Existence & Immortality

In 2022, I minted an NFT every day using Manifold on ETH L1.

I was inspired by On Kawara's Today Series/Date Paintings where he painted around 3,000 paintings over 40 years with an unvarying set of rules. I was captivated by the meticulous, machine-like detail in his paintings and also his lifetime dedication to the series.

In viewing the collection, I realized blockchain is an excellent medium for for this concept as it captures time of creation by default, so I resolved at the end of 2021 to create an NFT every day of 2022 and maybe longer.

That collection I called Existence & Immortality, and can be found on Manifold Gallery or OpenSea. I gave myself a set of rules that allowed me to complete the series:

• The date had to be in the artwork, as homage to Kawara

• I used the same set of attributes on each work, that required adding manually by hand per mint

• If I missed minting on the date (which I did for ~33% of days that year), I would add a tag indicating it as such

• I follow UTC time, as ETH does, which means 7PM EST is the cutoff for my mint to be late

With these rules I was able to mint a work for each day of that whole year, which was more than I expected.

Viewing the collection now, there are a few things that stand out:

• AI creation tools were just becoming accessible
  I got access to Midjourney on May 5, 2022, owned by Juan, and you can see Midjourney's immediate impact on me. This was an incredible, incredible unlock for me and continues to be as I write this on Jan 1, 2025. The rest of the collection includes a lot of early Midjourney creations, and you can see the models evolving rapidly in those seven months, culminating in the abstract circles of December.

• Contract costs are way lower thanks to L2s
  I thought I would use this contract to house a bunch of different NFTs and sub-segment it by the "Collection" attribute, which is why my wife's wedding ring is in there, and sets the total token count to 366. At the time, standing these contracts up was pretty expensive so I was planning to reuse it. Now I stood up a whole contract and minted the first work for ~10¢ total. Thanks, Base!

• Creator tooling has come a long way in the last two years
  Manifold has seriously leveled up, and I'm very thankful for that. They were solid then and they're solid now. I own my contracts and have a lot of flexibility in there. I am definitely on the more crypto-tech side than a lot of creators I think, and simultaneously there are a lot of more friendly options now for web3-curious people, like Zora or Rodeo, but Manifold is the right choice for me.

• Lens & Farcaster were not around when I started in 2022
  Since late 2022, I've spent a lot of my online community time on Farcaster. It's largely a technical community, although there is definitely appetite and appreciation for artists. I have been told Lens is the place for creatives but it just hasn't stuck for me – it's felt spammy when I've visited, and I don't really love the Orb client. I'm excited to embed Frames into my workflow this round, and expect that distribution will be much easier than in 2022 thanks to those.

• Simplify, simplify, simplify
  Even though I had a set of rules for the daily mints, they were still too overbearing. I am reducing the rules even further, and also working to stay more thematically consistent by the month, and perhaps even for the entire year. This is a creative workout exercise, and reflection on being alive at this point in time, pre-AGI.

• Minting is fun / Stamp the void
  I like to mint. The most important thing to me is stamping the blockchain with my address. The art is for fun. This is my favorite way I can think to yell "I was here!" into the digital void. Stampers gonna stamp. This is not a change from 2022. This is play, practice, and experimentation.

Overall, the landscape dramatically shifted in the last two years and I'm excited to take advantage of the advances in AI, NFT tooling, and my own focus to create an interesting conceptual work on blockchain.

I just listed the last 30 of 2022 for 6 months at 0.003e / $10 each. I didn't promote these at all as I was minting them. My goal is to get them into people's hands, and if I even sell a few then I will be covered for multiple years of minting on Base.

I still have 268 of the tokens total. If there is one you like, please DM me on Warpcast or X and I'll sell to you for 0.003.

I was not even thinking about resuming the practice until three hours before 7PM UTC today. I really like starting on January 1 of the year though, so with two hours left, I scrambled to get my new contract together.

The first mint is available until 7:00 PM EST on January 2, 2025:

01 JAN 2O25

01 JAN 2O25 - NFT (Digital Object): we begin again this is a continuation of my 2022 daily mint exercise. this year, i am focusing on simplicity and consistency. so much has changed since that time!

https://app.manifold.xyz

I'd already been in the habit of taking these 10-30 second videos, and had one I really loved from today, so I used that. I was totally captivated by this little container in a puddle in the Lower East Side that reminded me of floating paper boats down the river as a kid, and the wind was blowing it around in an animated way. I'm happy with this video style and also making it black-and-white. This should be an easy way to start out with a consistent look and feel.

My new rules for 2O25 dailies are as follows:

• No requirement to put the date in the artwork

• The date is always the title

• The description is whatever is on my mind at time of mint

• I will apply the Late attribute if I am late

• The required attributes are now only Location and Type (video, photo, etc)

• AI is allowed

• Collaborations are allowed

• I must work in the same style for the entirety of the month

• There is no rule about subject matter, but cohesion is preferable

What I still don't know:

• Not sure if there will be single token mints or every day will be an open timed claim

• Not sure if I will switch style at the end of January or not TBD

I decided not to re-mint into the original j4ck contract, which is on L1, and instead start a new contract on Base. This is obviously way cheaper, and thanks to that and the improvements on Manifold, I was able to airdrop this first token to everyone who holds any of my previous smart contract work.

The ability to immediately share this artwork as a reward to previous collectors feels amazing, and I can't believe it cost me just $5 to airdrop. Two years ago, this would take days, a dev, and a few hundred bucks to complete.

We are truly living in the future, and I can't wait to see what 2O25 brings.

Maybe someday someone will be inspired by this contract and clone me into an AI to continue this work forever, who knows. Maybe I'll do that.

A big thank you to everyone who has collected one of the original works, and some special shoutouts in my artistic journey to Christiania, dacopolis, Dan Stone, Winslow Porter, Shivani Mitra, Emily Edelman, Michael Mills, bedtimes, and all the supportive friends on Farcaster.

Happy New Year!

I was initially invited to Farcaster by my Googler friend Nick Matarese, who told me Farcaster was the Valley's hot new crypto social app and I needed to get on it ASAP. Nick always knows the latest thing, so when he tells me to try something, I try it.

This was sometime in early 2022 and there were less than 1,000 people on the app. The sign-up required me to save a recovery phrase and set the tone for a crypto-native experience. The core app layout was easy to use and felt like Twitter, but I churned quickly because it felt empty at the time.

I was walking in NYC a few months later and randomly wondered how that purple app was going.

I opened it up to see around 3,000 users and conversation flowing. At the time, the app had a leaderboard showing the most popular users. I decided I would just target their casts with replies to see if I couldn't get in the leaderboard, and in pretty short order I did. After that, I decided I would cast every day, and it was easy with solid mobile and desktop apps.

Once I was on the leaderboard, followers accumulated rapidly. Eventually, I learned this was due to the onboarding flow that asks you to follow 50 users, and those are the top 50 users on the app as determined by a ranking algorithm.

My follower steadily rose, and I was followed by Marc Andreessen, Vitalik, Chris Dixon, Dan Romero, other core members of the Merkle Manufactory team, and many other crypto legends. I realized how unique and special it was to be on the protocol during this time, and on the leaderboard, as it opened up channels for me I wouldn't get on any other platform.

My favorite part was I felt like I could be myself, and the conversation was focused on crypto, tech, and art – all my favorites.

Farcaster became my daily driver, I was hooked.

Why I stuck around

The Celebrity Effect and rising Follower Count are two nice perks of being active on Farcaster, but the meat and bones of why I love this platform are as follows:

The People

This is obvious, but worth stating: the people who make up any social network are the most important component.

My perception of the core Farcaster user as of June 2023 is someone smart, kind, motivated, creative, curious, technically oriented, entrepreneurial, optimistic, and open to discussion.

This manifests itself in the timeline daily, where Casters raise interesting topics daily, have fun making memes, create NFTs, stream together, discuss products, discuss topical events, and ask a lot of questions.

IRL, the Farcaster Fam is a treat. The meetups at ETH Denver and NFT NYC this year were very well attended and felt more like a reunion than a first-time meeting of internet strangers. In the picture above, people who I'd met on Farcaster sang happy birthday to my wife and surprised her with a cake. What gems! In my experience, that's not a normal outcome of social media. Being part of Farcaster means you automatically have a group of excellent people to meet up with at any given conference.

The Merkle Manufactory team leads by example. They are on the protocol casting day in, day out, hosting video chats, and attending meetups. I honestly wonder when DWR gets any rest because he follows everyone on the platform and must get endless notifications yet somehow usually replies in under 1 minute. He sets the tone for the whole platform, and I like the vibe.

There are also many startup founders on the platform, which is invaluable to me as I cofound my own company, Icebreaker. There is no shortage of deep insight, founder support, investor opinions, and product feedback. In general, everyone is down to test everyone else's products and this hardcore early adopter attitude fosters a unique and rare environment. Where Twitter feels like a noisy stadium, Farcaster feels like a chill party full of interesting friends.

The Mission

I can't say it better than the team here: Permissionless, Open Source, and Blazing Fast. Who doesn't want these attributes? I resonate with all three of these pillars and want to see this Protocol succeed in its mission.

I'm a firm believer in open source and permissionless composability as forces for good in the world. Looking at the available social media options with this perspective, it is easy to be in Farcaster's corner as there aren't other products building from this fundamental long-term worldview.

The Products

The Farcaster protocol is built in such a way that it fosters an entire ecosystem of apps around it.

The Warpcast client is (likely) the most popular product on the Protocol as it's the original client and built by the core team, so it has the most distribution. The team continually updates the app with quality-of-life improvements, recently dynamic notifications, and Channels.

The fact that the iOS app was fully functional and snappy upon my joining was another reason I was able to stick around: no one else had put a decentralized social experience in my pocket so well, and the team was very responsive to feedback.

Beyond the Warpcast client, a few of my favorite tools and clients built on top of Farcaster are Discove, Jam, Launchcaster, Searchcaster, Farcaster.Network, and Alphacaster. These are each different clients on top of the Farcaster protocol with various custom, differentiating feature sets. You can entirely replace the Warpcast client with one of the others if you so please, demonstrating the power of using a protocol instead of centralized services.

It's been amazing to have a front row see as an active user watching these products transform from ideas to functional apps. I personally really enjoy having alpha access to products and am always down to try out a new product in its earliest stages.

Building a new product is incredibly challenging so it's a testament to Farcaster that so many apps have already been built on top of it. I salute everyone building on top of the protocol.

a16z keeps a GitHub repo list of projects built on the protocol called Awesome Farcaster if you are interested in exploring what some of the builders have been up to.

Challenges & Opportunities

Of course, there are plenty of improvements to be made and we are in the early stages of a long journey. Here are a few of the challenges I see the protocol and clients needing to overcome:

Welcoming newcomers: In my personal experience, people who I expect to like the protocol and clients churn at a higher rate than expected. I think this is because they feel like they're late to the party, starting over on a new social, and don't want to contribute the energy. I wonder how we might make joining the protocol more welcoming and expose the great vibes you find if you hang out long enough.

Easier onboarding: Users struggle with recovery phrase setup and management. New account abstraction and wallet services like Privy and others are tackling this challenge, and I'm sure the team is thinking about ways to make this less painful while retaining the powerful decentralized aspects of wallets.

Multi-account management: I recently went through this to add the Icebreaker account, and I know others have done the same. Managing multiple accounts right now is cumbersome and confusing to manage. This could be a wedge for another client by being the best place to manage multiple Farcaster accounts.

More topics and communities: As much as I love crypto, NFTs, and tech, it dominates the conversation on the protocol. I don't know how this problem works itself out, but I hope we somehow attract some other groups and see the network grow beyond its core set of early adopters. Getting people to shift their behavior to something that is not a 10x better experience is a hard sell unless they're motivated by the mission.

Protocol growth: User growth percentage sits at 1.2% currently, with a slight decrease in Monthly Active Casters. This is the existential threat for Farcaster in the scenario the network can't get enough traction to survive. Addressing the newcomers and onboarding challenges may help with this. I know DWR and the team have thought a lot about this particular scenario and either way I'm curious to see what happens. I'll be continuing to cast!

DWR's notes: Dan has posted a lot of ideas for Farcaster on his site. If you want to build something on Farcaster, check that out.

Wrap up

I hope to see Farcaster succeed as a protocol on a grand scale. I am already fully bought in with my own time and whenever possible try to convince those who I think would enjoy it to give it a shot.

I would be curious to hear from churned users why they left and see what can be done to address those challenges. For me, it's been an amazing journey so far and I don't see that changing – Farcaster is hands down my favorite place to hang out on the internet.

I'm very much looking forward to FarCon, the first unofficial Farcaster Conference, this weekend in Boston, and big thanks to Cameron Armstrong for organizing both FarCon and the writing contest on his platform Say More which motivated me to write this up.

If you made it this far and are not yet on Farcaster please message me on Telegram for an invitation, and if you found this article enjoyable I'd love to hear about it on Warpcast, Twitter, or in a DM on Telegram.