We set out to build a mini app where creators prosper, $BETR holders win, and users have a blast collecting onchain — all in a way that’s sustainable for Netnose and me to keep shipping and iterating on the daily.

Almost exactly 4 months in, the numbers speak louder than any words I could choose:

• 40,000+ spins of the neon flywheel across 60+ rounds

• $150,000+ in transaction volume (~$38,000 MRR)

• $35,000+ in rewards paid directly to creators

BETRMINT Rounds are so in-demand, they frequently sell out in just 12–13 minutes. That virality has helped thousands of people discover the onchain art and content from our featured creators across Farcaster, Zora, and beyond.

But what about the token holders, Toady?

Over these past months, we’ve worked hard to reward the people who’ve believed in us enough to put skin in the game. The BETR Believers group (holders of 50M+ $BETR token) has become one of the most energetic and enviable communities around. We’ve run poker nights, art contests, cross-project collabs with Tipn, Noice, Degen and more, and we even dropped a limited-edition animated coat of arms NFT for the OG Believers (claim window opening this week).

At the same time, every single BETRMINT round now puts buy pressure on $BETR through three built-in feedback loops:

1. 0.0001 ETH from every spin goes to betrnotsleep.eth and is swapped into $BETR.

2. Creator rewards are paid half in ETH and half in freshly swapped $BETR.

3. Netnose and I often swap part of our own app earnings from rounds into $BETR for the treasury.

And now, we’re unlocking the next chapter.

Introducing: BETRStake

BETRStake is live today. For the first time, $BETR holders can stake their tokens directly in the mini app (or from outside ) and share directly in the app’s continued success.

How it Works:

• That 0.0001 ETH per spin flowing into betrnotsleep.eth? Starting now, it’s distributed proportionately to stakers. And the 700M $BETR already there will be used to boost APY for the first two months and reward our early stakers.

• Staking is open now at betrmint.fun/stake (copy and paste link inside a Farcaster cast or DM to make sure you're in the mini app for best experience.)

• Reward claims will begin Sept 1 — and in classic BETRMINT style, you won’t just click to claim. You’ll spin a neon flywheel once per day to collect your accrued rewards, re-stake them, and maybe hit one of our monthly Yield Jackpots:

• 50M $BETR Yield Jackpot

• 4 × 10M $BETR Mini Jackpots

• Early stakers get a 50% APY boost for the first 2 months, plus plenty of extra perks.

We’re also introducing new staking tiers at 25M, 50M, and 200M $BETR, with juicy perks like weekly BETR Karma boosts (and remember: Karma powers our airdrops).

Why Staking?

Because it makes the neon flywheel spin even faster.

$BETR launched 4 months ago with no team allocation (everything we own we bought on the open market). Instead, half the initial token supply was vaulted via Clanker for community airdrops, app prizes, and initiatives. That design means as the project grows, so too does the runway of our shared community reserve.

Which means: more reasons to buy and hold $BETR → more rounds of BETRMINT → more fans → more rewards → more staking → more fun!

Like interlocking gears in a grandfather clock, one flywheel spins another: more rounds → more rewards for creators → more app revenue → more yield for stakers → more reasons to join our community.

We see $BETR as a Project Coin — a special kind of memecoin that lets you bet on the upside potential of your favorite builders and what they’re cooking. But just because it’s a memecoin doesn’t mean it can’t flex the programmatic powers of onchain tokens to align everyone’s incentives. We’re excited to see what this X-factor unlocks for the entire BETRMINT ecosystem.

One final note about today’s launch:

We’ve built a custom WalletConnect page so you can access staking outside the mini app, if you want to.

That means:

1. You can stake, even if your tokens aren’t in a Farcaster-connected wallet.

2. You can now participate in the BETR ecosystem even if you’re not active on Farcaster or don’t want to / can't often play the game.

We’re bullish on giving Crypto Twitter a way to gain easy, passive exposure to one of the fastest-growing ecosystems on Farcaster and Base.

And as for our loyal community of Farcaster-native BETRMINT wen-warriors: for the first time, even on non-spin days, you’ll always have something to do onchain in the app if you choose to stake and compound your tokens.

It’s what you might call a win-win-win scenario… and what could be BETR than winning together?

Start earning $BETR rewards + Boosted APY + Bonus Karma by staking your tokens today!

https://betrmint.fun/stake

A sincere thank you to everyone who has supported this project and community to date, especially the content creators and artists who have given us lots of amazing onchain creations to collect. Thank you also to Netnose for his tireless shipping, to Sam and Wiz who graciously reviewed our contracts for this implementation, and to Apex and Nifty/Kompreni for advice and assistance. May the BETR Karma gods bless you all.

The Ethereum ecosystem is open source, and it deserves media content that is open source as well.

This is something I believe very strongly, alongside my longtime conviction that CC0 educational content is a bonafide public good. To wit, today I am excited to announce the official launch of Zero Rights Media (zerorights.media), a zero-copyright onchain content collective dedicated to producing and curating media that make us all excited about Ethereum and life onchain.

Watch this little stinger to get jazzed up before you read on (you can collect it for free on Base too here.)

Day Zero.

This is "Day Zero." by Zero Rights Media Collective on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

https://vimeo.com/

Collect a copy of Still Day Zero for free on Base via Zora:

Collect NFT

Now if you're an enjoyooor of our video podcast ZEROPOD, or a connoisseur of the beautiful short films my friend JackWyldes has been cheffing up all year long (nice mustache by the way, very based), then you are already a fan of ZRM. Today's launch simply represents a rebrand and consolidation of all of the projects we have been building on Base over the past two years (and also takes into account all of the lessons we've learned along the way.)

All of the educational onchain videos and short films that Jack and I have been putting out these past two years, teaching people about all aspects of the Ethereum, Base, Superchain and Nouns ecosystems, will now be released by Zero Rights Media instead of The Noun Square (TNS.) Our YouTube, Spotify, Twitter/X, TikTok, Zora, ENS and Basename have all been rebranded to reflect this.

We will continue to openly encourage other creators to reuse our content -- slice it up, remix it, repost it (with attribution please, but otherwise, go nuts!) Some like Leo Clarke from CC0 Films have already been experimenting with building accounts on TikTok and elsewhere featuring clips from ours and other podcasts. We would love to see more positive sum games like this being played in 2025!

This rebrand is a conscious decision to minimize market confusion, keep it simple (stupid), and lean into the success of ZEROPOD, plus our other video content by Jack, while championing first principles that are both Ethereum and Nouns-native, chief among them the power of open source.

Jack and I will be working very closely together in 2025 to create banger after banger, and also to curate & co-release CC0 and CC-BY content from other talented creators in the space (more on this below.) We will be experimenting hard at the intersection of decentralized contribution & centralized distribution.

And speaking of Jack, I have learned so much from this dude by building alongside him these past couple years and I have so much respect for his boundless creativity, his superhuman storytelling abilities and his impressive work ethic. I'm even more bullish on what we can produce together for you this year as a zero-coded power couple... Watch this space.

Over the past year, ZEROPOD has also progressed from an obscure little CC0 pod about nouns and Ethereum, into one of the fastest growing onchain podcasts in the space, with over 25,000 mints of our onchain editions on Pods.media (plus another 4000 mints on Zora before we migrated over.) We have been seeing steady growth of the pod on YouTube at the same time, and in 2024 we were in the top 20% of video podcasts by watch time for all of Spotify. We've had incredible guests on the show like Base's Jesse Pollak, Dan Romero from Farcaster, Jacob from Zora, Luca from Pudgy Penguins and many more. I'm excited to continue to grow and level up ZEROPOD on all fronts in 2025.

Almost exactly one year ago, alongside the core team of The Noun Square (me, Benbodhi, RobotFishGirl, BrettDrawsStuff, ProfWerder, Symbiotech, Santhosh and JackWyldes), I launched a fork of Nouns DAO on Base called The Yellow Collective. It features a daily auction and unique community-drawn traits, and has grown into a thriving Farcaster-native culture club that aims to support and empower creators onchain.

In fact, we paid out over 60 ETH last year to artists and creators through regular art contests, collaborations and commissions. I had a lot of fun coordinating many of these artist collabs last year, and our monthly Based & Yellow Artist Spotlight Editions alone brought in over 10 ETH for the artists that we partnered with, giving distribution, attention and income to these talented creators who might not otherwise have gotten it.

I want to take some of the lessons from Yellow and apply them to Zero Rights this year, by inviting the best and brightest content creators in our space to collaborate on interesting open source content drops, and by doing what we do best in boosting onchain distribution on Base and helping these creators earn more for their work, just like we've done for countless artists via Yellow in 2024.

The year has just begun, but we already have some really fun tentative collaborations lined up with Rachel Wilkins (Good News Show), Goldy and Dan from Nounish, GM Farcaster, the spicy ladies from Los Fomos, Kyle Patrick, Sloppy and more.

To follow along on our journey this year and help us grow, please make sure you follow @zerorightsmedia on all socials (X, Farcaster, YouTube) so you don't miss our upcoming content, both original videos and curated collaborations.

You can also join our Zero Heroes Discord server to meet other fans and get early alpha on all things ZRM and ZEROPOD. Follow JackWyldes on Farcaster and X because he is criminally underrated and that won't be the case by the end of this year I'm sure of it. And follow me too I guess if you like mid takes and bad puns: Farcaster. X.

We are also in the process of re-building our website from the ground up to be a single-stop destination for fans to view all of our content & socials and get to know other members of the community. But for now, you can bookmark zerorights.media as a placeholder with helpful ZRM links, and expect some announcements very soon about new design and functionality.

It's Still Day Zero. There's so much to build. LFG.

The Noun Square originally began in 2022 with a simple idea: Host a Twitter Space about Nouns every single day, at the end of the daily auction. When we started this endeavour, I don't think my original cofounder Dan or I knew what we were getting ourselves into.

Earlier this morning, we hosted our 935th straight Space in a row without ever missing a single day. It's been an epic run (almost 3 years!) and throughout all the many seasons of Nouns, NOC has remained as a steadfast touchpoint for the community, day in and day out. I'm proud of that.

As part of this restructuring and planning for 2025, our team has made the somewhat difficult decision to sunset the daily Noun O' Clock Live show after episode 1000, which is coming up in a couple months' time. In the meantime, next month we will be launching a weekly show about the Nouniverse to be hosted on X, Mondays at 11 AM EST.

While we didn't see a path forward in the current meta and climate to continue producing the daily show on an ongoing basis, we are nonetheless excited about the opportunity to teach new people about Nouns at a set time and day that they can remember and set a reminder for. After a month or so of overlap, this weekly show will replace the daily show. It will be called The Noun Square (in honor of Nouny's legacy) and I'm excited to see what RFG and the team can do with a full week to prepare and promote, and a show that doesn't change airtime every single day.

Speaking of this, I would like to take a moment to thank the dedicated TNS team who have always gone above and beyond to make sure that this show could continue with such consistency and quality for so long, especially RobotFishGirl, BrettDrawsStuff, Symbiotech and Santhosh. I would also like to thank all the Nouners who supported our proposals over the past two years. We always received resounding support onchain and that gave us renewed excitement and dedication to keep iterating and cooking. Thank you for your trust and agency.

In all honesty, I think the daily show kept the nounish lanterns burning all through the bear more than most would care to admit, and there's really no telling where the project might be if we hadn't been able to continue making Noun O' Clock a "daily celebration for the internet," and creating engaging content to teach people about the best parts of this weird little community. Even as we make some difficult changes going forward, I'm proud of that legacy.

Our previous round of funding from Nouns expires in a couple weeks, and these operational changes are coming from a series of ruthless retrospectives, and are in line with our commitment to try and figure out a way to continue and adapt for another six months of building after January. In 2024, we started to see a lot of success in earning onchain revenue for our video content, and we want to go all in on this direction to FAFO and see what can happen, while also leveraging our lessons on collaborative distribution from Yellow to create more win-win partnerships with other creators in the space, with the goal of turning Zero Rights Media into a premiere content creation organization for the entire Ethereum ecosystem.

We are very inspired by the success of the Nouns Esports org, which has impressed crypto fans and critics alike in their niche by embodying the Nounish ethos of transparency, which is rare in the esports industry. Similarly, we want to be a flag-bearer for another important Nounish ideal, open source and CC0, in the crowded and often-pvp space of media content creation.

Zero Rights Media is and always will be "a nouns thing ⌐◨-◨ "

In conclusion: The Noun Square is dead; long live The Noun Square.

See you onchain,

Toady and Team

“If I can get India onchain, the rest will follow."

Move over, Men in Black—there’s a new FBI in town, and they're not chasing hackers... they're hosting hackathons instead, and changing the future of what it means to be onchain.

In today’s Farcaster VIP feature, we meet Saumya Saxena, the founder and driving force behind Farcaster Builders India (FBI) and also the newly minted Head of Base India. 

Saumya’s journey is one of passion, reinvention, and a career-long obsession with building in public. Hailing from Kanpur, India, a city where academics run deep and teaching is practically the family business, Saumya was the first in his lineage to break from tradition and pursue engineering instead of education at college. While most of his relatives stuck to the chalkboard, Saumya charted his own path, trading textbooks for tech stacks. 

Growing up, Saumya’s world revolved around football (that’d be soccer to some of you) and academic excellence. His family’s deep-rooted focus on education meant that 40% of their household income routinely went toward making sure he and his younger brother had the best schooling.

“There was no question I was going to be an engineer,” Saumya laughs. “But it’s only when I actually pursued engineering as a career that I realized… I didn’t want to be an engineer after all.” 

Many such cases.

That particular realization came after completing a degree in aeronautical engineering and doing a short stint working in the research field. During one such gig, the penny dropped—quite literally—when his professor asked him to help make up an invoice.

“I realized the professor was making a ton of money off the research we were doing and I thought, why am I not on the other side of this equation?” 

Saumya then pivoted into finance, accepting a junior role with a consulting firm, and it wasn’t long before he was rubbing elbows with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, consulting on infrastructure projects as an ambitious (if a little green) 22-year-old.

This job was definitely challenging and fun, and allowed Saumya to travel far and wide, which was a nice bonus for a professional of his age. But then a near-death accident while traveling in the mountains of India brought his fast-paced career to a Himalayan halt.

“It was a real wake-up call,” he says. “And I started to ask myself, what am I really doing with my time?” 

That experience led him into a period of work in the charity field, where he spent a year helping scale operations and fundraising for a large nonprofit. It was there that Saumya says he honed his storytelling and strategic skills, applying his background in finance to create impact in a new space.

But while the nonprofit world provided a sense of purpose, Saumya’s love for building new things kept tugging at him. It was during this time that he stumbled across the concepts of blockchain and decentralized systems and realized that onchain governance could be the ultimate tool for creating real-world impact at scale. The obsession took hold, and soon enough, he was diving headfirst into the world of crypto.

In 2020, Saumya would become fully immersed in the onchain space. “I got obsessed with the idea of decentralized governance and building and realized I wanted to bring it to India,” he says. The pandemic played a role in his decision to go full-time into crypto, and by 2021, he had left the traditional finance world behind altogether.

“When you get into crypto full time, it’s like diving into a black hole of endless possibilities,” Saumya says. In those early days, he and a rag-tag gang of builder friends would gather online to chat and collaborate on onchain apps. “We’d sit in Discord servers all night building products with people we’d never met in real life. And honestly, we built some really cool shit.”

This group would go on to develop around 20 crypto products over a 10 month period. Some went viral.

“We were each bringing different skills to the table,” he recalls. “Someone was great at UX, someone else could do tokenomics. We had the perfect blend of people.”

Enter FBI. The Farcaster Builders India group began as a simple Telegram group chat where Saumya and a handful of close friends (many from that aforementioned Discord server) wanted to build things just for fun.

“I made a group called Farcaster Builders India, and it suddenly hit me—the acronym is FBI!” Saumya laughs. “I even said in the first message, ‘This could become a meme one day,’ and well, here we are.”

FBI’s first builder hackathon, which took place in Bangalore, was a success by all accounts, attracting top talent from across India. “It was all about building on Farcaster Frames,” Saumya explains. “Nobody was chasing the prizes—we just wanted to see what we could unlock on Farcaster.”

Saumya’s own journey into the Farcaster ecosystem had begun in late 2022, when he was exploring the potential of consumer social applications in the onchain space. “I had this thesis that consumer social was going to take off,” he explains. Farcaster caught his attention because of its decentralized nature and the opportunities it presented for building products in a truly permissionless environment.

“It wasn’t just about creating another social app—it was about building an ecosystem where users actually owned their own digital presence.”

Saumya saw Farcaster as a playground for developers, where experimentation was encouraged -- and that sparked his excitement. “Farcaster had this open, collaborative vibe where people were constantly building and riffing off each other’s ideas. That’s where I wanted to be.” It wasn’t long before he was fully immersed, rallying other builders in India to join him in shaping the future of decentralized social.

And the rest is history. Today, FBI has hosted over 30 meetups and hackathons across India, established itself as a major player in the Indian builder scene, and is even expanding internationally, with FBI Africa (Farcaster Builders "International") now gaining momentum too.

“It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come,” Saumya reflects. “We’ve built this community that thrives on collaboration and shared vision.”

Recently, Base started looking for someone to lead their India operations. At first, Saumya was approached to recommend candidates for the role. He considered it carefully, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized… why not me? After all, he had been driving the onchain movement in India through FBI, building a strong community of based developers and thinkers in that part of the world. So, instead of sending in a recommendation in the end, Saumya put his own name forward.

“I told them, ‘Actually, I think I’m the right fit,’” he recalls with a grin. And just like that, the role of Head of Base India found its perfect candidate. “I really love Jesse Pollak’s leadership style," says Saumya, and Base’s mission aligns perfectly with what we’re trying to do in India.”

Looking ahead, Saumya’s goals are clear: Bring the world onchain, starting with India. “India’s tech scene is already miles ahead in terms of infrastructure and scalability. We’re just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up,” he says.

So, what’s next for Farcaster VIP Saumya Saxena? World domination? Maybe. But for now, he’s focused on getting India—and eventually the world—onchain, one builder at a time. Whether he’s rallying a crew for the next hackathon or teaching his newborn son the finer points of Dune, Saumya is all about the long game.

“If I can get India onchain, the rest will follow,” he says confidently. And if Saumya's reputation is anything to go on, that’s not a threat—it’s a promise. 

If you made it this far, thank you for reading! And if you are enjoying this Farcaster VIPs series, please drop a comment below and share it with your network on Warpcast and X. <3

The story of @matthew begins in small-town Massachusetts, where he grew up with what he himself calls a “mild streak of mischief” (though he also insists, nothing too rebellious). As a kid, he and his siblings would build epic Lego creations, only to use them as makeshift weapons to play fight against each other (perhaps the perfect training ground for Crypto Twitter?)

After diving deep into the classics in high school, Matthew developed a love for the "logic puzzle" of translating Latin and Greek to modern English. Oddly enough, it was deciphering these ancient languages that helped lay the groundwork for his later love for coding and building in tech.

Fast forward to college and Matthew found himself at NYU’s Stern School of Business, right in the heart of New York City. But while his classmates were dreaming of investment banking and consulting gigs, Matthew had his eyes instead set on startups. Interning at many of these, working on his own side projects, and even dabbling in venture capital, he became the guy in his cohort who zigged while everyone zagged. In 2020, during the pandemic, he started a successful virtual coaching company focused on helping men be more vulnerable—an emotionally intelligent business with a unique mission.

Matthew’s introduction to crypto was, as is often the case, a series of rabbit holes he found himself falling down over the years. From initial dabblings with Bitcoin way back when Minecraft servers accepted it as currency, to witnessing the ICO boom during his VC days, and then finally to building on top of an Ethereum-based social network in Farcaster.

As someone who had always been intrigued by the cutting edge of tech, he was drawn to Farcaster’s decentralized, onchain-first ethos. That’s why he joined so early, immersing himself in a community that, at the time, was still very small, but intensely passionate. In those early days, Farcaster was a much more intimate space, with users primarily consisting of early adopters, builders, and a few curious onlookers exploring this new take on decentralized social networking.

Matthew’s decision to build on Farcaster wasn’t just about being early to a new platform though; it was driven by his long-standing passion for creating tools that foster community and connection. Farcaster’s unique blend of decentralization, ownership, and onchain interaction offered him the perfect canvas.

I just had this feeling,” Matthew says, “that Farcaster wasn’t just another social platform. It was a chance to build something where users truly owned their data and their interactions.” 

This belief, coupled with the platform’s modular architecture, made Farcaster an ideal space for launching Eventcaster, a tool that quickly evolved from a simple event coordination bot into a comprehensive platform for organizing meetups, podcasts, and dev calls.

“Everything is an event,” he says, and that framing has been a game-changer for how he thinks about what Eventcaster can do. Want to gather a crew for a Latenight Crew discussion? Eventcaster’s got you. Hosting a podcast or dropping a mint? Planning a virtual book club? Whatever you or your community might be up to, Eventcaster now has the infrastructure to turn it into a seamless experience on Farcaster, and beyond.

Of course, being an early mover in an experimental space like Farcaster isn’t without its challenges. Matthew admits that building for such a small but passionate community can sometimes feel like an uphill battle. 

“But I have this irrational optimism around Farcaster,” he says, laughing, “I just assume it’s going to work and be huge. That’s what drives me to keep building.”

It’s that kind of optimism that’s driven him to keep iterating on Eventcaster, even while Farcaster remains relatively niche. Matthew is playing the long game, building tools that not only work for today’s user base but are designed to scale as the platform itself grows.

It’s not just his work on Eventcaster that makes Matthew a beloved figure on Farcaster. His role as one of the founding co-hosts of Latenight Crew, a popular weekly audio hangout on Tavern FM, has also helped cement his place as one of the key voices in the community. The show, which he co-hosts with a group of friends including Zinger, YB, and Brian Kim, is a space for candid, real conversations that often go deeper than the surface-level chatter you might find on a typical social platform. 

Like a mix between a builder stand-up, a cocktail hour, and maybe a little bit of group therapy, Latenight Crew has quickly become a popular venue for Farcaster fans to show up, unwind and chat about the meta. There’s something about the informal, off-the-record nature of the show that brings out the best in the Farcaster community—honest, thoughtful discussions that wouldn’t necessarily happen in a public cast. As a bonus, it has also been a great opportunity for Matthew to dogfood his own product Eventcaster, and experiment with ways to engage the social graph and build community via recurring events. 

But Matthew’s commitment to building on Farcaster also extends far beyond his own projects. From everything I have seen, he’s quick to collaborate with others and has a strong desire to see the entire ecosystem grow. He’s already thinking about how Eventcaster can integrate with other tools and products on the platform, whether through mini apps, better UX for creators, and making it easier for builders to get their work in front of a larger audience. His vision for Farcaster is one where coordination happens naturally, where the tools make it so easy that creators can focus on creating, rather than getting bogged down by logistics.

“I’ve seen the power of building in this space, and I’m here for the long haul,” says Matthew. “As the platform grows, so does the potential for what we can create together.”

As Farcaster continues to evolve, so does Matthew’s work. He’s constantly thinking about how to improve, how to make the platform more useful, more engaging, and more accessible to new users. In the coming months, he plans to roll out more recurring events features on Eventcaster, a feature that’s been in high demand among users who want to schedule regular meetups, podcasts, or community calls without the hassle of manually creating new events each time. 

“The idea is to make everything as frictionless as possible,” he explains, “so you can focus on what matters—connecting with your community.”

Whether he’s coding, casting, or corralling the late-night crew for a chat, Matthew has been shaping the culture of Farcaster from the inside out since early days. And unless his unbridled optimism for the network is completely misplaced, it sounds like the Farcaster of the future will be an amazing place to hang out for builders and creators alike… so don’t forget to RSVP!

If you made it this far, thank you for reading! And if you are enjoying this series, please drop a comment and share it with your network on Warpcast and X. Help spread the word that there is no shortage of Very Interesting People on the purple app.

In light of this, it feels like the perfect time to feature Jesse in the next episode of my Farcaster VIPs (Very Interesting People) series.

"We’re not here just to build cool tech. We’re here to build a world where opportunity is open to anyone, no matter who they are, or where they come from.”

Whether he’s breaking down the game plan to bring the next billion onchain, or jamming out to Drake and Kanye on a bike ride around the Bay Trail, Jesse embodies the very spirit of what makes Farcaster special—equal parts technical innovation and human connection. In short, Jesse makes the Farcaster community more interesting and fun, just by being himself.

Jesse’s onchain journey kicked off during his years studying Computer Science at Pomona College in South California, thanks to a chance lunch encounter with Olaf Carlson-Wee, eventual Coinbase Employee #1. What started as a casual conversation would become a pivotal moment for Jesse, launching him headfirst into the world he would later help to brand as "onchain." He went on to found Clef, a startup focused on identity solutions.

"I grew up going to Quaker school and from a young age felt a deep calling to make the world a better place,” Jesse says. “When I first learned about crypto, I immediately felt like this new technology could be a huge lever for driving those values across the world."

Clef would eventually be purchased by Authy, which later got acquired by Twilio in a Bay Area Babushka doll of 2-Factor-Identification. Jesse’s efforts building that company did not go unnoticed -- His expertise would lead to an acqui-hire of sorts by Coinbase, where he found himself tasked with the challenge of making the onchain world more accessible and secure.

After leading consumer-facing engineering at Coinbase for several years—working on projects like Coinbase Wallet and Coinbase Pro—Jesse started feeling that familiar itch for a new challenge. In fact, in 2021 he almost left the company. (Almost.) But in the end, he stuck around, after realizing there was might be a tremendous opportunity to push Coinbase into the onchain future in an even bigger way. 

"In the framework of 'exit, voice, and loyalty,’ I've always been someone who’s inclined toward ‘voice.’ I like to work within existing systems to make them better,” Jesse explained during yesterday’s AMA.

With that mindset, Jesse thought: What if I could help bring Coinbase truly onchain? 

The result? Base—a secure, low-cost Layer 2 solution built on Ethereum, leveraging the open-source OP Stack. Designed to bring both developers and consumers into a global onchain economy—and, ideally, to onboard the next billion users to crypto in a positive sum way.

Jesse is crystal clear about his mission for Base: Bring the whole world onchain. His roadmap focuses on slashing transaction fees, making wallets more user-friendly, and decentralizing infrastructure to ensure that it can scale alongside Ethereum. 

"We want to build a global onchain economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom,” Jesse says. “There’s a lot of work left to do.”

But it’s not all work for Jesse—far from it. Despite his professional achievements, he’s also deeply connected to his personal values and likes to find balance through hobbies that keep him grounded.

"I’ve had a pretty unrelenting focus and drive from a very young age," Jesse shares, attributing his energy not just to his work but also to his daily routines and the people around him. His mornings are all about balance—usually starting with a workout, followed by a home-cooked breakfast and a decaf cappuccino (yes, decaf—he apparently doesn’t need caffeine to be this energetic!)

In his downtime, Jesse enjoys quality time with his wife and his close friends. Recently married during this past (onchain) summer, he says that not much has changed in their long-standing relationship—except for a deeper sense of certainty and connection. The couple is rooted in Oakland, where Jesse also co-owns a local restaurant, reflecting his love for the East Bay community. 

His personal philosophies also shine through in how he leads at work. Jesse believes in always coming from a place of earnest interest and empowering those around him.

"Always lead with curiosity and questions... it helps whoever you're coaching come up with the right answer for themselves,” Jesse says. (A leadership tip that's worth bookmarking to be sure.)

Jesse’s love for creativity and culture also extends beyond the onchain world. He’s an avid music fan, with albums like Views by Drake and The College Dropout by Kanye at the tippy top of his Hip Hop Top 10. He also finds joy in working out, running, and biking—balancing his high-intensity career with fitness and outdoor activities. Plus, he’s actively involved in projects like Oak Currency that aim to improve his local community in Oakland, blending his professional mission of change with personal contributions to the real world.

At his core, Jesse is committed to the broader onchain community. He engages with builders and actively supports public goods funding, often collaborating with Optimism to push the Superchain ecosystem forward.

“At the end of the day, Base is not going to be successful because of me... it’s going to be successful because thousands of people all over the world believe in that mission [...] What makes this space unique is the openness and willingness to collaborate. The best ideas come when we build together.”

And that has certainly been this writer's personal experience. Since day one building The Yellow Collective on Base, he has been nothing but supportive and encouraging to me, leveraging the distribution power at his fingertips to actively participate and amplify the work we are doing to help and empower artists onchain.

Story time: Earlier this year, I was having some merch made for my upcoming trip to ETH Denver representing Nouns, and I happened to see a rack at my supplier with royal blue hoodies on clearance. On a whim, I decided to have a simple blue pullover made with white text on the chest reading "SUPER BASED." When it arrived, I posted a photo in reply to Jesse and said "Look what I'll be rocking in Denver." He replied saying "Need!"

I immediately called my procurement partner and begged him to rush one more SUPER BASED hoodie through. He kindly obliged, and I brought one along to Denver for Jesse as well. This was my first time meeting him in person, and when I handed him the hoodie, he immediately put it on, right there in the ETH Denver Base booth, and proceeded to wear it day in and day out for the entire conference.

On the last day of the event, he called me over and said "Toady, you need to make some of these and sell them in a Farcaster Frame." So I did! We would go on to sell 300 units in a couple hours, with proceeds to The Yellow Collective, and the community response was so positive that we later created an entire Super Based Apparel line, via Slice for the Onchain Summer Store, with Super Based hoodies, t-shirts, hats and slides available to buy in USDC on Base.

This story is such a perfect example of what it's like to work in Jesse's orbit: Find a based idea, execute on it, and he will gladly help you turn it into something amazing. As he is fond of saying: "Talk less, build more.

Jesse Pollak is a relentless optimist with a vision of an open, onchain world—and that vision is slowly becoming a reality. His onchain journey isn’t just about building for today—it’s about laying the groundwork for a future where decentralized technology becomes as familiar and essential as the internet itself.

As he continues to push the boundaries while leading both Base and Coinbase Wallet teams, that vision for a more open, accessible financial system feels more within reach than ever.

In a space too often defined by scams and speculation, Jesse stands out for his unwavering commitment to innovation with purpose. The road ahead might be unpredictable and difficult, but with builders like him leading the way, the onchain future looks based AF.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading! And if you are enjoying this series, please drop a comment and share it with your network on Warpcast and X. Together, we can make it known that there is no shortage of Very Interesting People on the Purple App!

Jesse was also a guest on my podcast ZEROPOD earlier this year and it remains one of my favorite episodes to date. I've embedded the YouTube version below, but you can also find it on Spotify by searching "Zero Rights Reserved Podcast."

Oh and also, Jesse has confirmed that his favorite color is Yellow... just saying.

People come to crypto for many reasons, but they stay for the culture.

Binji Pande isn’t just building partnerships at The Optimism Collective; he’s building bridges—between protocols, communities, and most importantly, people.

Binji’s onchain journey has been more of a wild adventure than a straight line—from the peaks of Nepal, to the beaches of Costa Rica and the busy streets of NY. Charged with partnerships and growth at Optimism, he has been rallying communities from all over crypto’s frontlines with an infectious and optimistic energy that makes everything feel somehow possible.

Binji’s story begins in Nepal, where he was born and raised. At 14, his childhood took an unconventional turn, as he left home to attend a boarding school in Costa Rica through a program that aimed to bridge divides post-World War II by bringing together students from around the globe.

This was no ordinary school—it was a melting pot of cultures, backgrounds, and, crucially, economic statuses, where students often struggled with basic issues like transferring money internationally. This exact struggle was actually Binji’s first exposure to the difficulty of value transfer across borders using traditional rails, planting the early seeds of his future passion for decentralized finance and onchain technology.

Fast forward to his college years, where he dabbled in crypto as a curious economics student, fascinated by the promise of a new kind of financial system. But it wasn’t until he stumbled upon behavioral economics and learned about the deep inefficiencies in traditional incentive structures that his interest in crypto became something more—a calling, maybe.

For Binji, crypto wasn’t just about making a quick buck on a trade; it was about completely rewriting the rules of economic engagement and coordination on a global scale.

His early career saw him diving into product management at Coinbase, where his passion for onchain communities deepened. But it was the ethos of Optimism—an Ethereum L2 protocol focused on rewarding impact over profit and building for the long term—that pulled him in completely. Binji saw in Optimism a rare alignment of values, with a mission that went beyond tech and profits.

It was about fostering collaboration, inclusivity, and a genuinely optimistic vision for the future of Ethereum and beyond.

From day one at OP Labs, Binji’s focus has been on tearing down the walls of tribalism that have historically plagued the crypto space. When, he joined me and Prof Werder on my ZEROPOD podcast last year, he drew parallels between the rivalries in crypto and sports fandoms: fun, energizing, but sometimes petty.

For Binji, the key is channeling that energy positively—celebrating the competition without letting it hinder the broader mission of scaling onchain technology.

You can be rivals with other teams... as long as you don’t stop the game.

One of the biggest themes Binji likes to champion is interoperability—both technical and social. He believes that as the underlying protocols become more modular and interoperable, so too should the cultural layers built on top of them. It’s this spirit of openness and modularity that defines his work at OP Labs and Optimism, where he’s helping drive the vision of the Superchain, an interconnected network of Layer 2 chains designed to make blockchain as seamless and accessible as the internet itself.

For Binji, the overarching goal is simple: help create a blockchain ecosystem that doesn’t just work technically, but that feels alive, human, and connected. “People come to crypto for many reasons, but they stay for the culture,” he says, capturing the essence of why he’s so committed to this space. With each partnership and every initiative, Binji is working to ensure that crypto’s next chapter is one that anyone can be a part of—regardless of which tribe, chain, or subculture they happen to belong to.

To this end, Binji has made waves over this past year with the innovative community-building initiatives that he has spear-headed, like the “We Love The Art” contest in the Spring, (which awarded a total of 1.25M OP tokens as prizes to the winning entries, celebrating the creativity and contributions of artists within the Superchain community) and now The SUNNYs Awards, an upcoming “Onchain Emmys” in collaboration with Chris Carella and Charmverse, designed to recognize and honor outstanding builders of all kinds in the Optimism ecosystem. You can still apply to The SUNNYs for a couple more days HERE.

Binji Pande’s journey is a testament to what’s possible when you blend onchain conviction with unbridled optimism.

And he’s not just betting on the future of onchain; he’s actively building it, one bridge at a time. Get a front-row seat for the action by following him on Farcaster.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading! And if you are enjoying this series, please drop a comment and share it with your network on Warpcast and X. Together, we can make it known that there is no shortage of Very Interesting People on the Purple App!

Binji has been a guest on my podcast about Enjoying Ethereum, ZEROPOD, as reference in today's article, and he was also recently a guest on our "Based Builders" Live stream with Chris Carella, where he spoke about The SUNNYs. I'll embed both of these appearances here below for anyone who wants to give them a watch:

Finding Peace in Onchain Pixels

Photographer Priyanka Patel finds peace in life’s most fleeting moments, capturing them from behind the lens with a quiet, introspective eye.

And then she brings them onchain, with her Farcaster friends cheering courtside.

Born and raised in India and now based in Alberta, Canada, she has journeyed from the bustling world of Indian wedding photography to the cutting-edge realm of NFTs, all while staying true to her mission of finding serenity in a world that often feels overwhelming. 

For Priyanka, photography is more than a profession—it’s a refuge, a way to connect deeply with the world and share that sense of calm with others. Her journey as a photographer has been anything but conventional. What began as a desire to capture the vibrant chaos of Indian weddings evolved into a personal mission to find serenity through her art—and, in the process, to offer that serenity to others.

Her story is one of pivots and reinventions. Growing up in Ahmedabad, she initially followed a traditional path and then made the pilgrimage to Los Angeles to earn a graduate degree in engineering. But six months into those studies, the realization hit: her passion lay not in the numbers and codes of engineering, but in the narratives and emotions that she could capture with her humble camera. 

"I was like, Dad, can I switch my major?" she recalls. The answer was a firm no, but with a promise: finish the degree, and then you can chase your dreams, if you still want to. So that’s exactly what she did—returning to India post-grad to immerse herself in the world of wedding photography.

Her early career saw her documenting the color and grandeur of Indian weddings, a genre that demands an eye for detail and a flair for the dramatic. "My first assignment was a wedding shoot for my brother’s friend," she shares. Despite initial nerves, the experience hooked her. "I had a lot of fun, and just continued doing that." For nine years, Priyanka’s work captured the authentic, unscripted moments of celebrations across India, blending documentary, lifestyle, and minimalism to create photos that were both intimate and somehow grand.

Yet, as much as she loved the work, Priyanka felt a sense of creative stagnation. "I felt like I had peaked as a wedding photographer in my city," she says. It was around this time, in the pandemic’s isolating quiet, that she discovered Photography Twitter and, with it, a burgeoning community of NFT artists and photographers. Suddenly, photography wasn’t just about physical prints; it could also be about digital permanence, blockchain provenance, and the chance to connect directly with collectors around the world.

Priyanka’s transition into NFTs was a natural evolution driven by curiosity and a desire to explore new creative frontiers.

As she began to explore the onchain art space, Priyanka became one of the earliest artists involved in the Base ecosystem, a journey that significantly shaped her current work. Introduced to Base through her brother Manan, Priyanka connected with key figures like Lght and Leighton, eventually minting her first piece as part of their “Based Management” collective. "That’s when I started getting more active on Farcaster as well," she says. Base quickly became more than just a platform for Priyanka—it was a community that actively supported her growth. “Jesse, the creator of Base, has been amazing,” she says. “He was one of the first to buy my physical prints through Coinbase Commerce, often amplifies my mints, and even subscribed to my Hypersub.” This support solidified her commitment to the Base ecosystem, and she continues to be a vocal advocate for building and creating there.

Farcaster, another key part of Priyanka’s journey, provided her with a space to experiment and connect with like-minded creators. Initially, she found the platform intimidating, filled with “big brain people” discussing complex topics. But as she began engaging more, especially after the launch of Frames, Farcaster transformed into a vibrant hub for her art and new ways to distribute it. “Manan taught me the principle of ‘don’t ask, don’t get,’” she says. This newfound confidence led her to propose to Dan Romero a weekly Mint with Warps drop, a collaboration that significantly boosted her visibility on the platform. This fearlessness to ask for help amplifying her art has paid off time and time again.

Recently, I had the pleasure of collaborating with Priyanka via The Yellow Collective, as we invited her to be featured in our monthly Based & Yellow Artist Spotlight series. She minted the beautiful photographic diptych you see above, entitled "yellow in blue."

She says this collab challenged her to capture the color yellow in her work, something she hadn’t intentionally done before. “I was literally on Google Maps, using street view to scout locations,” she laughs, describing the process of finding the perfect shot. She eventually landed on a striking bright yellow building against a clear blue sky in Edmonton. The image, which perfectly captured the "Based & Yellow" theme, resonated deeply with collectors -- nearly 12,000 have minted it so far. “It was amazing to see the response; once it hit the Coinbase Wallet Explore page, the mints just blew up,” Priyanka says. The collaboration was a fresh and rewarding departure from her usual style, pushing her boundaries as both an artist and storyteller.

(You can still mint this piece for 3 more days here if you would like to support Priyanka’s work.)

The NFT space has given Priyanka the freedom to experiment beyond the constraints of client and commission work, allowing her to delve deeper into her own personal artistic vision. Her photos, often dominated by cool, blue tones, reflect a deep inner world shaped by her own life experiences. "Blue is often associated with melancholy," she says, "but for me, it represents peace and serenity." During the quiet months of 2020, she reflected on why she gravitated toward certain styles and subjects, realizing that photography was her escape from the noise of the world. Music plays a significant role in her creative process as well, often influencing the titles and moods of her photos.

In early 2022, Priyanka also co-founded the South Asian Artist Collective (aka /theburrow) with Anand Deyanandan, aiming to bring more visibility to emerging artists within the NFT space. For Priyanka, community support has always been crucial. "Bringing opportunities that help people move forward in the space is the best thing you can do for any artist," she says. It’s a sentiment that reflects her own journey—one defined by a constant search for peace, connection, and creative expression.

Earlier this year, Priyanka further extended her experiments in NFT-land by learning p5js on her own and creating her first ever onchain generative art collection on Highlight called Mind Waves. Check it out if you haven't already!

As Priyanka looks to the future, she envisions her art not just on screens but in physical spaces, too. “I want to do a show—an IRL exhibition that combines my photography with tech elements,” she says. “I’m proud of the work I make, and I want people to see it on big screens, to come and feel at peace, to just be grounded.” It’s clear that for Priyanka, photography is more than just a career—it’s her way of bringing a bit of calm to an often overwhelming world.

And we appreciate her for it.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. And if you are enjoying the Farcaster VIPs series, please drop a comment and share this profile with your network on Warpcast, X or elsewhere. Let's make it known together that there is no shortage of Very Interesting People on the purple app.

All photos in this piece are taken by Priyanka and used with permission. If you would like to learn more about her or hire her, here is her website. Special thanks to 6529Gradientz on X for this write up that was used for background on this piece, and to Priyanka for sitting down with me to chat about her story.

Originally, my plan was just to send a single long cast every day, highlighting one person who is building and contributing on FC and constantly bringing value to the network in their own way. 

But in typical Toady fashion, I went a little over the top... 

When my feature of Chris Carella wouldn’t fit in a Long Cast, I said “fuck it, I guess this is a Paragraph series now.” And once I had switched mediums… I found myself wanting to do the medium justice. As a result, my profiles on Yon, Melissa Burr, Mike Demarais and Prof Werder took shape as longer form, semi-researched features… a far cry from the simple daily cast I had originally set out to do. 

While I have been enjoying the writing process a lot, and the feedback has been thus far been overwhelmingly positive, I’ve also come away from Week One with a renewed respect for those in our network who write so creatively and consistently for our edification (people like YB, Kaloh and Six) and I’ve realized that doing a piece of this length and detail every day just isn’t feasible alongside my other obligations. 

TL;DR: I want to keep doing these profiles, and I will, so long as people still enjoy them. But having found the daily cadence to be a little over-ambitious, I am going to take a Mulligan here and switch to 3 times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) starting tomorrow. Hoping you understand and will continue to support this initiative!

-TH

Of all the many people I've had the pleasure (and occasional displeasure) to meet onchain, Prof Werder (aka “The Nounish Professor”) is one of my absolute favourites, and she is easily one of the most interesting people building on Farcaster.

Among other things, she is the cofounder of GM Farcaster, the go-to morning show that’s setting the standard for onchain media on the purple app.

What started as a simple idea—just a daily onstream recap of Farcaster’s latest happenings over a cup of coffee—has quickly evolved into a full-fledged onchain media network that’s growing by the day.

With her sharp wit, engaging content, and relentless consistency, Prof Werder (alongside her intrepid and equally interesting cofounder Adrienne) has transformed GM Farcaster from a niche experiment into a must-watch show that is reshaping how we connect, learn, and build on Farcaster. 

Prof's own journey has been a bit of a winding road that is as fascinating as it is refreshingly real, proving that the most interesting people in this space are often the ones who took the most unexpected paths to get here.

Werder didn’t start out planning to teach blockchain and crypto to eager undergrads... In fact, she didn’t start out planning to teach at all. 

After finishing her undergrad in Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics and Government (CLEG), then earning a Law Degree from Suffolk University (and finally, an MBA on top for good measure) she went to work for a trademark and copyright research company. But her heart just wasn’t ever in the traditional law grind. So eventually, she made the decision to put that MBA to work and pivot into an entrepreneurial pursuit, starting an event planning business (something she had always dreamed of doing.) 

She would go on to spend almost a decade creating beautiful IRL experiences for her clients, before eventually making another career change that would have her combining all of her accumulated talents to teach Law, Events, Entrepreneurship and Hospitality as a Professor at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Werder’s onchain journey first started in 2017 with an MSNBC article promising to teach about smart contracts through—wait for it—digital cats. CryptoKitties were her gateway drug, as they were for so many early NFT enthusiasts, and that’s how she first learned about Ethereum, wallets, Smart Contracts and more. But like many, after the initial hype fizzled, she wandered away and didn’t become interested in the space again until few years later. 

In 2020, she noticed her students’ growing interest in crypto and decided to pitch her FGCU Dean on letting her develop what would be the first ever Blockchain course at her university (and one of the first in the USA.) With self-sourced course material and guest speakers, she helped bring the legal side of NFTs to life in the classroom, turning her own curiosity into an innovative new curriculum for her students. That class grew in popularity and evolved, adding special topics and integrating blockchain in ways few other institutions or instructors dared to try at the time.

Fast forward to 2021, and the Nouns project, with its playful and collaborative ethos, had captured her attention. She stumbled into the community via a fun isometric nounish extension project called Sidenoun, and before she knew it, she was spearheading an NFT project of her own alongside her students called FloriNouns. The collection featured Florida-themed Nouns with a sunny vibe, perfect for her school’s colors and energy. It wasn’t just a class project; it was an exercise in onchain creativity, CC0 art and governance that brought her students directly into the fold of one of the most vibrant communities in crypto.

“There’s something that was just inherently interesting to me about Nouns. It was always changing. And the two aspects of nouns just kind of touch all of my background and my soul: The CC0 and the experiment with IP to me is so interesting...and then the governance aspects of like, can we do things differently, not only like from a larger political perspective, but just corporate governance and such?”

Over the past 3 years, Prof has been an integral part of the nouns community. She was one of the founding members of Nouncil, a council of nounish builders who have been meeting to discuss nouns governance once a week every week since early 2022. She is also a longtime contributing member of the Lil Nouns community, and was one of the founding members (alongside this Toad) of both The Noun Square Onchain Media Collective and The Yellow Collective. She even spearheaded a collaboration between Nouns and Pudgy Penguins, convincing Luca Netz to make  a run of be-noggled versions of their popular plush collectibles. I have a hard time imagining what nouns would be like without its resident Professor. 

Like many in the nouns community, Prof was one of the earliest cohorts of people to join Farcaster, and she was even one of the approximately 70 people who gathered for the inaugural “Beta” FarCon in Boston (her hometown); a small, intimate gathering of FC fans in the summer of 2023.

She immediately felt at home among some of the brightest minds she had ever met. “I felt like I was in the Google dorm room, and you know, what an opportunity. The smartest, most dedicated builders in the onchain space are on Farcaster right now, building the future of the internet.”

It’s this unique blend of intellectual energy, innovation, and tight-knit community that has kept her hooked and coming back day by day. She often describes Farcaster as being at the forefront of onchain experimentation; a place where builders, thinkers, and creators can come together to shape the future of the internet. 

 “I don’t know how I got in this room, but I know I want to stay here and contribute somehow,” she recalls. This sense of belonging, and the chance to be a part of something new and groundbreaking drew her in further. For Prof Werder, Farcaster isn’t just a platform—it’s home base for her onchain journey.

 “So I figured, one are where I could contribute was media and thought, you know, what if we did a morning show that’s all about Farcaster? One you can enjoy with a cup of coffee, and we just talk about what’s happening.”

She pitched it to her friend (and now cofounder) Adrienne,  and the rest, as they say, was herstory. 

Over the past year, alongside Adrienne, she has helped build an onchain space that’s part talk show, part community hub, and all passion project. 

“We just wanted a way to talk about Farcaster with a cup of coffee in hand,” she says, and what started as a simple idea has slowly but surely evolved into a full-time gig for both of them, with a combination of values-aligned sponsors and individual Hypersub patrons helping to make their enterprise sustainable. 

For Prof, leaving her full-time teaching role wasn’t easy, but she made that leap this past August, staying on only as a single-course instructor to keep her blockchain course alive. 

Their flagship “GM Farcaster” show now runs three days a week, with plans to expand into a broader network that supports Farcaster content creators. They’ve already launched a handful of new shows recently, and there’s even some fun merch on the way—so don’t be surprised if you spot a GM Farcaster mug in the wild sometime soon.

If there’s one thing that keeps Prof Werder hooked on both Farcaster and Nouns alike, it’s the people. Whether it was helping to build a float for The Rose Parade or sailing around New York Harbor in a giant noggled Yacht, it’s the connections and shared experiences that have made her stay.

“It might be cheesy, but it really is all about the friends we made along the way. I can’t find other places where I can have all this variety of interesting conversations,” she explains. Farcaster, with its on-chain social experiment vibe, has become her digital home, and she’s not planning on leaving anytime soon.

For those who think crypto is all about flashy projects and price speculation, Prof Werder is proof that it can also be a space for deep human connection and creative exploration. Whether she’s lecturing in the classroom, yapping onstream, or chatting away on the purple app, she embodies the very ethos of being nounish: part builder, part dreamer— all heart.

So the next time someone says Farcaster doesn't have enough interesting people, just point them in the direction of the Professor—they might just learn a thing or two.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. And if you are enjoying this series, please drop a comment and share this profile with your network on Warpcast and X. Let's make it known together that there is no shortage of Very Interesting People on the purple app!

Mike Demarais (aka “Mike Rainbow”) is the dynamic and sometimes unorthodox founder of Rainbow Wallet, a popular crypto wallet known for its user-friendly design and vibrant, approachable branding.

Anyone who spends enough time on Farcaster will surely have come across Mike, who is always quite active memeing in /memes, shitposting all over, and lovingly referring to the network by his favourite tongue-in-cheek misnomer: “Fartcaster.”

But who is “Mike Rainbow”? (And why does this suddenly sound like the beginning of a true crime documentary?)

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Demarais has always been a self-described “computer kid,” deeply immersed in technology from a very early age. 

His journey into the onchain world began after a few years spent working on SaaS products, where he found himself increasingly “being a bad employee”, distracted by the allure of crypto during work hours. He realized that, maybe unsurprisingly, his life’s passion was not in B2B Software as a Service. (I know!)

In 2018, Demarais made the leap into full-time onchain work, having been drawn to the crypto industry by its unique intersection of technology, politics, and history.

Earlier, circa 2009-2010, Mike had been skeptical of Bitcoin, worrying it was maybe a scam or that some unfortunate bug would bring the network to its knees, but his later experiences buying weed on the darknet and eventually learning more about Ethereum and its inifinite composability ultimately convinced him of crypto’s potential. 

The turning point came with the launch of 0x Protocol (creators of Matcha.xyz), which showcased the power of composable, modular onchain applications. This understanding eventually led him to cofounding Rainbow, a crypto wallet that prioritizes user experience, approachability, and fun. (By the way, his cofounder Christian is also on Farcaster.)

With Rainbow, Mike and Christian set out to create a wallet that could make the often intimidating world of crypto feel more accessible to everyday users. Unlike the clinical, utilitarian names of many crypto products at the time (think “CryptoBlaster 5000”) Rainbow’s branding is meant to be colorful and friendly by contrast—a deliberate choice to make the technology feel more human and less daunting. The app is designed to appeal to both power users and newcomers alike, with features that make interacting with Ethereum and other blockchains simple and enjoyable.

One of Demarais’s most distinguishing traits is his raw, unfiltered presence online. Whether posting memes or engaging in candid conversations on “Fartcaster”, he  embodies a new breed of tech founder who tries to merge personal authenticity with brand identity. 

This approach has set Rainbow apart from more traditional crypto companies, whose more formal, detached communications can feel somewhat alienating. For Demarais, it’s all about breaking the mold of corporate speak and bringing a human touch to Rainbow’s brand:

 “We try to speak casually, we try to make jokes., we try to break the mold of corporate-speak. I think people respect that kind of rawness, the ‘we don’t overthink it, we just click Send’ attitude,” he says. 

A vocal advocate for open-source software, Demarais believes that transparency fosters trust with users and drives innovation from builders. Many are surprised to learn that Rainbow’s code is openly available under the GPL license, reflecting Demarais’s conviction that protecting ideas through patents is "an outdated concept." To him, open-source development not only empowers users, but also ensures the longevity and adaptability of technology in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Beyond the technical achievements, Demarais’s success with Rainbow is rooted in his commitment to community and fun. He’s not afraid to poke fun at competitors or engage with users directly, often through humor and a dash of irreverence. This approachable, often playful attitude has helped Rainbow cultivate a passionate user base that feels more like a community than just a customer list.

Say what you will about Mike Rainbow, but one thing's for certain — few would argue with the assertion that he is one of Farcaster's Very Interesting People.  Come for the fart jokes and insolent memes,  stay for the approachable tech, open source values and radical transparency.

(By the way, rumor has it that it is often Mike himself behind the wheel at the official Rainbow Wallet account... worth a follow too, while you're at it.)

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. And if you are enjoying this series, please drop a comment and share this profile with your network on Warpcast and X. Let's make it known together that there is no shortage of Very Interesting People on the purple app!

And if you enjoyed learning more about the man behind the Rainbow, Mike was a guest on Episode 23 of ZEROPOD.xyz my CC0 video podcast about Enjoying Ethereum. You can watch the full episode here via YouTube, or mint and watch the onchain edition for free on Zora.

“The trick is to always be learning faster than the curve.” 

Melissa Burr (@burrrrrberry) is Farcaster’s resident Jersey Girl, a former professional poker player who has brought her lifelong love of the green felt to the Purple App, with style. 

Travel with me through time back to 2001, where we find Burr completing a college degree in marketing and business operations. But being allergic to alcohol, she finds herself searching for less … typical college pastimes than her peers. 

And that’s how she ends up playing billiards down at the local pool hall, then finding out she has more than a bit of a knack for it. Before long, she was making decent money parting unwitting opponents from their playful wagers, and winning local tournaments. 

It was at this very same billiards club that she was also introduced to that other All-American, green-felted game… poker, as patrons would often gather in the back room for drunken Limit Hold’ Em shenanigans. 

As soon as she tried it, she was hooked. Especially because, in her own words, she could tell “there’s no way they were playing mathematically correct.”  

She studied the game, she studied the odds, and she found her edge. 

She then continued to play and improve all through college, and kept playing as often as she could, even after she graduated and joined the workforce. In 2007, when the economy took a turn for the worse and she was laid off from her job, she thought “you know what, fuck it, I’m just going to try and play poker for a living.” 

She began her Professional Poker career by learning all the many different types and variations of poker, and how to play each one correctly, and she practiced discipline and restraint at the tables to outwit and outplay card rooms full of (mostly) men all over the US of A. She also began to play at higher and higher stakes, and would make a name for herself as one of the greatest mixed game, high stakes poker players in the world. 

In 2014, she even became the first woman to ever cash in the World Series of Poker’s $50,000 Poker Players Championship, a high-buy-in event for elite players where the games would rotate between all the popular poker formats (No-Limit Hold'Em, Pot-Limit Omaha, 2–7 Triple Draw Lowball, Limit Hold'Em, Omaha 8, Razz, Seven-Card Stud and Stud 8.) She placed 7th in that event, banking an impressive $165K!

Despite being primarily a cash game specialist, she also finished in the money in several other WSOP tournaments during her time as a pro, raking in over $300k in career prize money. Meanwhile, she continued to terrorize cash games all over America for the better part of a decade, until in 2020, with the Pandemic put a stop to all that. 

With live poker officially “off the table”, Burr decided to put her marketing and business operations degree to work, and began taking business development work in the crypto industry. 

Fortunate for all of us that she fell down this particular rabbit hole post-poker, because that’s the path that would eventually bring her over to Farcaster, where she immediately realized that there were opportunities to build communities and for people to be rewarded in onchain-native ways for their contributions. 

Burr quickly saw that there was a lot of poker interest on the purple app, but not a whole lot of conversation about it, and definitely no opportunities for people to play together. 

Drawing inspiration from her past experience, she decided to start hosting free roll, just-for-fun, "vibes only" tournaments on the free Club GG app for her followers, and rewarding winners with $HAM, $DEGEN, $MOXIE and other Farcaster-native social currencies.

The Burr Frens Poker Club was born. 

Fast forward to today, and Burr is often running several free tournaments most weekdays, with hundreds of community members joining in from all over the world to learn, play and chat together.

She has also been running occasional “clinic games” where club members can join and receive live playing advice and critiques directly from a pro, as well as a weekly “Tournament of Champions” where anyone who won a tournament that week can enter the arena to attempt to be crowned the "Burr Poker Cub Champion" of the week, and a chance to take her on in a heads up battle. 

Burr was originally talking about poker when she said “the trick is to always be learning faster than the curve”, but I have been personally observing her community-building here on Farcaster over the past few weeks, and I think it’s clear that this is advice she takes to heart in all aspects of her life. 

Joining the Burr Poker Club is easy: Just follow her on Warpcast and watch for a game announcement, then ask politely for the code to join. She takes no buy in fee or rake, or any other payment for running all these tournaments, so if you do join in on the fun (and you should), be sure to tip her generously in your Farcaster tipping coin of choice, or maybe purchase some of her Moxie Fan Coin to pay it forward.

In my opinion (and in my firsthand experience) what Melissa is doing with her poker club is one of the most earnest and effective community-building efforts happening on Farcaster right now, and it is exactly what we need to see more of if we want the network to grow. She is a Very Interesting Person, bringing hundreds more very interesting people together daily for the love of the game.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. And if you are enjoying this series, please drop a comment and share it with your network on Warpcast and X. Let's make it known together that there is no shortage of Very Interesting People on the Purple App!

Thank you also to poker legend Brad Wilson for hosting Melissa for an episode of his "Chasing Poker Greatness" podcast back in 2020, which I listened to in doing research for this profile.

Speaking of podcasts, Melissa is slated to be a guest in the upcoming Season 2 of ZEROPOD.xyz, our CC0 video podcast about Enjoying Ethereum. Subscribe on Spotify or YouTube so you don't miss it when it drops.

Today's Very Interesting Person is the one who first taught me about Marcel Duchamp's Fountain with a psychedelic, trippy NFT I collected back in 2021 and still hold to this day... Meet my Peaceful Groupie, by Yon.

And then, meet Yon, a relentlessly positive and inexplicably talented artist and illustrator from Argentina who brightens the Farcaster timeline on the daily with his trippy creations and quippy casts.

If you hang out on Farc for any length of time, especially in certain cozy corners like the /replyguys channel, you won't be able to escape the unbridled optimism and energy of Yon, a self-described "internet-native human creating art on the internet" and his distinctive brand of colorful illustrations and animations. (Oh and by the way, it's pronounced "Jon" not "Yon"... sorry if that bursts any bubbles.)

Yon's story is a pretty amazing one. He grew up in Chaco, a rural province of Argentina and one of the poorest regions in that country. His parents told him that art was not a career, but Yon begged to differ.

Against all odds, he has charted his own path as an artist, leveraging onchain technology and community-building along the way. As a young man, he saved up to move to Paris temporarily and worked in a hostel while doing freelance illustration work in his off-time, and then eventually made his way back to Argentina.

Doing this freelance work for a lot of international clients, and with a lot of challenges with receiving funds in his home country, he stumbled his way into crypto via accepting payment for his art in Bitcoin and Ethereum as early as 2017. From there, he began to learn more about the onchain ecosystem, and eventually began to understand that it could have applications for his art as well.

He began publishing his art on Rarible circa 2020 and quickly fell in love with this new medium allowing artists to connect in a symbiotic way with their collectors.

Fast forward to 2021, in the heat and froth of the NFT bull market, and Yon came up with the idea for PEACEVOID and the Peaceful Groupies, a 10,000 PFP collection HAND-DRAWN over 3-4 months and launched almost exactly 3 years ago today. Inspired by his passion for psychedelic culture, he created the now-iconic animated trippy backgrounds for the rarest Groupies, and built an iconic community of like-minded individuals from all over the world.

Yon brings this colorful, psychedelic energy to Farcaster... and pretty much only Farcaster. (He's barely active anymore over on X... many such cases, etc.)

I remember when he first arrived on the Purple App; as a longtime fan of his work it was amazing to see him dropping gm's in the chat and doing custom art on the fly. He understood the culture immediately, and he took the platform by storm.

At the height of the $DEGEN frenzy, you would find Yon on /replyguys every day, doing what replyguys do and also drawing custom animated versions of people's PFPs in exchange for $DEGEN tips (check out my own here... too good.)

He was bringing levity and positivity to the TL while also supporting himself with his art in a crypto-native way... the ultimate win-win.

Unfortunately, Warpcast would later deprecate support for animated pfps, but Yon has never let that harsh his groove. He continues to contribute art and culture to the network on the daily (while also bullying DWR about animated pfps at every opportunity.)

I had the great honor and pleasure to collaborate with Yon on one of our first Based & Yellow Artist Spotlights from The Yellow Collective and he knocked it out of the park. Almost 2000 people minted this illustrated piece featuring the first 100 Collective Nouns and it has been irrevocably added to the Yellow lore.

A few more of my favorite interesting things about Yon:

• All of his art is CC0. As a fellow fan of public domain creation (all of our ZEROPOD.XYZ and other content from The Noun Square are released without licence as well), I really respect his encouragement of other artists to draw inspiration from his trippy world-building.

• He is very thoughtful and intentional with his minting decisions as an artist. Many have asked him to mint the trippy pfps he has made for them, for example, and Yon would politely decline because he believes in curating his onchain body of work with an eye to intentional story-telling. I really respect that commitment.

• He is relentlessly positive and always supportive of others.

If you're not following him on Farcaster, fix that now. And if you're not on Farcaster at all, fix that too -- I'll even cover your $5 subscription for the first year, just comment on this article with a way to get in touch and send you the free invite.

Yon also has an amazing Hypersub that gets you exclusive art drops, and you can subscribe to that easily here. Likes on this post summarizing his contributions to Farcaster will help him earn ETH from the ongoing Retro Rewards round being run by Purple and Octant. Learn more about the Peaceful Groupies and his trippy community on the PEACEVOID site.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. If you are enjoying this series, please drop a comment and share it with your network on Warpcast and X. Let's make it known together that there is no shortage of Very Interesting People on the Purple App!

Big thank you also to Daniel Witcoff and The Bad Posture Podcast. I listened to his episode from 2022 featuring Yon to do background research for this profile and it is definitely worth the listen! (And by the way Yon, I would love to have you on as a guest on our next season of ZEROPOD.xyz to pick up where that pod left off. Slide in my DMs, you handsome devil.)

For what it's worth, I think this is a perfectly fine and honest thing for the founder of a social network protocol to say, and it fits perfectly with his constant contention that he considers Farcaster to be "default dead" until and if it successfully scales. This "interesting" comment, as I took it, was just another observation on the difficulty of scaling anything, really. He's not saying "everyone here sucks", he's saying "if we want growth, we need many more interesting people creating a lot more interesting content." Of course we do!

However, some took this opportunity to self-flagellate and wax poetic about how everyone who was early on Farcaster was basically just lucky and doesn't bring anything interesting to the table. Good engagement-bait perhaps, but ultimately very far from the truth in my experience. I have met so many smart, ambitious, quirky and kind people on this app, and while I agree with Dan that we still need many, many more... blanket dismissing the people that made this app special in the first place is not the wei.

And so, to try and help in some small fashion, I've decided to attempt to shine a light on some of the people whose content and company I have found the most valuable in my time here by posting a short daily spotlight, every day, on one person that I believe is worthy of the title "Farcaster VIP (Very Interesting Person)."

---

There is perhaps no better person to start this series with than Mr. Purple himself -- Chris Carella (@ccarella.eth.) With an FID of 472, you know this guy has been on Farcaster long before it was cool. In fact, he was so early here and loved it so much that he helped to found a nounish DAO all about supporting Farcaster builders; /purple DAO, which has raised over 100 ETH from daily auctions to fund all kinds of contributors to the protocol. In fact, alongside Octant, they are rewarding Farcaster-native builders with 10 ETH right now via Rounds.wtf in the /purple channel.

Chris is a great person to follow here because he is a very kind and genuine soul, and he is always cooking up something new and interesting. He believes strongly in enabling permissionless building, upholding Ethereum-first principles, and supporting builders and creators whenever he can. He is one of the most positive sum thinkers I've met, and it's very refreshing.

Chris has been an active and engaged participant in /nouns (where we met) and he's always contributing his voice in governance and helping new people get involved in the community. (He was even awarded a Noun for his contributions.)

He also founded a collective called /energy, all about supporting artists in the Zora ecosystem. And speaking of artists, Chris is a very talented one in his own right. Check out his Zora profile for a taste of his creative output.

Even at his day job with Charmverse, he has constantly been a source of edification for builders in this space, keeping them up to date on available grants from across all onchain ecosystems and even partnering with Optimism to deploy a bespoke site for the SUNNYs Award Show applications recently. The latter initiative was a blending of worlds for Chris, who is also an Optimism Badgeholder and has volunteered countless hours to help adjudicate previous rounds of Retro PGF.

Most recently, Chris has taken on a new challenge with his Charmverse colleagues, launching a new app today called "Scout Game", which aims to gamify the discovery and proliferation of open source software.

If you want to learn more about Chris directly from the source, he was one of the earliest guests on my CC0 video podcast Zero Rights Reserved, or ZEROPOD for short, and if you haven't seen that interview, it's definitely worth a watch. You can view and collect it for free on Zora here.

Follow Chris on Farcaster @ccarella.eth if you like learning and hearing about: art, open source software, grants programs, optimism, nouns, and more.

-TH

Eight months later, Yellow stands apart as one of the most active and vibrant onchain communities on Base, and here are a few of the milestones and successes we have celebrated so far this year:

• We have received over 51,000 mints on our onchain content, from 38,000 unique wallets and representing more than $81,000 in rewards and revenue.

  

• We have raised over 41 ETH from daily auction proceeds on yellowcollective.xyz

• We have raised a further 60 ETH from other sources (20 ETH from outside grants, 10 ETH from merchandise and other revenue, and 30 ETH from minting revenue)

• We have paid out more than 50 ETH in art contests, commissions and mint revenue sharing with artists and creators already this year!

• We've grown our Yellow community organically to 163 holders, 80% of whom (131) are all in a very active group chat on Warpcast, which is our one and only online gathering place. Membership includes many prominent builders and artists from the Base, Farcaster and Nouns ecosystems, such as Jesse Pollak, Chintan Turahkia, Chris Carella, Brennen.eth, Foodmasku, Stoopid Buddy, Kugusha, VPAbundance and many more.    

• For many (maybe even most) of our holders, a Yellow Collective Noun was their first introduction to the Nouns ecosystem. 

• We have successfully collaborated with many other onchain and Farcaster-native communities such as $HIGHER, $DEGEN, $BUILD, $IMAGINE, $NOGS, Verbs, Basepaint and Moshicam on Art Contests, collaborative drops and other initiatives.     

• We have run 15 art contests using Uplink and Rounds.wtf and have distributed $50,000 worth of ETH, DEGEN, HIGHER and other tokens to artists and creators so far this year via Rounds contests alone.     

• We have been recognized by Jesse Pollak and the Base team as one of the most impactful teams building in their ecosystem.
  

  

• We have achieved and surpassed our primary goal of generating enough revenue so that our ongoing art contests and creator onboarding initiatives could be completely self-funded.    

• We have collaborated on monthly Based & Yellow Artist Editions with some amazing creators including Cory Van Lew, Yon, Awkquarian, Sloppy Pencil, Priyanka, Ilustradora and more. 
  

  

• Artists whom we have collaborated with have told us that Yellow was the community that first piqued their interest in Nouns and led them to explore the ecosystem more. Example:
  

  

One of our core directives at Yellow has been to host frequent Art Contests to give creators an opportunity to flex their artistic muscle. We have hosted 15 such contests so far this year, originally on Uplink.wtf and later leveraging Rounds.wtf. (Check out https://rounds.wtf/yellow)

 As you can see, the results have been nothing short of incredible. The depth of artistic talent in our community never ceases to amaze!

A huge Thank You to everyone who has supported Yellow on our based journey so far. We are excited for the future, leading the way on Base by supporting and empowering artists onchain every day!

If you would like to learn more about our Collective, check out the /yellow channel on Warpcast, follow along with the daily auction at yellowcollective.xyz, or check out our onchain content available to mint at zora.co/basedandyellow.eth.

What follows is a brief a look back on some of the highlights and takeaways from the first 79 Collective Nouns, and some things to look forward to!

Based And Yellow Beginnings

First of all, on behalf of the founding team from The Noun Square, I would like to thank everyone for the tremendous amount of love and support shown since our launch in January. 💛

The demand for our daily Collective Nouns auctions on BASE has far exceeded expectations. Token Number 1 went for nearly 1 ETH, and auctions have since ranged between 0.25 and 0.5 ETH, with one Farcaster Arch head even sparking a bidding war and ultimately going for 0.717 ETH.  

In just 55 short days, we have been able to grow our auction treasury to more than 17 ETH, while our grants wallet at basedandyellow.eth, has been funded by generous small grants from BASE & Nouns Builder, plus over 15 ETH in mint earnings and Zora creator rewards. With both wallets combined, we have so far raised over 42 ETH with which to continue our mission of empowering and inspiring artists and creators, and helping them get onchain (in fact we've already deployed nearly 6 ETH of those funds directly to artists and creators already.)

Slow & Intentional Community Growth

Thanks to the innovative daily token emission schedule borrowed from OG Nouns DAO, Yellow has been growing slowly and steadily, and we have been able to add nearly every single auction winner to a Farcaster group chat so far. This kind of slow, intentional, organic community building really can’t be undersold!

It has been incredible to see the caliber of people joining the Collective too; from Coinbase/Base employees like Jesse Pollak, Chintan, Leo Zizzamia, Daryl and Ryan; to based builders like Grant from Rainbow, Pratik from Powerloom, Mason from ATXDAO, Payton from Privy, David from Covalent, JackJack from Base Name Service and Hidayeth from Webhash; Nounsfolk like Brennen, Carlos, Pat Yiu and FattyButHappy; and Superchain fans + Farcaster OG's like Optichad Dicaso, SOV, Redjetcar, Eric Plante, Sean Bren, Santi, b0ggs, YES2Crypto, Billbandito, AlphaLB, Excavator, Mirko Nosenzo, Loudman and Wen; and finally, super-talented artists like Anaroth, Jack Mashka, Kugusha, Dystopic Hippy and Ashe. A collective is ultimately only as strong as its community, and I feel like we are off to a great start! I've gone to great pains to link each of their Farcaster profiles above and they would all make high-value follows imo.

Based & Nounish Collaborations

Despite being less than 2 months old, we have nonetheless been extremely busy building and collaborating with other projects and artists in this space since day one, as well as giving many opportunities to creators from our community to have their work spotlighted onchain. 

During our January launch, we reached out and collaborated with as many based builders as we could cram into one week: We were featured on a beautiful daily Basepaint canvas, customized a Yellow Speedtracer track, collab'd on a Yellow Based Management edition and even released a vibing track from our homies at The Park.

We also commissioned a beautiful limited edition piece by Kimmydeuk, a talented artist from The Noun Square community, which was featured by Coinbase Wallet and minted almost 14000 times! (We ended up surprising Kimmy with a 1 ETH bonus above what we had agreed for the commission since it did so well, and she was over the moon!)

Based & Yellow Artist Spotlights

One concept we had developed for The Yellow Collective, as a way to amplify and support artists, is a monthly onchain event called the Based & Yellow Artist Spotlight. The idea is to collaborate with an artist on a piece that represents the Nouns, Yellow and BASE communities, and drop it together as a free mint on BASE L2 via Zora.

Our inaugural Spotlight featured iconic multi-talented artist Cory Van Lew. He created a stunning piece called "Chief Noggle" and we dropped it on Feb 8, as a one week limited open edition. The illustration was minted over 2600 times, and Cory was blown away by the support. Thanks to Zora Creator Rewards, we were able to share over 1 ETH with Cory for his art, and he opted to donate 0.15 ETH from the proceeds to Yellow as well.

All in all, we counted this as a great win-win-win initiative, as it was a positive experience for the artist, mission-aligning for Yellow, and it also brought renewed attention to both Nouns and BASE. We have our second Artist Spotlight featuring a really fun piece by former Rick and Morty animator and Nouner Sloppy Pencil, coming up next week. If you would like to recommend yourself or an artist you admire for a future BYAS, please drop the suggestion in our Yellow Channel on Farcaster.

Farcaster Frame Mania

Speaking of Farcaster, when Frame-Mania first struck on the purple app, we jumped at the opportunity to join in on the fun. Our resident code-wizard Spencer Perkins from Paperclip Labs helped us put together a novel token-gated frame that allowed Farcaster users to mint one of 2000 limited edition NFTs with Based & Yellow Nounish art commissioned from TNS community member JollyMaw.

The frame was extremely popular, minting out in just a couple of hours. We saw our Yellow channel explode from 150 to over 6000 followers, and the Frame cast was shared 917 times and Liked some 1280 times. This is was a useful lesson about the tremendous distribution power of Farcaster and frames, which we have since been able to leverage at The Noun Square for our onchain minted video content as well.

When the word got out that the frames spec would soon be expanded to include in-frame transactions, we immediately began work on developing two separate Day One tx-in-frame concepts: The first ever auction in a frame (which was built by Paperclip Labs and has already been receiving daily use in our channel), and a collaboration with Slice and Base to mint a limited run of SUPER BASED hoodies, with proceeds to The Yellow Collective. The latter frame is still open for a few more days, but has already grossed over 7 ETH for Yellow. (Thank you to Jesse and Jacopo from Slice for making this drop possible.)

Some General Lessons and Observations on Building Yellow So Far

• Leaning into Farcaster has been key. From Day One, we have built Yellow as a Farcaster-first organization. No Discord, no telegram, just an active public channel on Warpcaster and a token-gated private Group Chat. I think this has paid dividends both in terms of the aforementioned closeness of our community, and also in terms of the attention we have received from Farcaster natives, many of whom have joined the Collective or reached out to collaborate in other ways.

• Finding your niche community can be daunting, but it's important. In the days of early planning for Yellow, we worried about demand for auctions in "yet another" Nouns fork. (Nouns ecosystem members could be forgiven for perhaps having a bit of fork fatigue after all.) So it was important for us to find a mission that would unify people both inside and outside of nouns -- supporting and empowering artists and creators -- and to focus a lot of our early energy on creating a nounish community that folks from the BASE and Farcaster ecosystems might be interested to join as well, rather than 'just another place for nouns fans to hang out.' A cursory review of the Collective membership so far will show that this intentionality has so far been paying off, with the majority of our membership coming from outside the traditional nouniverse so far. We are excited to be in a position to blend the world of nouns with the communities of the most values-aligned L2s (BASE, Zora, Optimism) and the most decentralized social network state (Farcaster.)

• Leading the way on creating a positive "minting culture" in Nouns. One of the numbers I am most excited about on the chart at the top of this essay is the total number of Yellow content pieces minted over the past couple months -- 23,500. That's an average of more than 400 mints every day!

  

  There has been some talk recently from Noun 40 and others about the importance of encouraging a mint-what-you-enjoy culture both inside and outside of nouns, because of the potential new paradigm of patronage this kind of model could unlock.

  The corollary to that 23,500 number I mentioned above is the one that's just a little further up on the chart: over 15 ETH earned so far from minting revenue. The fact that our Collective has so far earned nearly as much from minting community art, content and collaborative drops as we have from our daily auctions is (hopefully) an early indicator that we are in the arena doing some things correctly.

• BASE REALLY Understands Distribution. I can't say enough positive things about the level of support we have received since day one, both from core BASE team members like Jesse, Drew Coffman, Chintan from Coinbase Wallet and more, and also just from the broader community of based builders and enjoyooors. We spent a long time deciding which L2 we should deploy our Collective on, and there were good arguments to have launched on other networks like Zora or Optimism instead. Honestly, any of these choices would have been fine. But our decision to deploy on BASE has helped us hit the ground running in a way we never could have imagined. BASE understands that its chain will live or die by the strength of its builders, and the team is not afraid to leverage their reach and distribution to help those builders survive and thrive. Of course, you still have to bring the energy and build interesting things, but if you do, they will help you find your audience. This is something that most ecosystems do not understand. (It's also something many ecosystems could stand to learn, imho.) If you are planning to launch something on an L2, my recommendation is... launch it on BASE and you won't be disappointed.

What's Next for Yellow?

The past 55 days have been a whirlwind, but we are just getting started. We are currently in the final stages of preparing our second Based & Yellow Artist Spotlight featuring a piece by Nouner Sloppy Pencil, which will drop next Thursday, March 21.

The custom Yellow Collective Swag Bags containing hats, hoodies and custom Precious Plastic Noggles have all arrived at Toady HQ and I will be packing and sending them out to the first 30 non-founder token holders in the Collective as a thank you for their early support. (A few lucky Yellow folks whom I ran into in Denver got to grab theirs already!)

We have even lined up our third Artist Spotlight as well in the legend Yon (Botfrula). Expect an amazing Based, Yellow & Nounish piece to drop from him mid-April!

We have already hosted several really fun art contests this year in conjunction with The Noun Square, and you can view all the incredible entries on our Uplink Profile here. We have also been minting the winning entries and runners up and you can view (and mint for free, if you like) all these pieces on our Based & Yellow Zora Profile. We have more great contests coming up soon, including a competition to add 50 new community-drawn heads to the Collective Nouns descriptor! This will be in collaboration with the Noundry team, who are nearly finished deploying a bespoke Yellow.Noundry version of their site, where pixel masters will be able to draw and submit their heads and accessories for consideration, with the potential to both win prizes and have their art added to the Yellow collection!

In closing, I just want to say a huge thank you to all those who have helped and supported Yellow since launch, from the artists who have blessed us with their talent to the based builders who have jumped at every opportunity to collaborate. A special personal thank you to Jesse Pollak from BASE, who saw the Yellow vision early on and has supported us with encouragement, opportunity and amplification at every turn. Much love. 💛

We are excited for the future and we hope you are too-- keep it Based & Yellow. ⌐◨-◨