Gas was still pretty expensive at the time, so the scope of what you could do here was pretty limited, but over time, as gas costs came down to the penny mark, it became more and more achievable - but even then, there are limits, and Clankermon hit those limits pretty fast this past month.

The real killer was cost variance - it could cost $5, $30, or $200 for the same or less activity. The average cost per transaction ranged from $0.002 to $0.10. We had accounted for the lower end but not the upper limit that these costs could reach.

This made sponsorship unsustainable, and having to pass tx costs back to users created the exact friction we originally set out to alleviate. Ultimately, this led to shutting down onboarding, pushing back feature development, and pausing rollouts until we could determine the best path forward.

We examined our options, including reducing the onchain footprint by moving huge chunks of the game off-chain. We also considered switching to cheaper, higher-throughput chains or base L3s to stay closer to home.

Over time, we will add more and more interactive features and experiences that aren’t as heavily onchain, but one of our guiding principles for developing any feature is that the game's core logic and economic primitives rely on state and logic that live onchain.

Call us crazy, but it ascribes a kind of “Proof of work” value that we believe will make it so much more satisfying when you wipe the floor in with opponent in a friendly skill based wager match or settle a score in hardcode mode where losing has a real impact - and that’s one of the biggest unlocks crypto gaming has, the ability to be make what was once ephemeral feel tangible, rewards to be real and consequences to matter.

To do this, we need infrastructure that:

• Enables huge scale at consistently low costs

• Optimizes away inefficiencies that building onchain can present

• Doesn’t cut us off from growing network effects

So that’s exactly what we are building! The Clankermon appchain is designed to be a scalable moat for gaming mechanics built around our assets on base. Providing us with the scale that appchains enable while leveraging the infrastructure, liquidity, and distribution available on the base.

By leveraging Syndicate's Smart Sequencer, we can even move our sequencing logic onchain, enshrining randomness and oracles that supercharge game mechanics in every single block.

The concept of bridging can be quite an abstract idea for new users to wrap their heads around, even knowing what the word means already indicates you have been around the block(chain). Which is why we plan to integrate our appchain directly into our game progression loops. Blurring the lines between the two chains while leveraging the best aspects of each.

When we built the current version, we had an idea; we weren’t sure how feasible it was, if base could continue to scale at a rate that kept our idea viable, if people would play it (they did), and if it came to it, would they pay for it (they did). Now we have a plan and partners that can help us bring it to life, bigger and better than we initially imagined.

This is a big change for us, but we will make the transition as smooth as possible for the players - while taking the opportunity to rework core pillars of the game - player progression mechanics, babymon game loops, staking mechanics, and shipping a better version of dungeons that is both more rewarding and intuitive.

Clankermon, the chain. Clankermon, the game.

In case you missed it, YB published a great article that covers a lot of ground on the concept of Mini Apps, the lore behind the idea, and why they might just be the next logical evolution of Farcaster Developer logos.

Before we pull out the crystal ball and dive into the future of where this all goes, let's quickly recap what's already happened in the past 2 weeks since the term "Mini App" started to proliferate around our little corner of the internet.

• Flappycaster became the first "Mini App" supported by Warpcast - over 3k unique users.

• Recaster integrated a Payflow Moxie/Degen Claim Mini App as an embedded feature

• Recaster tested "deep links" - opening mini apps in the feed by interacting with a frame

Near Term

0-1 in one page load.

David makes a great point here, and while he was in no way inferring that Mini Apps solve this, they actually do.

Mini apps enable your user's first experience of your product to bypass all the tedious steps and jump straight into the action. They do this by authenticating a user from any FC client from a simple frame interaction by verifying and tapping into the data instantly.

Light Personalization ↔ Full Authentication

Farcaster accounts are some of the most data-rich public user profiles on the internet, something many still overlook. The depth and breadth of insights you can distill about an individual in a second are kind of crazy and largely untapped.

Perhaps the most incremental way to think about the "Mini App" experience compared to other dominant Western social platforms is to simply compare the embedded web view experience with the embedded browsers we would see on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

When you click on anything in either, you typically experience the link in an embedded browser cut off from your usual browser. This results in a lack of context and cookies that interrupt behavior normally more fluid in your default browser—this is only a slight detraction.

Still, how these embedded browsers work doesn't add anything to this experience; they primarily serve as a last-ditch attempt to keep you in their app.

The emergent behavior we see with Farcaster Mini Apps is the addition of the available context. When you open Nook, you save things to your profile while sharing your thoughts with your network. With Flappycaster, you play as your bird and record scores to your profile and the global leaderboard.

This slight change can have a meaningful impact as light interactions accumulate into a deep well of preferences that a product like Nook could use to improve your experiences or build out a fuller experience later after validating the product as a mini app.

Inevitable Power Ups

I can see almost every feature from frames making its way into Mini Apps over time. My bet would be sooner rather than later. Some devs are already trying to jam Wallet Connect into a Mini App experience. Personally, I think this is a terrible idea, but I respect devs doing what they can when they can't do what they want.

We have a test client for prototyping concepts. We've added transaction and signature interactions and experimented with methods for two-way messaging between a mini app and the client, based mainly on Telegrams Web App SDK and approach.

It quickly became apparent that a similar FC version was viable and could be extremely powerful. Blowing open the design space for how clients could differentiate and the opportunity for more apps to go viral, an opportunity we haven't seen before in crypto. Outside of a handful of NFTs and meme coins, few apps/products have "blown up" outside of a few notable exceptions like Topshot & Pump.fun

Medium Term

Expand the POV of "Decentralized Social"

As mini apps mature, we should begin to see categories emerge—many will fall into your classic "productivity/gaming/entertainment" categories. However, I also think it's reasonable to expect massively singular-focus apps to rise to popularity in the communities that care about them.

So much so that new clients/platforms will likely emerge that embrace certain apps over others to provide the ideal user experience for their target demographic.

Right now, the outsider's perspective of "Decentralized Social" is that it is a less polished, less diverse Twitter with a "content problem." In my personal opinion, no social platform has ever achieved critical mass without sufficient novelty.

These novelties seem small and almost benign, but consider how crucial these features were to their platform's success.

Twitter: Micro-blogging

Facebook: News Feed

Instagram: Photo Filters

Snapchat: Ephemeral Messaging 

Tiktok: Licensed Music Integration

Frames were the first "Novelty" that really separated Farcaster from the pack, but their slideshow like experience led to their popularity faltering and generally dulled what is otherwise a novel and powerful tool - Mini apps could be a natural evolution from frames and potentially even be the linchpin which set's our network apart.

The "Post Mini App" impression of a decentralized social could be a diverse network of apps and experiences instead of "Twitter with a content problem."

Platform Agnostic Mini Apps

I would also bargain that Mini apps will start becoming more platform agnostic. The same application will be available to different users wherever they are, be that a Farcaster client, a Telegram group chat, or a blink or similar primitive that might appear anywhere on the internet a link would appear—this scope only covers the existing platforms where the Mini App or similar primitive exists.

Expand the surface area of decentralized social.

If I were so bold, I would say that a sufficient supply of Mini apps will lead to a massive uptick in deeper Farcaster integrations in crypto native applications like wallets.

If this happens, it could lead to more apps using Farcaster as a central building block in their app foundations. Adding a signer to your wallet app could become the norm—maybe even account creation. These wallets can begin serving mini apps to their users, essentially bootstrapping new features and engaging content that would be too cumbersome/risky to prioritize themselves.

Long Term Predictions

Knowing that the further forward we look, the more we are likely to get wrong, I'll keep this section brief and sweet; here are a couple of bets/predictions I would make:

Mini app popularity grows over time, becoming a net new channel available across the internet.

A breakout consumer app is born as a mini app, grows a vibrant community of users within crypto, launches its own mobile app, and breaks out into mainstream consciousness.

The breadth and depth of mature mini apps give rise to a new class of aggregator applications that resemble WeChat's utility but are specialized for their users.

Leading to what I would call the "Networked Super App" - a composable hyperstructure that acts as a new kind of operating system that combines the best of social, crypto, and adjacent consumer products into a plug-and-play ecosystem that enables entirely new experiences the western world can't yet fathom.

This last one is a bit of stretch, after all - crystal balls can only see so far.

Both of us grew up a 30 minute drive from each other in the pits of rural Ireland but had never met - neither of us had access to decent internet, heck to this day both of our family homes have mobile signal blackspots where you couldn’t reach the outside world if you wanted too.

We bonded over a shared hunger to do more and continued to connect a couple of times a year. We were both working in the events industry at the time, Josh had been touring on large scale theatrical productions and I was whipping around commercial circuits from stadium tours to conferences. Until one faithful conversation in 2019 over pints on a rooftop bar in Dublin - we hatched a plan to turn Josh’s photographer moniker “Exhale” into a creative powerhouse, or at least that’s how we saw it at the time.

We nailed down our launch strategy, landed a partnership that would give us unrequited access to a year of shows, artists and events - for which we would provide onsite media and post production services, wrangled a team of hungry creatives and were ready to go to work. Until on March 18th 2020, the same day we received the incorporation papers for “Exhale Productions ltd.” - the world shut down.

A lot happened in this time, we had to let the entire creative team go and figure out our next move. Something I often ponder over the is the power of mutuals, there really is no higher stamp of validation of another person in my eyes than when someone I would trust with my life introduces me to someone who they would trust with theirs, and boy did that become a cornerstone of the past 4 years of our lives.

A group of us moved into a house in Galway for the summer, bright eyed and bashful, while the world was shut down there was still this infectious feeling we shared that by the time it opened back up we would be swinging for the fences. It’s at this point of the story where we introduce Finn, Martin, Shane, Tadhg and Dylan. Each of us connected to one another in different ways, bound by the power of various mutual friendships.

Around a year later, we had another addition to this rag tag misfit mafia - Arek, the somehow pragmatic eternal optimist, now one of my favourite human beings on the planet, joined the fold. Brought in by Dylan, Arek had just finished his computer science degree and at the time I was on a solo side quest in Budapest looking for “what’s next” and banging my head off a keyboard trying to get a grasp of solidity. Arek became our CTO - Yet another testament to the power of the mutuals.

The group never intended to end up in business together, it was more so a conscious intention to create a support network for each other to pursue our own goals - but over time they began to merge into the one. We bounced from challenge to challenge, moved and traveled together on this quest to “figure it all out”, shared wins, consoled loses, lived in all kinds of conditions - from a lavish villa on the coast of Spain to squashing 6-8 people into 2/3 bedroom houses/apartments in Athlone/Barcelona. I will forever look back at that period of life as one of the most exciting and transformative periods and honestly couldn’t imagine a better crew to have shared it with.

At this point the team had formed two sudo structures under the same scaffolding - one focused on tech and providing developer services, the other focused on content and marketing - both had there ups and down’s, ironically often inversely , which led to one side carrying the other at different points in time. Yet as we tallied a win here and there on either side, the resume began to open doors for both and kept us dynamic to the point that I think it was at the very least, intriguing if not confusing to anyone on the outside.

Fast forward to the beginning of this year - The content side of the business (Exhale) spearheaded by Finn is steadily building momentum as the team continues to drive 10s to 100s of millions of views each month across platforms for some of the biggest Artists in the world. While on the tech side, Arek, Josh and I, have been 100% dedicated to figuring out our next chapter since we stumbled upon a very purple protocol which we now call home.

I felt inspired to write this today as we received the incorporation documents for our next venture: "Categorically Large - a self proclaimed Onchain Entertainment Company."

I hope for everyone's sake that the world doesn’t react to this one like it did the first, regardless, I just wanted to let you know, we will be swinging for the fences building things that we hope can capture your imagination, entertain you and create compelling offerings to onboard the world to the protocol we believe is best positioned to bring the world onchain through the things that matters most, people and connection.

Long Live Farcaster.

What is Russian Roulette?

Russian Roulette is well known for its brutality and high stakes. Often portrayed in movies and media as a game played by two equally unhinged players with extreme wagers.

A single bullet in a 6 chamber revolver is spun, before players take turns to see which one walks away with the prize pool, the other has a headache to say the very least 💀

Source is our first game launching this August, it’s a Seasonal MMORPG and this shady little corner is known as the backrooms of Seizures Casino in Source city.

Seizures has a variety of “more traditional games” but in a city like Source - all kinds of things happen behind closed doors, behind this particular door - illicit games of Russian Roulette are a popular pass time among locals.

Players can stack their credits daily via the minigame in preparation for the full game launch. Once the game launches players are free to revisit the casino and try their luck anytime.

How many credits you can claim each day is based on your “Daily Allocation”. There are two main ways to increase your Daily Allocation:

• Completing Bonus Tasks

• Holding Source Assets

These could be anything from social actions, having used another app in the Farcaster ecosystem or holding partner assets. New bonuses will appear randomly so check daily!

Right now there are 2 Source assets:

• Source CNCPT - 37 items minted back in March

• Source Pre-order - Currently available to mint on Zora, via this frame and in the Jeeves App.

Below is a breakdown of the Collectible types and how they impact your Daily Credit Allocations

Here’s a quick video run through that covers all the basics to get you going :)

• Getting started

• Completing bonuses

• Preordering the game

• Claiming credits

• Trying your luck vs Drex (Source NPC Character)

Right now the game is a simple solo player experience, you play against an NPC at your own pace and leisure.

The next phase will move the game onchain and enable PvP games between players across Farcaster.

We're in the final stages of testing Phase 2 and tentatively targeting release between the 9th-13th of July 2024.

Play now in the Jeeves App.

Source is a Seasonal MMORPG, built on Farcaster and powered by Jeeves.

Play with friends or against enemies, build up your character, survive Source City, and fight for your share of the glory (and the pot) to win the flux wars.

Before diving into the details of Source, let's explore the foundational concept behind its mechanics. This concept shapes the unique experience of playing Source. The general idea revolves around "Seasonal MMORPGs".

In its simplest form, a Seasonal MMORPG is an ephemeral game in a temporary world—where everything matters until it doesn't. The idea is to blend the accessibility and ease of casual gaming with the skill-based intensity of competitive games.

Source aims to be approachable for everyone, accessible on your phone, natively social, and not requiring long hours in front of a PC. It also fosters a competitive environment where strategy, decisions, and teamwork are crucial, enhanced by season-based gameplay and prize pots.

The game will mostly feel like a "choose your own adventure" within an overarching narrative—similar to open-world mechanics, where side quests or free-roaming are available anytime.

Consequences play a major role in the game. Every choice matters, whether deciding how to play for the day, making an in-game decision during an interaction with an NPC, or engaging with another player.

For example, your player archetype, determined by which class recruits you, has unique pros, cons, and gameplay mechanics. The overarching narrative acts like a storm, influencing future decisions and impacting past ones. Players interact with this narrative through various events and direct engagements with NPC characters - each of which have their own Farcaster accounts. If one of these accounts follow you, it's a good thing in-game :)

Progress systems will guide you through the basics of the resource system and show you the benefits you can yield from the options available. Ultimately, what you do daily is up to you, and there is no definitive answer on how to play.

Seasons are multiweek events, each season every player starts off on the same footing, seasons may have similarities, be extensions of a narrative in a past season or be entirely different. Regardless, no prior knowledge is required to play - but might be fun story wise for players of past seasons.

Players buy-in each season, seeding the pot. Additional mechanisms like special drops, marketplace trading fees, and game-based penalties or perks can increase the pot size over time.

Players compete to become the strongest, richest, best-connected, or most prepared for an elusive endgame that develops throughout the season. This structure is similar to a poker tournament, with an initial pot that grows and is distributed among top players at the end.

At the end of the season the gameplay ends, elements of the game will persist such as items, more details around this will be rolled out closer to the first season kickoff.

The game launches this August, and you can pre-order it on Zora, via this frame, or within the new Source: Russian Roulette minigame, which just went live in the Jeeves App.

Pre-orders are the current "Buy in" previously mentioned, so once pre-ordered, you will be ready to go in August! While also earning credits daily to play the new minigame.

We will continue to share more about the game as we approach August. If you have any questions, feel free to jump into the Source or Jeeves channels on Farcaster and ask the teams are active and engaged there :)

Creators earned $1.8 Billion in royalties during 2022, with $489 Million of that going to the top 10 projects in the space. It was big business and a major revenue driver.

The concept was simple: create perpetual demand and receive perpetual rewards…

Or at least it was supposed to be that way.

Marc Andreessen once said the internet's original sin was the failure to build payments into the internet's architecture from the beginning. I will go out on a limb here and say that the original sin of NFTs was not building royalties into NFTs from the offset.

This post will look at what happened to royalties, a recent exception to the rule, and the tailwinds that may bring them to the forefront of conversation (and trading) this year.

Any chart showing royalties over time will look a lot like this:

Down and to the right.. very down and to the right.

Here is a crash course on what happened with royalties, the marketplace wars, and some proposed solutions.

In summary:

• Royalties became optional on both Ethereum and Solana marketplaces.

• The Solana community quickly responded with a new standard to enforce royalties, which was widely adopted; royalties are no longer a contested issue on Solana.

• Ethereum marketplaces used the turmoil to strong-arm each other with promises of royalty enforcement in return for loyalty, only later to give up on them entirely.

• Various solutions have been proposed in the Ethereum ecosystem, from registries to new standards and even new chains.

We will dive into 2 of these solutions and how they already impact the space.

Let's look at a couple of projects' trading activities in 2023; one is not like the others.

Only Overworld (Far right) hasn't lost millions of potential revenue due to optional royalties.

The following figures are derived from 2023 trading data; interestingly, Overworld launched on December 15th, allowing only two weeks of trading data to be used in these calculations.

Overworld's massive lead in Royalty Capture Rate is particularly interesting; the lost revenue for the more established projects is pretty substantial, too.

There are 2 main drivers behind this massive lead in royalties captured.

1. Opensea agreed to enforce royalties exclusively.

2. The collection was initially not available to trade on Blur at launch.

The details of the agreement and the specificities around why the collection wasn't available for trading on Blur are unknown. However this combination of factors did garner plenty of attention and serves as a good point of reference for enforced royalties in 2024.

NFTstats.eth

@punk9059

Overworld has earned over $400k in royalties this past week.

All the green bars in the chart below have found a way to enforce.

Feels like the tide is shifting as more projects find ways to enforce, despite leading to less decentralization.

134

5:17 PM • Dec 20, 2023

Limitbreak & ERC721C

Several Overworld holders confirmed that they did not have the option to list on Opensea without creator royalties, even though the contract the team used did not meet Opensea requirements for enforced royalties - in fact, the team used LimitBreaks ERC721C standard.

In case you aren't familiar with LimitBreak, the team with a wealth of experience in the early days of mobile gaming raised $200m in 2021 on the vision that "free-to-own" will replace the "free-to-play" genre.

Within the space, LimitBreak is better known for its collection DigiDaigaku, which you may remember from the $7m Superbowl Commercial when the majority of users who scanned the code to earn an NFT were instead directed to the founder Gabriel's Twitter.

The DigiDaigaku ad aired during the Superbowl in 2023

Limitbreak introduced the ERC721C standard in mid-2023, its key features are:

• Programmable Royalties range from enforcing royalties to shared royalties and even have a figuration for assigning royalty percentages to minters or transferring shares of the royalties to other users.

• Adjustable Security Tiers that apply various rules to both the caller and the receiver depending on the active level.

Sounds great on the surface. However, the Achilles heel of the new standard is that it takes two to tango.

The ERC721C standard requires marketplace contracts to leverage the feature set to avail of the new features effectively. Currently, the only product in the market that does this is the LimitBreaks payment processor.

While the standard and the payment processor are open-source, both have been adopted sparsely until now. It is also heavily speculated and even stated by LimitBreak founder Gabriel that the Magic Eden and Yuga Labs collaboration to revive their ETH marketplace is using the new tools to enforce royalties.

What's interesting here is that teams like Overworld leveraging the standard can eject from optional royalties at any time by upgrading their security level and blocking incumbents like Opensea and Blur.

All they need is a safe haven to move to, which might be Magic Eden.

While the solution is far from perfect, the lost revenue figures from projects that the shift in royalty enforcement has impacted provide ample reason to consider the solution.

Frame : A place for creators and collectors.

The next solution we will look at is the new Layer 2, Frame. It was launched by a team of prominent developers and crypto Twitter voices, and built on the Arbitrium Nitro stack.

The team has set out to build an NFT-first orientated chain, making optimizations at the chain level to increase the quality of NFT-based UX and reduce the cost of critical features to create the optimal experience.

Two key innovations at the base layer are:

• The Palette Protocol is designed to provide network-wide onchain liquidity and native royalty enforcement. Based on currently released information, Palette combines a seaport-like protocol and the open sea-inspired operator filter embedded at the network level.

• Native wallet delegation, is a feature where you can assign utility rights of an NFT to another wallet address. This delegated address can now access anything that NFT enabled without holding the asset in the same wallet. Made possible via the native integration of Delegate.xyz, which popularized the pattern to prevent malicious apps from stealing high-valued assets from users.

If you haven't heard of Frame but have at one point traded NFTs on a marketplace, you qualify for their airdrop, which you can claim anytime before the Frame Mainnet launch on January 25st.

Frame and their approach with Palette brings us full circle from the opening statement that the original sin of NFTs may have been not building royalties from the beginning.

Nike recently stated in their .SWOOSH update that they will allow holders to export collectibles to their own wallets, and also specified that collectibles will be available for trading on marketplaces that enforce royalties.

The return of royalties is a trend that will inevitably grow in the coming year.

Royalties play a big of a role in the broader perspective of business and creator considerations; the opportunity is too big and too important not to be solved.

LimitBreak's ERC721C/Payment Processor and Frame's new NFT and royalty-friendly blockchain are just two of the most timely solutions to the royalty problem.

Either way, I am optimistic that royalties will return in various shapes and sizes throughout 2024.