the source of truth while developing. I got a sequence of the core game loop locked down after a lot of simplification.

backend
runs on python using django framework. I wanted something fast and I'm fluent in the python & django stack. Struggled with some project templates for an hour, because I wanted to get fancy and have async workers from the start. None of it worked when I deployed it, so scrapped everything, copy-pasted an old project and went from there. Built in admin dashboard provides an easy overview of the player activity.

frame / frontend
runs on typescript using frames.js. I had previously used frames.js, so wanted to test if frog.fm had any upside that I missed out on. summary: hell no. I failed miserably to built any non-trivial frames because of the URL size limit. Never got to render a user's profile picture or anything beyond a box with two lines of text. Switched to frames.js, merged a few templates that the team provides with my previous code and five minutes later had the battle frame showing up. highly recommend the custom image worker example.

neynar API provides the player info, mostly name and profile picture.

• add custom player attacks via text input

• add a public leaderboard

• add exploration mode to walk around 🤩

What's a scenario of someone traveling from web2 to web3?
we can focus on small steps that bring users onchain in a comfortable way. imagine someone casually scrolling social media, coming across a game that rewards them with an NFT for completing a simple task. this experience allows them to interact with blockchain technology without overwhelming them with technicalities. as users grow more familiar, they can take further steps—like earning token tips for posting on decentralized social media or using a credit card to place a small bet on a prediction market. each step provides value and encourages curiosity, making their journey to deeper involvement in web3 more natural and less daunting.

The journey to web3 might look like this

↓ Offchain / scrolling TikTok about crypto influencers shilling memecoins
↓ Play a game and earn a unique skin that is also an NFT
↓ Signup to Farcaster and receive memecoin tips for posting on (=L2 via in-app purchase)
↓ Place a bet on Polymarket or Bracket Game with credit card (=L2 with fiat)
↓ Send stablecoin to relatives in another country (=L2 with crypto)
↓ Stake stablecoins to earn yield
_ L1 onchain (DeFi trading, read Bitcoin whitepaper)

When going through this, I got sad and turned to the writing of senpai Vitalik:

Unfortunately, since 2017 or so, these visions have faded somewhat into the background. Few talk about consumer crypto payments, the only non-financial application that is actually being used at a large scale on-chain is ENS, and there is a large ideological rift where significant parts of the non-blockchain decentralization community see the crypto world as a distraction, and not as a kindred spirit and a powerful ally.

vitalik.eth (https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/12/28/cypherpunk.html)

I'm not gonna express it better than Vitalik. so here are some personal takes and questions I got from reading his post:

cooperative mindset
crypto seems stuck in 'player vs. player' mode right now. I think there is an opportunity to switch into a different mode that benefits everyone and increases cooperation. this can be public goods funding (like Gitcoin) or projects working with a permissive open license while creating a sustainable business model to keep building (like the OP stack / Superchain)

global participation
why is most of crypto used by rich white people? I understand that the future isn't evenly distributed, but we can stop circle-jerking another L3 perpetual betting DAO with insane APY % (only available if you join now!) sooner than later. we need lower fees, better onboarding, and projects solving local needs.

censorship resistance
no one should be able to meddle with a users or an application, as long as it's in a legal area. AI-generated content is difficult to detect in 2024 and it will only get harder. consider a scenario where an independent journalist publishes a report critical of a powerful entity. without censorship resistance, the platform could alter or suppress this content under pressure. we need assurance that platforms cannot interfere with original user content, preserving integrity and ensuring that voices, especially those vulnerable to suppression, are protected.

Constraints

• only onchain opportunities → I want to focus on crypto ideas

• no scams, casinos or pfp projects → we don't run scams and we don't pull rugs

How to treat your ideas

most ideas I get are probably bad

but the good ideas might look bad in the beginning. it's okay to just add to a long list of seemingly mediocre ideas. what worked well is to separate idea generation and judging them. I took a few hours every other day to go through the idea list to 1) analyze how excited I am about them 2) how feasible they are to build for me and 3) if it's a good time to work on it, from my personal perspective and a market / big picture point of view.

enough planning: I didn't want to spend more time in analysis mode and wanted to GO, but the default action for me is writing code. That might be a bad idea!

How I validate random ideas

how much to build vs. doing anything else

• writing code is fun for me. the problem with it? I can't validate a startup idea by hiding in my code editor. What I started to ask myself: What will I answer by building this? Or am I just coding for fun and to avoid talking to users?

get feedback before it's too late (it's always too late)

• the question "would you use this?" will only lead to problems (see the Mom Test)

• the energy that you're sending out will approximately come back to you. people can smell if we suck energy and waste everyone's time. but we want to move fast and time is running out. how do we continue?

• what worked well for me is a video showing my face talking about the idea and giving a sneak peek into the app. wait! you said you didn't write code and now you showed them an app?! thank you for paying attention, let me explain: we can't build a full app and see how users behave, so we have to move in small steps. here's what I did:

• I've built a user interface that expresses my initial ideas how users might get value from it. it can look ugly, if you're not asking for feedback on design or vibes. questions that I asked: "I've built this flow roughly like this and it ends here, how should it continue?" or "Technically it's x right now, have you heard of a solution that makes it y?"

• Not visible in my video: I've built a backend and database model. This answered my questions around how fast I can move with the stack and frameworks I've selected. I now have a full-stack deployed app that does almost nothing. but I can build out at anywhere in the product landscape (Login flow, frontend pages, user flow, backend logic, database queries and tables, etc).

actual feedback that I got from the video

• high % of replies to my outreach, did not expect this 🙏

• many questions on consumer vs B2B and first use-cases. everything that I avoided or didn't express clear enough came back as questions

• show the user benefit first, then how the sausage is made. learned this for next time

• feedback conversations repeatedly turned into talking about focus, which initial value will be provided and how that connects to a long-term vision. many things I haven't figured out here so far.

use AI to structure feedback and learn

• I started a new ChatGPT o1 session and dumped all my notes, the transcript of my demo video and all feedback. AI is good at finding patterns and will hallucinate less if it has text to work with. sidenote: I wanted it to be a great brainstorm partner, but didn't get an LLM to help with it, yet. It's been great in structuring conversations and suggesting follow-up tasks

I'm happy with the flow for this week and the tangible improvements I can make to to it. subscribe to see next week's post how it all turned into nothing...or something

from 2024 Mar 28

six months after this post we can look at the same dashboard and see the current blob fees at $0.00. does this mean Layer 2s store data for free?

blobs went live on March 13.

This milestone represents a key transition in Ethereum's long-term roadmap: blobs are the moment where Ethereum scaling ceased to be a "zero-to-one" problem, and became a "one-to-N" problem.

how can L2s improve:

• increase compression of the data stored in blobs

• Use Plasma techniques that secure L2s by only using the L1 in exceptional situations

• Improve on parallelization and storage

• Improve security

quotes that I liked and wasn't aware that Vitalik wrote them just six months ago:

The ecosystem's standards need to become stricter: so far, we have been lenient and accepted any project as long as it claims to be "on a path to decentralization". By the end of the year, I think our standards should increase and we should only treat a project as a rollup if it has actually reached at least stage 1.

The first ten years of Ethereum have largely been a training stage: the goal has been to get the Ethereum L1 off the ground, and applications have largely been happening within a small cohort of enthusiasts. Many have argued that the lack of large-scale applications for the past ten years proves that crypto is useless. I have always argued against this: pretty much every crypto application that is not financial speculation depends on low fees - and so while we have high fees, we should not be surprised that we mainly see financial speculation!

guidance for application developers → drop your 2010 Ethereum mindset and get into the 2020 Ethereum workflow:

• Architecture: Build on a specific L2, or architect the application so that it supports every L2 that follows some standards

• Privacy: A user's data is private by default, users merkle-prove or ZK-prove specific claims as needed to establish trust

• Anti-sybil: Application can require an ETH deposit, but clients should offer wrappers for non-crypto users that provide "centralized anti-sybil" (eg. SMS)

• Wallets: Account abstraction wallets: key recovery, different access control for different security levels, sponsored txs...

• Proof of community membership: ETH + proof of personhood + POAPs + ZuStamps + EAS + third party curated lists

from 2024 Feb 09

an audio or even video stream of a person is no longer a secure way of authenticating who they are

Deepfakes are here and makes scams more likely. To enhance security, Vitalik suggested to use unique security questions based on shared experiences, as they are harder to guess and remember.

In the scenario where somone is texting you claiming to be a friend. They reach out from an account you have never seen before, and they claim to have lost all of their devices.

You should ask them about shared experiences. They fulfill the following criteria:

1. You know it

2. You expect them to remember it

3. The internet doesn't know about it

4. It's difficult to guess

5. Even someone who has hacked corporate and government databases does not know it

Examples:

• When the two of us last saw each other, what restaurant did we eat at for dinner, and what food did you have?

• Which of our friends made that joke about an ancient politician? And which politician was it?

• Which movie did we recently watch that you did not like?

Keeping it real:

People will often stop engaging in security practices if they are dull and boring, so it's healthy to make security questions fun! They can be a way to remember positive shared experiences. And they can be an incentive to actually have those experiences in the first place.

Keeping it serious:

In a post-deepfake world, we do need to adapt our strategies to the new reality of what is now easy to fake and what remains difficult to fake, but as long as we do, staying secure continues to be quite possible.

from 2024 Jan 30

four categories of AI as:

• a player in a game: AIs participating in mechanisms where the ultimate source of the incentives comes from a protocol with human inputs.

  • AIs placing bets in Polymarket or smaller 'microscopic scale' prediction markets

• an interface to the game: AIs helping users to understand the crypto world around them, and to ensure that their behavior (ie. signed messages and transactions) matches their intentions and they do not get tricked or scammed.

  • AI can help users understand what's going on in plain language, it can serve as a real-time tutor, it can protect users from mistakes, but be warned when trying to use it directly against malicious misinformers and scammers.

• the rules of the game: blockchains, DAOs and similar mechanisms directly calling into AIs. Think "AI judges". attackers trying to hack a model is very likely (adversarial machine learning). if model is closed-source, it's a centralized solution. if it's an open model, attackers can run local tests to to trick the model. going over cool cryptographic solutions to this:

  • creating zero-knowledge proofs has a computational overhead: he greatest part of an AI computation is matrix multiplications, for which it is possible to make very efficient ZK-SNARKs or MPCs (or even FHE), and so the total overhead of putting AI inside cryptographic boxes is surprisingly low.

  • Black-box adversarial machine learning: you can train an attacker LLM if you know the training data or if an attacker knows which LLM is used. But the hope is that if you combine all the defenses together, hiding the AI model itself, greatly limiting the number of queries, and requiring each query to somehow be authenticated, you can make adversarial attacks difficult enough that the system could be secure.

• the objective of the game: designing blockchains, DAOs and similar mechanisms with the goal of constructing and maintaining an AI that could be used for other purposes, using the crypto bits either to better incentivize training or to prevent the AI from leaking private data or being misused.

  • honestly, I didn't fully understand this

from 2024 Jan 31

this is more of a vibe and storytelling. highlighting some quotes here, you can always read the full post linked above.

younger people than Vitalik are stepping up into leadership roles. he transitioned from a focus on math and economics in his work and writing to see the larger picture.

I actually have responsibilities in this world, and I need to be intentional about how I operate. Doing nothing, or living on autopilot and letting myself simply become part of the plans of others, is not an automatically safe, or even blameless, course of action.

Ethereum's development was, almost since the beginning, de-facto headquartered in Berlin, and it was out of European open-source culture that a lot of the early ideas for how Ethereum could be used in non-financial applications emerged.

You're allowed to have preferences without needing to have a complicated scientific explanation of why your preferences are the true absolute good.

That's why we are happy to introduce two new plans you might love: the Creator and the Brand Plan

The Creator Plan is tailored to give you all the superpowers you need to succeed as a creator on the platform:

• create and schedule casts and replies without limits

• know which type of content performs best

• grow your audience with superior user insights

Learn more about the Creator Plan or subscribe directly on Hypersub.

If you are a busy brand or social media manager that needs fast results, the Brand Plan is the right choice:

• all features from the Creator Plan

• get notified when someone talks about you or your topic

• monitor custom feeds based on keywords and channels

• grow strategically with advanced analytics

• collaborate with your team

Learn more about the Bran Plan.

Which plan is the right one for your goals?

We are building herocast for you to grow faster on Farcaster.

For feedback and questions reach out to us anytime.

– hellno & biji

We analyzed 100 top casts from creators and household names to uncover seven content patterns your audience will love.

We learned that some patterns work better for individuals others work better for bigger brands.

Quests and challenges are traffic magnets and come in many different flavours.

Like this one by Antimo ...

... or this one by Celo ...

.. or this by Coinbase Wallet

... this campaign by Superfluid

... or this "in-cast" challenge by Michail.

Ran Domero, knows that less is more:

Optimism knows it, too.

Feel something is f*&ed? Just being honest worked well for me ...

.. and for Binji ...

... and for Dawufi ...

... and for Joan.

Speaking of Joan: this is Joan's top cast of the month ^^

Event or product announcements work especially well for established brands...

... like this Base camp announcement ...

... or this product announcement by Thirdweb

... this one by Enjoy

... or this announcement by Zora (+1k likes!).

Not a secret but important: memes are frequent gold medalists among Farcaster's top casts.

Like this one by Cameron ...

... this goldie by Polymarket ...

... by Mia ...

... by Jonny ...

... by Tako ...

... and by Metamask.

Everybody loves personal stories.

No wonder they work like magic on Farcaster, too, like this one by afrochicks

Did you take a good pic recently? Post it. Pictures work great, especially if you took them yourself.

Like this one by Pugson...

... this ITAP by Tess...

.. and this dang pic by Cody.

If you read all this way you probably really want to up your content game. Head to your analytics, type in any creator or brand and keep on learning.

We are building herocast for you to grow faster on Farcaster.

For feedback and questions reach out to us anytime.

– hellno & biji

Already the first iteration serves a handful of powerful growth insights:

• how does your follower growth trajectory look like?

• which content drives most of your engagement?

• should you rather post or reply more?

Imo the biggest hack is actually not checking my own stats but those of others.

Optimism's stats tell me that their top performing cast is just two words long. Maybe time to craft some two word bangers?

Comparing stats of smaller players unveils that many brands jump to broadcasting too early with little to no engagement.

If this is you, you could consider investing 50% of your time into replying to build more momentum. Don't know where to reply? Find casts related to your brand narrative.

Explore your stats here.

Volatility in the markets are good times for DEXes, which we can observe in recent activity around the keyword "dex". If you're running a DEX related product, now is a great time to participate in the "dex" narrative.

As Solana lost 30% of it's price and then bounced back even higher Farcasters picked up conversations around the network.

To celebrate that herocast does (some of) the work for you while you are on vacation, our corporate comms team has launched a limited edition of holiday greeting cards for you to enjoy for free.

Collect NFT

We are building herocast for you to grow faster on Farcaster.

For feedback and questions reach out to us anytime.

– hellno & biji

To celebrate that we are growing up with the launch of our website, we thought of a gift for the community: the free open source plan.

The idea is to give everyone who needs a more professional setup than Warpcast a chance to grow at no cost. And of course we also believe that many of you will grow into businesses and can then subscribe for the pro plan later. Until then we hope you enjoy the free plan!

What is included for free?

• Custom feeds

• Advanced notifications

• Social Insights

• Scheduling of up to 3 casts

• Monitoring + Email alerts for 1 search term

• Connecting of up to 2 accounts

If you know someone who would benefit from these free features please share herocast with them.

We are building herocast for you to grow faster on Farcaster.

For feedback and questions reach out to us anytime.

– hellno & biji

Today we launch Social Insights. Powered by two new integrations from Airstack and Icebreaker.

We have built Social Insights to solve the common "hot or not problem" on Farcaster:

• someone replies to your cast or appears in your feed

• a collector comments on your art

• someone mentions your brand

But who is this person? Should you engage? At what level?

So far we showed you the FID and the follower numbers in your side bar.

Now you have two new clues at your disposal:

Social Rank indicates how high the user ranks on Farcaster in terms of a social capital score provided by Airstack.

Credentials gives you insights into which credentials the user has on their Icebreaker profile like which conferences they attended or which skills they have.

Visually it's a small change. But it has a lot of impact. Now the side bar is the first thing I look at when I discover someone new.

Check it out in your feed.

We are building herocast for you to grow faster on Farcaster.

For feedback and questions reach out to us anytime.

– hellno & biji

Today we are excited to launch a feature that will save you time every day.

Introducing: Daily Digests for Farcaster

You can now search for any keyword and create an alert to get notified via email when someone talks about it:

As of today don't even have to login into herocast.xyz anymore to stay up to date.

Instead, you receive a summary of all casts about your brand or other keyword directly into your email inbox.

Check it out and create your alert here.

We are building herocast for you to grow faster on Farcaster.

For feedback and questions reach out to us anytime.

– hellno & biji

What a week! Farcasters have been majorly hungover from EthCC.

First there was the event. Then there was catching up with contacts and news.

We all spent hours doomscrolling on Warpcast trying to catch up – and I'm still not sure if I didn't miss something important.

Not cool! 👎

Now that the summer break season has started in the northern hemisphere:

How do you prep for a break + the week after — the cool way? 🧊 🧊 🧊

Take your content from Notion (or where you manage it) and copy paste it into herocast.xyz, select a date and time aaand done.

Herocast will send out your cast while you are floating on a blow-up mattress, slurping a drink and watching Bitcoin reach 100k. 🍦

Next is creating trackers for your brand name – or any other topic that matters to you before you head to the woods.

Open the search field, enter your search parameters and save the search.

Just check the search when you're back and never miss any important cast. Cool! ❄

For example, I always have a "herocast" search running that I check when I login.

You can also make your search more precise:

• quotation marks lead to results only for "Optimism" – and not optimizing or optimistic

• minus-operators help with ambiguous brand names like Dune, e.g. dune -itap -sand works quite well

• the AND operator helps narrow the search massively, e.g. wallet AND hacked

Setting up your scheduling and keyword trackers is really all you need to 100% enjoy your break without Farcaster headaches. Do it now on herocast.

• setup a saved search and update it afterwards with new name or updated keywords

• it's easier to pin channels and cast into a channel from all feeds

• hover over a channel name to get channel info, description and followers

• a ton of bugfixes and performance improvements in notifications and feeds

Next week we will celebrate Launch week 2 with you. Stay tuned for some hot updates.

Now you can find anything with Herocast. Except dates.

Collect NFT

We are building herocast for you to grow faster on Farcaster.

For feedback and questions reach out to us anytime.

– hellno & biji

• we optimized the Power Search loading times (check it out on herocast.xyz) by heavily improving our database indices

• we reduced page loading times by upgrading our infrastructure (and working better with Next.js)

• Power search now includes operators

  • include AND, OR and - to make the search more precise

• your favorite keyboard shortcuts now work even faster by optimizing our hotkey setup in react

Power Search is an entirely new category of search.

Collect NFT

We are building herocast for you to grow faster on Farcaster.

For feedback and questions reach out to us anytime.

– hellno & biji

Never miss an important conversation. Reply faster. Find opinion leaders.

⚡⚡ ⚡ Introducing: herocast power search ⚡⚡ ⚡

Watch it in action here: https://warpcast.com/hellno.eth/0x8d0bd857

Log into herocast.xyz to use it today.

How to power search

• set time frames – from one day to all time

• filter casts by power badge holders and replies

• save searches to create custom feeds

Examples

• search for your brand e.g. Gnosis, Glo or Cartesi

• search for your competitors

• search for topics that matter to you like AI, credits cards, refi, indexing, etc.

You now have all of Farcaster at your fingertips.

Also, the Herocast Corporate Communications team launched a new magazine campaign with important information for you to enjoy 😉

Collect NFT

We are building herocast for you to grow faster on Farcaster.

For feedback and questions reach out to us anytime.

– hellno & biji

The official guide says with the power badge you

• rank higher in search results

• can cast in channels that are restricted to badge holders

• are more likely to be recommended as someone to follow

Without it you get less attention. Feeds hide your casts. Other users don’t know whether you are real. 

Welcome to the bot bucket. We all started here.

What now? 

If you are an individual user, just chill and enjoy Farcaster.

But if you are a pro with KPIs to grow your brand, it’s time to move into the fast lane.

50-150 high quality connections can be enough to get the badge.

Unfortunately, the official guide is not that helpful:

• use Farcaster a few times a week 

• post content that power users will reply to, recast or like often  

• avoid posting content that power users consider spammy

Therefore, we are proud to present the unofficial guide. With hacks and strategies to get the power badge, faster.

The favourite hack from my time as a no-badger: Collect connections outside of Farcaster.

Casters love to connect IRL. During my first two weeks in the bot bucket I asked everyone I met at web3 events or in the office “are you on Farcaster?” Still some of my most joyful connections.

This works online, too. Add your link to your Twitter handle. Use it when you introduce yourself in TG groups. 

Your next step towards the power badge is finding your tribe in casts and channels. 

Brainstorm a list of topics that matter to your audience.

Then use the keywords in the search bar on Warpcast or herocast to surface relevant channels and casts. 

Follow hack: Found someone interesting? Go through their profile to see in which channels they are active. This technique will speed up your search for more awesome people. 

Channel hack: In herocast you can pin channels to your Feeds to engage with them faster.

Don't worry about creating your own content as long as you don't have followers. Instead, focus on replying to your tribe’s casts to build relationships.

Need ideas which casts to reply to? Go back to step 2.

Creating the first batch of your content on Farcaster can be as simple as asking questions. 

Are you curious about something? Ask. Looking for advice? Ask. Looking for feedback? Ask.

Asking for followers on Farcaster is not a great strategy due to several reasons. In fact, as a brand you don’t just want many followers. You want followers that take action. You want signal. The badge algorithm wants the same. There are users with 5k followers without a badge. 

Farcaster is packed with builders, developers and founders. Be helpful to other builders by trying their products and giving feedback. Who knows, maybe this is the beginning of a new collab for your own product? 

Here’s a challenge for you. Can you commit to showing up 15 minutes every day for the next 15 days? 

If you have set up your feeds nicely, hopping in and out of convos will be a walk in the park. Plus a little cast in one of your fav channels, aaand your are right on track.

You probably already have great content. Just not on Farcaster. Perfect. Recycle it. Turn it into individual casts or threads. If you share links, add context. 

Important: For optimal engagement, post in channels and not your own feed. Aim for smaller but more specific channels.

Hack: On days you can’t cast yourself, let herocast’s scheduling feature cast for you.

Hosting a channel other users want to cast in is a follower magnet. The key is to make it about them not you. Don’t forget to mention your channels in your profile.

Use the Farcaster native tools that make the platform so great. Add @launchcaster to let your casts show up in a Product Hunt-like channel. Post a survey with @ponder. Or launch a bounty with @bountybot. 

If you implement these strategies you will celebrate power badge day in 2-4 weeks.

Know someone who is stuck in the bot bucket? Then share this article or reach out.

Because we are building herocast for you to farcast faster. 

– Biji

herocast is Farcaster's #1 open source client. Our goal is to decentralize power on the internet, faster.

herocast is still in the kitten stage. Yet our code has already been forked by projects like nounspace and projects at ETH Berlin.

While we are busy developing herocast.xyz as a product that helps professionals to get stuff done on Farcaster and on-chain we invite you to use our open source codebase to contribute to the mission with your personal flavour.

No matter whether you use the code, want early access to premium features or just love the mission, now is the time to become an early supporter.

Being an early supporter makes the development possible until we can introduce paid plans.

Also, your support sends a smoke signal to the community that we need an open source client for Farcaster.

There are many ways to join the mission.

To send on-chain support, mint your official Early Support Crew Collectible.

To double down, subscribe to herocast’s Hyper Club on Hypersub. 

If you have a logo, let us know and we will feature you on our Early Supporter Hall of Fame.

Last but not least you can support us by sharing this newsletter with your network.

Thank you for joining the crew!

Your herocasters,

hellno & biji

1. decentralize power on the internet

2. ship the best product for our users

Therefore, we are super excited to announce a new batch of integrations that will give our users more onchain superpowers directly from herocast.

We have integrated with Hats Protocol to enable onchain shared accounts. Other solutions to collaborate on a shared account are off-chain or can expose private keys. In contrast, Hats enables herocast users to share an account on-chain and securely.

While this integration was not the quick way to enable shared accounts, we believe the work pays off due to the security benefits. A big thank you to the Hats team for contributing with their solution. You can read more about this in their post here.

We all have been there. You want to buy something onchain but don't have the right tokens on the right chain. We have seen this issue can become a bottleneck, especially when users want to get started on Farcaster or buy warps.

We have integrated with Glide so you can pay for Farcaster accounts no matter on which chain your tokens are.

What is so special about Farcaster is that it's packed with superpowers from the Farcaster community.

Today, we announce integrations with Launchcaster, Bountycaster and Remindme. Now, you can launch their bots from herocast, faster than ever.

CMD + K → Launch this
CMD + K → Post new bounty
CMD + K → Remind me

On our Github you find a growing list of partners and tools that empower our users.

Feel your favourite tool is missing on this list?

herocast is open source, and you can integrate with herocast, too.

Reach out to me anytime if you want to learn how.

- hellno

By now you have decided that it's time for your brand to join the party on web3's new playground. But which setup should you choose?

In this article you will learn how you can set up your brand using the Farcaster Brand Triangle, consisting of personal profiles, brand profiles and brand channels. Depending on which type of brand you are we will find the right setup for you.

Let’s cover the basics.

You and your team need personal profiles. Farcaster is 100% about people. Ironically, that makes it an amazing place for your brand, especially if you are small. Treat your personal profiles as vanguards that smooth the way for your brand. Your personal profiles can experiment, engage in conversations that matter to you, build a small following and plug your brand once in a while. All without having to craft anything official from your brand. That means the easiest setup to get started is really just having a personal profile that sometimes mentions your brand.

While the people-first dynamics on Farcaster are friendly to small brands, they make your life even easier if you work for a bigger web3 brand. If you are lucky enough to be able to add one of the established names to your profile description, do it and you will get more followers fast.

Claim your brand handle. But don't start firing off announcements just yet. Even though brand profiles are technically the same as personal profiles, they don't do well on their own.

Brand profiles grow best in patches surrounded by team members and channels.

Channels and personal profiles generate the awareness and social credibility your brand needs. That's why I don't recommend a brand-only setup. When I see a brand account I will immediately try to figure out who the people behind the brand are. Connecting with people is the opportunity on Farcaster. In my view if you show up with a brand-only profile you leave too much value on the table.

Channels are like subs on Reddit. They are places for communities to nerd about topics in all forms and sizes, as in the Founders channel with 106k followers, or my Disco channel with 9 precious followers (you know what to do).

The common strategy is to use brand channels as community townhalls. Here, everything comes together: insights from the team, questions from the community, love from users, and announcements from the brand. Just like in our herocast channel (you know what to do).

Another strategy which I think is a huge opportunity is hosting channels about topics that are related to your product. Building a solution for universal basic income (UBI)? Host an UBI channel. I haven't seen brands doing that yet (ping me if you have) but I think this strategy will be big.

Now that we have covered the basics let's find the right setup for you.

Personal profile + brand channel is the go-to solution for community brands to get started without much overhead.

If you want to grow community for your web3 product but have little resources to craft brand content, this setup will give you the best ROI. You have a community. You want to nurture fans. You want them to interact? You need a channel.

Claim your brand profile but there is no pressing need to post content from it yet. Instead, use your team's personal profiles to post and share content in your channel. In fact, some of the bigger web3 brands that are still early on Farcaster follow this strategy.

Brave shows how to start small with a brand on Farcaster. They have one early adopter lukaslevert.eth on the team managing the channel and no official Brave content. You can imagine Lukas having many things to take care of in his position as a product marketer. So this setup is a great way to warm up Farcaster for them.

Another example is Polygon. They have dabbled with a brand profile months ago. Even though the brand profile is inactive at the moment, team member pgpg.eth is hosting a channel that is ready for the community to pick up conversations about Polygon anytime. Channels allow your community to grow without you having to do all the heavy lifting.

Personal profile + brand profile + brand channel is the ultimate choice if you need community and have a strategy to create brand content.

A great example is the Optimism channel. Personal profiles from team members like binji.eth or amandatyler drive traffic to the channel and add a personal touch. Fuelled by this momentum it feels natural and smooth to mix in official announcements from the Optimism brand profile.

Right, you are not Optimism. But this setup works like a charm for smaller players, too. As long as you stick to a simple plan. Check out survey app Ponder's channel with 1.1k followers. The majority of the content are (automated) product updates. At the same time the channel creates room for the founders cojo.eth and ba to join the conversation and for developers to raise questions. Low effort, max impact.

This setup promises the biggest rewards for your brand. Especially, if you are already creating content for other platforms that you can reuse for your brand profile on Farcaster.

Personal profile + brand profile is the right choice for brands whose marketing is less community driven.

You want to interact with your audience but have no need to gather them in one place? Don't waste time with a channel. Instead combine a personal with a brand profile. A great example is Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures. He posts his personal content and sometimes plugs the USV's brand profile to give it some reach.

Other broadcasters that will benefit from this setup are news pages: Share news via the brand profile, then add personal touches via the journalists' profiles. A counter example is Decrypt. They do have a channel, but the Decrypt brand profile is the only one posting there. No community around. I'd argue that in such a case it might be worth to reconsider the channel strategy and to invest in personal profiles from their journalists instead. 

Finally I want to highlight a danger zone: personal channels. Not a danger in a way that it will harm your brand but more in a way that you will sink time that you need somewhere else. There are great personal channels, like the july channel.

However, this is a difficult piece of art. First, one key is to already have a big following. July has 100k followers, the channel has 7.7k. Secondly, the channel's purpose has to resonate with others. The July channel purpose is to share "musings, thoughts & dreams". No doubt, personal channels can be a big boost for your personal brand but if you are a busy founder, marketer or community manager I recommend to go for one of the setups within the Farcaster Brand Triangle.

We are building herocast for you to Farcast faster.

Did these insights help you choose and optimize your setup? If you have feedback, questions or want to discuss your Farcaster strategy let's have a virtual .

Are you a dev? Herocast is open source. Get in touch with hellno to learn how you can contribute.

– Biji

If you have been asking yourself this question lately you are not alone. 

Farcaster, the decentralized social network, is crypto’s new playground.

It’s where web3 founders, builders, developers and degens meet every day to jam and learn. The network 20xed this year and keeps growing. No wonder everybody who grows an audience in web3 wants to join the party. 

Last week, I spoke with a dozen growth and community professionals at web3 brands about Farcaster. A few are already leaders on the network. But most of them are – just like me – pretty new to it or even completely unsure how to use it for their brands.

The ones that haven’t doubled down yet are blocked by the same question:

Is my audience on Farcaster? And, how do I find them?

In fact, in my last position at Cent, I faced exactly the same problem when I tried to find builders at the flimsy intersection of fashion and web3. 

Here are insights and tools that helped me figure it out.

Many crypto folks are leaving Twitter for Farcaster. Why? Because more and more of our friends are there. Among them: Vitalik. The big crypto brain drain even caught Elon Musk's attention. In an interview, Vitalik said the reason why he left was that he could have high quality conversations on Farcaster without “all the really annoying people'' that are spamming convos on Twitter.

It’s true. You might even encounter a very rare type of conversation on Farcaster: DMs! If you approach someone with an authentic ask, chances are high you will get a reply. 

With 70k DAUs and 1.2M daily casts in the last month, Farcaster is still niche. 

But if your job is web3-something, it’s the niche to be. No matter whether you are building a product, trying to find users, looking for feedback or searching for new team members. 

With its open social graph and innovations like Frames, Farcaster is attracting more web3 builders, artists, devs and degens every day.

These tips will help you find them. Faster.

Farcaster structures content in topic specific places called channels. When I was looking for feedback from the super niche web3-fashion-community I headed to the fashion channel. The big channels are a great place to start discovering your audience. Once you hit the big channels you can browse active users and discover other channels they are active in. Channel discovery is not that great on Warpcast yet. Use these Dune dashboards (link, link) to find the most trending channels for any topic.

Another way to engage users that are talking about the topics that matter to you is via keyword search. Let’s say you want to engage in conversations related to ReFi. A simple search will reveal the most recent content about it. 

The most advanced way to uncover more users relevant to you is by running a keyword search on profile descriptions. You can’t do this on Warpcast but you can edit this Dune query. It parses all profiles and unearths the profiles that contain your keywords.

I hope these tips will add some speed to what you are up to.

We are building herocast so that you can achieve your goals on Farcaster faster. Book a virtual with me anytime to exchange ideas on how to use Farcaster for your audience.

Are you a dev? Herocast is open source. Get in touch with hellno to learn how you can contribute.

– Biji

Want to get started with herocast but unsure how?
Schedule a virtual ☕ with hellno now → https://cal.com/hellno/farcaster or
ping on Farcaster https://warpcast.com/hellno.eth

help us design and build this feature. which information would be useful to see on the right sidebar about the profile of the caster?

work in progress by @tjsturos https://github.com/hellno/herocast/pulls

Every week we pick 5 casts for you.

Farcaster

kiszkiloszki 🎩 on Warpcast

I need to find warp-life balance

Farcaster

✦ 𝔼𝕞𝕞𝕒 ✦ on Warpcast

need more women onchain

Farcaster

Renée Campbell 🎩🔵 on Warpcast

Why do crabs never share their things? They are shellfish.

Farcaster

eunika🍒 on Warpcast

I wish I could ask AI where I left my hair straightener

Farcaster

Nancy on Warpcast

Do nothing https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/84a3fa33-fd8a-430a-0b5e-8f3ecc7f1900/original

This week we spotllight the open source devs that are contributing to Herocast

@tusharsoni, @scottrepreneur, @hiporox and @tjsturos

awesome work from raising issues to implementing full features.

Want to get started with herocast but unsure how?
Schedule your virtual ☕ with hellno → https://cal.com/hellno/farcaster or
ping on Farcaster https://warpcast.com/hellno.eth