BETRMINT uses speculation, the lifeblood of consumer crypto, to fuel the onchain creator economy. "If speculation is the only thing in crypto with product-market fit, then how can you weaponize that speculation to at least do some good? And not have it just become a degenerate casino where everybody is trying to make a buck off each other's back?"

This is the question that Toady Hawk set out to answer, alongside cofounder @netnose.

At first glance, BETRMINT is a portal to Las Vegas within a Farcaster mini app. Spin the neon wheel to win, whee! Instead of feeding dollars into a slot machine, you earn spins by minting the featured NFT of the day. Mint proceeds are split between the creator and the BETRMINT team.

The wheel dispenses token jackpots, either funded from the $BETR project treasury, or contributed by partners seeking to expand their own communities through token distribution. Total aggregate volume during BETRMINT's three months of existence amounts to $85,000.

In keeping with the Vegas flair, BETRMINT has a VIP lounge: holders of at least 50M $BETR join the "BETR Believers" groupchat and get early access to the thrice-weekly games. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 3pm ET — put it on your calendar, Toady urges, because you won't be able to participate if you don't show up on time.

The mini app sends notifications when a new game opens, but user demand outstrips the supply of token jackpots (currently $1,500 in prizes per round). Often, BETRMINT "sells out" seconds after admitting the general public.

In fact, mints by BETR Believers had to be capped so they wouldn't take all the inventory before anyone else got a chance. This is a good problem to have, but still a problem; the team is tinkering with solutions to control the pace of the game.

Token as accelerator

The team launched $BETR through Clanker, and strategically allocated 50% of total supply to a community treasury. In effect, the higher the price of $BETR, the longer the game's runway extends. Clanker creator rewards provide additional operational capital.

Here is BETRMINT's core economic loop, in which the token supports the game:

"More prizes" is where the flywheels interlock. The juicier the prizes, the more demand to join the BETR Believers group. Which leads to the price of $BETR rising, which provides funds to continue running the game — or potentially, to increase the prize pools.

Let's talk about that. Since BETRMINT is currently bottlenecked by prize inventory for its players, why not raise the budget for each round, in order to serve more players and thus attract more sponsors, etc.? Two reasons:

1. Fiscal responsibility, AKA preserving runway.

2. Solid functionality and user experience: "There's still a lot about the process that is very manual at this juncture," Toady explained. "We are working on automation in order to scale."

Prizes also attract more players to the public access portion of the round, which we can conceptualize as a free tier. The more players, the more attractive it is for other projects to participate in BETRMINT, by allocating tokens from their own treasuries to sponsor a round of the game.

However, the flywheel graphic doesn't completely capture BETRMINT's dynamics. Speculation extends beyond the confines of the game itself. If you think BETRMINT is a promising product, it makes sense to buy $BETR, both because it's a direct input to the game and due to the attention economics that govern memecoin investing.

The more popular the game, the more valuable $BETR is likely to become. And speculation doesn't just increase the price, but also earns Clanker rewards from trading. This effect becomes a sort of "distributed venture capital," so to speak, that helps BETRMINT start bootstrapping into eventual sustainability.

Of course, none of this works if the game doesn't appeal to players. Why does it?

Rhythm and ritual

BETRMINT's interaction design was inspired by Warpslot, Yapster (RIP), and Toady's experience in the Blueprint creator accelerator — but especially by Nouns, where Toady focused his energies for a long time before striking out with ZEROPOD and Zero Rights Media.

"One thing that Nouns really nailed was this daily touchpoint for people. That was such a weird thing to do in 2021, when it was all about 'how can we mint 10,000 of these at once and max extract and make as much as possible,' and then sail off into the sunset or soft-rug over the course of the next six months." Toady was drawn to Nouns because it had the opposite energy, with an earnest long-term outlook.

"Even though Nouns has been through many seasons," Toady reflected, "the one piece of the mechanism that really seems to persist, aside from the memetic noggles themselves, is this daily cadence auction thing. Which we see even with $QR right now."

The lesson from Nouns: give people a reason to show up on a regular basis. Rhythm creates anticipation; anticipation creates habits. Habits create communities, and communities create value beyond any individual transaction.

Solving the creators' dilemma

BETRMINT came about because Toady needed to convince more people to mint his podcast. The Blueprint accelerator was a crash course in advertising via onchain incentives, but Toady wasn't satisfied with the existing platforms for running campaigns. And he was thoroughly intrigued by Farcaster mini apps.

In particular, the "memecoin dispenser" Warpslot caught his attention with its gleeful frivolity, consistent daily cadence, and the clever model of helping token projects grow their holder bases in exchange for prize pool donations. "What if we could take that energy and actually turn it into a tool that creators could use to make money for their content?"

The name BETRMINT "is meant to be a three-way pun, like you're betting but you're minting, and it's for the betterment of creators. We figured we'd spin this up and hopefully create a self-sustaining flywheel within a flywheel, with the token and the app, and help creators get eyeballs on their content by featuring it when we run the rounds."

Best of all, creators are directly compensated when people mint their work to play the game. "Most of our creators are making $300, $400, $500 every time they're featured in the app. For an onchain creator, that's actually very meaningful."

"People will spend three hours editing a podcast and put it out there into the void, then nobody mints it so they feel discouraged, and they're not sure what to do. Oftentimes they end up going back to old broken models of advertising and promotion," Toady said ruefully. "And you know, I think we can do better." Ahem… $BETR.

Actually making money

Onchain creators face the problem faced by every artist, since long before the internet: how do you get people to pay you? NFTs make it possible to turn digital work into durable artifacts, but that's only half the equation. The other half — actually more like 80% — is drumming up demand.

The tricky thing, when it comes to art and entertainment, is that people want to acquire things that other people already want. How do you initiate that loop, as an independent creator? How do you get the distribution necessary to establish social proof and stoke desire? Most crucially, how do you make it feel delightful and irresistible to spend $2 on content, instead of just scrolling onward?

Spinning the wheel "gives people a reason to open the app for that little dopamine hit." But the creator ingredient of BETRMINT doesn't only matter to the creators. "People like playing because it's not just a degen dopamine thing. You at least know that you're helping a creator." That wouldn't be enough on its own, but the combination is effective.

"It's not going to break the bank. It's literally a couple dollars." A couple dollars in exchange for the thrill of anticipation, and maybe a payoff — plus supporting a creator who is putting time into bolstering this ecosystem. "You want to come back. That was the whole idea: let's make a moment that people put in their calendar because they want to be there."

Micro-patronage at scale

Gamification of creator support is not unique to BETRMINT, but the directness and honesty of that gamification is refreshing. Beneath the dopamine mechanics, BETRMINT is testing a new model that we could call "micro-patronage."

Traditional patronage requires ongoing commitment: monthly subscriptions, repeated donations, sustained engagement. BETRMINT offers a series of small, low-commitment transactions that can nonetheless aggregate into meaningful creator income. Players don't need to pledge ongoing support or even remember individual creators. They just need to show up when the ritual happens and participate in the moment.

This lowers the friction for creator support dramatically. Instead of asking users to make cognitively demanding decisions about subscribing indefinitely, BETRMINT simply asks whether they want to play right now. The answer is yes.

To keep up with the project, follow Toady Hawk and BETRMINT on Farcaster. While you're at it, follow Splits too, and visit our channel /splits.

It's been a fun experiment, and the best parts will continue. We're wrapping up TWiF as a standalone newsletter, but Splits will continue exploring the Farcaster ecosystem on our main blog, as with recent posts featuring Rish from Neynar and Limone from Builders Garden.

Email subscribers will be ported over to the main Splits newsletter. Expect to receive blog posts like the two mentioned above, plus the Splits changelog. Of course, feel free to unsubscribe at any time!

Why: Originally TWiF was conceived as a links roundup gathering all the updates that Farcaster builders shipped in a given week. For whatever reason, that didn't hit — maybe the people obsessed enough to be interested had already seen most of the updates in their feed.

However, in-depth interviews and project analyses don't need to be siloed in a separate newsletter. Those are intriguing to anyone invested in the onchain world, whether they're part of Farcaster or not.

Point being, the content will continue, just in a different place. Meanwhile, see you on Farcaster 🫡

— Sonya

The web browser was invented as a means of accessing files uploaded to "the internet," this new limitless repository of digital artifacts that could be accessed from anywhere and expanded from anywhere. Early websites debuted as organized, interactive bundles of the myriad data and media now freely available to view and manipulate. They adapted the form factor of the book and the newspaper to screens, then rapidly evolved beyond those legacy constraints.

(I'm glossing over a lot of computing and internet history for the sake of getting to my actual point. Like I'm not about to explain server architecture right now. If you were around then, or you're knowledgeable about these golden eras, forgive me for the fast-and-loose summary!)

The onchain world is working through the same process for its own new universe of assets, a term that I use here in its broadest sense. The "wallet" is but the first rudimentary implementation of a portal to the onchain world, focused on the first, most transformative advancement: internet-native money. Significantly, an analogue wallet contains that which you own, along with your markers of identity. This is what's new about "the blockchain," the onchainternet: you can own digital objects.

Sure, there was a sense in which you always could, by downloading the files. (An important sense! So far as it goes.) Think of the jokes about copy-pasting NFTs. However, as I wrote a year ago, that critique was always obtuse: "The scarce artifact is not the file, per se, but the onchain object that includes it."

Ownership is social. Ownership is not merely having something in your possession (though again, that aspect definitely matters). Ownership can be shared amongst a limited group, but it is inherently rivalrous: by its nature, ownership rules some people in and others out. Combining this fundamentally legal property with the inherent abundance of bits, bytes, and ubiquitous access is what makes crypto so revolutionary.

I know Jacob from Zora has articulated this really well in the past, but I couldn't find the right post to quote, so I'll do the short version: "free but valuable." Crypto solves this paradox. (Also, "crypto is a printing press for markets" is soooo good that I have to mention it… but kind of tangential so I won't go deep on that idea right now.)

Anyway. Nothing I said above is a novel observation. However, it's really coming to the forefront as Farcaster upgrades from "Twitter with a side of Reddit, oh also Ethereum" to a full-fledged creator platform — mini apps! — with integrated financial rails, including Solana as well.

As Coinbase Wallet and now Zapper (in public beta!) offer their own takes on the Farcaster experience, I think of Will's comment that each Farcaster client "ultimately becomes something that looks more like a social media-browser hybrid." He added:

I didn't mean browser in the sense of how they exist today, I meant the more abstract 'primary interface through which people access an open protocol that other developers build with/on'.

Coinbase is integrating Farcaster as a bet on becoming that primary interface, a la Chrome for the standard internet, or the social media giants on mobile.

Another joke we've all heard is that crypto is speedrunning financial history (notably, all the problems that led to today's TradFi regulatory regime). This is true; I often liken crypto to early Wall Street. With some twists, of course!

Well, it's worth noting that we're also speedrunning the history of digital publishing. Of the internet writ large, really.

Farcaster is the social layer of a nexus of open protocols, designed to be interoperable by default, with its monetary precursors so deeply embedded that eventually "normie" users won't need to know the difference. "Best-case outcome is that Farcaster is what Ethereum is to crypto, but for social," as Rish from Neynar told me.

When you open Farcaster, you're entering the onchainternet. In case you needed a reminder of the radical potential here 😎

First, a brief review of Procoin, AKA $PRO:

• Impulsively launched on the heels of Farcaster Pro's debut.

• Airdropped (via opt-in) to most of the first 10k Pro subscribers.

• Originally billed as a "community-led governance token."

• Unsurprisingly, since community governance is a barely functional model and Procoin has ~nothing to govern yet, the project seems to be operating with creator mjc716 as a benevolent dictator ("for life" or not, who knows at this point).

• Immediately launched a barrage of sponsored community engagement initiatives.

• $PRO just crossed 30k holders.

Probots is one of those community engagement initiatives, and also a business venture. The allowlist aims to both reward and expand the population of $PRO holders by token-gating early access to "the premier PFP project on Farcaster" (very bold claim, but I love tinyrainboot, so I'll allow it). Total Probots supply will be 3,700 NFTs, a nod to the "37 Farcaster users" meme.

Claim thresholds:

100k+ tokens: 1 mint available
200k+ tokens: 2 mints
300k+ tokens: 4 mints

The snapshot will run at an undisclosed time between tomorrow and June 17th.

Allowlist mints are priced at 0.011 ETH [currently ~$30]

After 24 hours, any remaining pieces will be available for a public mint at 0.016 ETH [currently ~$43]

As noted above, I love tinyrainboot, so this structure successfully got me to spend ~$60 to amass 100k $PRO. I anticipate spending at least another 0.011 ETH to pick up one of the NFTs. When you do in fact feel the FOMO, FOMO marketing works!

Predictably, this allowlist setup is controversial, especially the choice to charge for each mint on top of requiring a large-ish token balance. Thing is, Procoin needs revenue to maintain project velocity — and thus attention share — in order to have any chance at growing its market cap.

Creator mjc716 stated bluntly: "We have earned some trading fees, but it's not close to enough to fund long term development. Especially so after taxes. You also cannot pay an artist in community vibes."

In my view, fair game. For one thing, no one will force you to mint the NFT. Just don't buy it, or wait to see what's left after the allowlist takes a crack at the collection. Personally, I am very curious to see how well this incentive structure works — inspiration for the next $interlock experiment? Perhaps, perhaps.

Builder bulletin

The big news of the week was Stripe acquiring Privy. The team definitely deserves to get its flowers! Just one example: the "invisible crypto" approach to consumer apps, tailored to actually recruit net-new users (?!), is largely powered by Privy.

The company enables developers to connect the powerful open financial networks of crypto to the smooth, intuitive UX that "web2" software has long established as table stakes. It'll be interesting to see what Privy does under the auspices of an established and deeply resourced fintech player.

A few other items of note…

Haptic feedback supported in mini apps. Back navigation supported in mini apps. Share extensions for mini apps: "Turn every Farcaster cast into an entry point for your product." Meanwhile, "we're working on unifying all the Farcaster developer legos under the Mini App standard."

Interesting architecture details: "rundown of the different Ethereum accounts that are part of your Farcaster experience."

From Neynar, "advanced notification analytics for customers using the Neynar starter kit or the MiniAppProvider from @neynar/react."

Surprisingly, Farcaster's first "native nft marketplace mini app," created as a Procoin contest entry.

Wallet and transaction UX problems, crosschain and otherwise.

Plans for the Degen Farcaster client: "Think Reddit-style convos. No messaging, no frames, no bloat."

Indexy launched a project token.

That's all for this week! Sayonara.

Allow me to state the obvious. Actually, restate the obvious, because we discussed this not long ago:

Airdrops attract attention because people like free money, so airdrops can act as top-of-funnel marketing. “Project I’ve never heard of” becomes “project that generated buzz on the timeline,” potentially even “project that paid me for doing nothing.”

Airdrops are a form of advertising. From the perspective of the team doing the airdrop, you are not the customer, you are the product. They are buying your attention. The amount they want to pay for it is $5-10, not $100. (It's not like you're about to select an insurance policy!)

The thing is, teams don't want attention from just anyone. They want people who will use their app, preferably more than once; who will hold onto the token and ideally buy more. They want people who already have resources at their disposal, and specifically the ones who are inclined to devote some of those resources to the team's project.

Furthermore, nobody wants to give you a large amount of a token that is already valuable. The point of an airdrop is to make the token more valuable; if you ever get an airdrop that is worth a substantial amount, it's because the campaign worked. If the token were expected to sustain a substantial market cap irrespective of the airdrop, the team wouldn't do one.

As I wrote in March:

Airdropping creates a constituency for the token — a group of people who will benefit if number go up. In theory, they will devote their efforts to making that happen. It is easier and faster to manufacture this group by giving the token away versus hoping enough people will buy it.

(For example, creating a constituency was likely the primary motive behind Zora’s airdrop. I won’t get into the weeds on that, but airdrop dynamics are different for a well-known brand that is guaranteed to see some level of speculative run-up, versus an unestablished team.)

Anyway, Farcaster airdrops in particular are attractive to teams because they can vet the recipients of the airdrop more thoroughly, thus skipping the farmers. Farcaster has an attractive population of crypto-native early adopters. Even within that population, it's possible to narrow things down to the most desired audience. Teams routinely require that recipients take an action as a condition of receiving the airdrop.

Look, there's nothing wrong with any of this. But you should understand the dynamic when you participate:

• On traditional social media platforms, advertising payments go to the platform itself, in exchange for access to the users.

• Whereas on Farcaster, Merkle is facilitating user access for free, because making Farcaster a place where you earn money is a cornerstone of Merkle's growth strategy.

• That means the advertising payments (airdrops) go directly to end-users

When was the last time Twitter paid you to look at an ad?

Here's the tricky part. $5-10 is only enough to directly buy the attention of someone whose attention is worth buying in the context of crypto’s alchemical economy. The ideal airdrop recipient tends to be someone who would ignore a $10 rebate on Candy Crush's in-game currency.

But a crypto token includes the possibility of upside — maybe it'll turn into $50 or $500. That outcome is unlikely in any given case, but it does happen, and the possibility is tantalizing. So someone for whom $10 wouldn’t normally move the needle can be enticed by $10 of an app token.

Also, because most Farcaster users are both financially and ideologically invested in crypto writ large, they're more willing to try any random game or tool than they would be with a traditional app.

Some additional tidbits as Merkle continues refining this program:

• As a term, “airdrop” has the wrong connotation: “these are closer to quests/campaigns/rewards.”

• How about “little treats” instead? Cuuute.

• Interesting behind-the-scenes details on these campaigns:

• “there's been ~$140K distributed to 10K+ Farcaster users with $125K+ lined up and positive feedback from teams we've worked with”

• Key point that should surprise no one: “giving airdrops that seem likely to be insta-sold is less appealing.”

• Much of this discussion was sparked by the hilariously obscurantist @shl0ms airdrop, btw.

Builder bulletin

Stuff you should know.

Wallet-related features that Farcaster is considering.

Dev rewards program has been embiggened.

Back navigation for mini apps is in progress.

Megapool is a clever new mini app that layers on top of another mini app:

- join or create pools to win the /megapot jackpot together
- contribute ETH or USDC
- ETH swapped for USDC via @aerodrome 
- winning pool uses @splits to distribute proportionally
- no fees (i get 10% of ticket cost as referrer)

Looking for collaborators? "open invite to any dev who wants to work on a miniapp together"

"We knew the NFT was going to drive subscriptions, but this is some of the first analysis of how intense the farming was." Data here, fascinating!

Update from the Intori mini app: “1,800+ $INTO holders with 31,000+ transactions on @base and 37,000+ friendships formed,” among other stats.

“Over 5.5k users reactivated their Farcaster accounts last Thursday,” nice.

The Percs team is winding down all current projects: "Onchain marketing tooling is a small market for a venture backed startup. We need to build something else that solves a bigger problem."

Does Rainbow charge too much for swaps? Hot debate.

The community-based retrofunding initiative has wrapped up.

“Onchain media won't win simply because you can monetize content better. It will win because of the power it has to deliver deeper insights to iterate content faster and grow your community more easily.”

Aaand that’s all for this week!

Cheers,
Sonya

Anyway, if you opened the app at all today, you were bombarded with celebratory posts about Farcaster Pro. We'll get into that. Plus the ecosystem updates most relevant to builders of mini apps, startups, or whatever else you've been hacking on 🧑‍💻

By the way, the Warpcast brand is dead. That means Farcaster is the name of both the protocol and its most popular client. This is potentially confusing… but the old setup was also confusing, in a way that turned off potential users. So here we are.

Pro moves

Farcaster Pro is an optional subscription that costs $120/year — charged in USDC on Base, naturally, and only available to purchase on mobile. (Okay, also charged in warps, the now-deprecated Warpcast internal currency, in order to give people a productive way to unload those.)

The first 10,000 subscribers will be airdropped a hotly anticipated NFT, designed by miguelgarest.eth, sometime in the near future.

Aside from the NFT, which is purely commemorative, the Pro subscription will include some extra features, such as longer casts and the ability to post four images at once (instead of just two). However, the only Pro feature available right now is a snazzy purple checkmark next to your username.

That was enough. Farcaster sold more than 10,000 subscriptions, garnering $1.2+ million USDC. Happily, "100% of revenue will go to creator and developer rewards," in the interest of protocol sustainability. Farcaster CEO dwr.eth described his approach to protocol-based subscription features, if you're curious.

He also explained why the team shipped Farcaster Pro today, despite minimal benefits being available:

For startups, every day you delay something matters. Every time you say 'this thing is different and worth delaying' you degrade your one true advantage as a startup: speed. It compounds. And then a few years later when it ultimately doesn’t work out, you likely missed out on something like 100% more opportunities to ship. Action produces information. Your pre-product-market-fit startup is not Apple.

Crypto users love to buy on hype so this was undoubtedly the right decision. Also, "Action produces information" is a banger.

It's worth noting that the Pro subscription is not intended to elevate subscribers above all other users: "Your reach, visibility and rewards are unaffected," regardless of whether you sign up. As for the users' interpretation of their new status… well:

"silence, crypto founder. a Farcaster Pro user is speaking" — @pugson

More Pro trivia and fast-follow responses:

• List of subscribers who qualified for the NFT

• Dune counter of Pro members who signed up onchain (not using warps), from @ilemi

• Incoming Pro purchases on BaseScan (again, doesn't include users who bought with warps) via @0x770dbeef

• Neynar will support the Pro designation once it's available in the protocol

• Pro subscribers are already receiving special airdrops

• Paperview added an option to grant free content to Pro subscribers only

• $PROCOIN is getting some traction as "the community-led governance token for Farcaster Pro users," though what they will be governing remains amorphous

• The advertising mini app Amps "allows you to filter your followers based on Farcaster Pro subscriptions"

As Phil noted when announcing that new Amps filter: "Onchain credentials = permissionless integration."

Builder bulletin

Various updates and announcements that might be useful to you. This is less "absolutely everything since the last newsletter" and more "things of particular note for project creators."

Another new filter from Amps: IRL location.

With Buoy, "anyone can create a telegram channel and get farcaster keyword notifications sent to it in realtime."

How Kasra Rahjerdi spent $2,205.56 on running his mini apps this month. (It can be done for much cheaper if you don't need to scale much.)

The Farcaster usage metrics dashboard has been updated. DAUs = 46.5k users, if you were wondering.

Meanwhile, Neynar's data on active developers hit an all-time high 📈

The top holder of a Zora coin gets to pin a comment on the coin page. See this feature in action.

Coinbase Wallet, still in limited beta, flipped the switch to support Farcaster mini apps.

Bankr added social airdropping functionality. Here's a demo.

The future of Farcaster channels remains in flux.

Quick rundown of "how to post a batch of assets to Arweave."

Celo Public Goods "is distributing 100k CELO to apps for incentive budgets."

The Noice tipping app took Farcaster by a storm. Base chief Jesse Pollak shared a quick breakdown of the launch campaign, calling it the "new playbook." And here's a Dune dashboard of Noice activity, thanks to @dammydee.

Not to be outdone, Noice competitor Tipn announced that an appcoin is right on the horizon.

A timeline testimonial:

idk who needs to hear this but ThirdWeb account abstraction embedded wallets and Farcaster social native integration are pretty good.

I got passkeys, cross-platform multi-factor logins, and state-of-the-art gas-funded wallets for less than half a day of coding.

Another quickstart resource: hellno/mini-app-ui is "an open-source collection of components, hooks and utilities for mini apps," offering "clean, reusable, working components." Live demo.

Solana corner

Farcaster supports Solana now, so Solana things are happening:

• AMA with Solana co-creator Toly

• Neynar is always on it: "possible to now input a solana token address and see who in your network holds it — results are personalized for each viewer"

• "Having at least $10 of SOL in your Farcaster wallet increases your chances of qualifying" for upcoming Solana airdrops

That's all for today! Did I miss anything important? Hit reply and let me know.

Cheers,
Sonya

Two more airdrops landed:

• WalletConnect ($WCT), with a flow that included staking within a mini app.

• Celo, marking another expansion of the networks supported by Warpcast wallet.

Farcaster is becoming more and more multichain, notably with an incoming native Solana wallet, currently in limited beta. Here’s a starter pack of Solana builders on Farcaster. Apparently the team has four Solana airdrops lined up 👀

In a simpatico moment, Bankr now supports Solana. Bankr is also on its way to Coinbase Wallet. Where there is Farcaster, there will be Bankr.

Soon Farcaster users will be able to prove that they’re human, or at least sufficiently similar to a human: “Verify your account by connecting two socials (X, Phone or GitHub) and holding $25 in your wallet.” Good enough for government work, as they say. The rationale:

Completing verifications allows authentic accounts to stand out by proving things that are hard to fake, like having socials on other networks and holding a balance for a long period of time.

More from the Farcaster team:

• Auth addresses should radically improve the web experience.

• RIP Warpcast brand, soon to die in favor of Farcaster being the name of both the network and the premier client.

Onward!

Slice Shops mini app = ecommerce but make it onchain and Farcaster-native. Shop straight from your Warplet! (I’m gonna be sad to drop that name with the imminent rebrand.) Check out the Higher shop to see the product in action.

You can now watch TBPN live on Farcaster. If you, like me, had never heard of this podcast, it seems to be a popular show about technology. What the acronym actually stands for was surprisingly impossible to Google within a couple of minutes. Claude said it means “Technology Business Programming Network,” which sounds suspiciously generic. Feel free to deride my ignorance, but please also clue me in?!

My colleague Matthew dropped a poker mini app. Ante up!

The next time you invite someone to Farcaster, send them "the first educational mini app" to help them get started.

Do you like the “walk and talk” videos that have recently taken off? There’s a whole mini app for that now.

Thirdweb shipped 1) a handy crypto payment link, 2) the ability to go straight from prompt to coin using the Nebula agent (available in a mini app, naturally).

Zora is doing interesting things with quote pairs, starting with $zora: “When you originate new coins you set the quote currency as your own token. You token gate your markets and capture the net value of all of the coins originated.”

Farcaster app store… Fapp Store, if you will 😏

Crypto-native TikTok competitor 10k World is available to download.

“We’re putting together a Live Vibe Coding Competition and are looking for participants!” At least $1k in prizes on the table.

Base Sepolia is now supported for mini apps, to make testing easier.

"FELL THE DRAGON is a rogue-like adventure where you fight to stay alive long enough to reach the dragon and slay it."

Dollarchain is a team-based competition to amass the biggest pot of USDC.

Tomasz Stanczak, joint executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, did an AMA.

“Open bounty to do good work for the benefit of @qrcoindotfun and we will pay you in $QR for the stuff that we like.” Check in first before getting started.

Something new from Neynar, as always: "We've updated the Send Notifications API from @neynar to allow for user filtering and a ‘broadcast to all’ feature, so you don't ever have to worry about notification tokens again." The team also put together an automated agent to demonstrate how various building blocks can be stacked together.

Farville is gearing up to start monetizing, and shared some stats on how the mini app has performed so far.

New website for Nouns grants.

Astrology girlies, there is a mini app for you now.

Fairmint published “the Open Cap Table Protocol (OCP) whitepaper, the foundational infrastructure to bring equity securities onchain.” 🧐

Did I miss anything? Hit reply and let me know.

Cheers,
Sonya

Some questions that emerged from the incident: Is forgiveness possible, or advisable? When are second chances (or third ones) a good idea? Can pseudonymous identities be trusted? Are the benefits of pseudonymous culture worth it, when the ability to switch names can provide cover for bad actors?

There is no single answer to any of these quandaries, and undoubtedly we will discuss them again in the future.

Links

Meanwhile, the valiant Clanker team is working on sniper mitigation.

The FarCon episode of Acidtest is out: "Featuring over 40 interviews with many of you on the ground in Brooklyn NY." Damn. The split for episode contributors divides the revenue amongst 73 addresses!

Indexy notifications: "Get performance metrics from your radar (tracked and created indexes)," among other alerts like trending indexes.

Spring 2025 retro grants for the Farcaster ecosystem, to be dispensed via Rounds — and you can contribute to the rewards pool!

Mini app notifications are now grouped into clusters, thank God.

Neynar has been shipping as relentlessly as ever:

• "all Neynar APIs now accept micro crypto payments."

• "personalized embed images for users when they shared the mini app on their timeline" — take heed, devs!

Tap-to-pay from a Privy wallet 🤯

$QR ad-of-the-day auctions are now denominated in USDC, for a litany of reasons.

Results from one week of the BETRMINT "content casino."

OpenRank is hiring.

Audio mini app Spaces added "roles (host, speakers, listeners) for better moderation."

DeepNewz: "Our AI collects, writes and organizes news in real time, based on tens of thousands of sources, on topics from tech to sports to crypto to international."

Dollarchain, purportedly "a social coordination game," might be something. The channel description reads, "Start a team chain with $1 deposit, coordinate to form the longest chain, and the winning chain splits the total pot evenly among its members." The waitlist is open. "My goal is delivering fun, & iterating fast w. my learnings," so we'll see how things go.

Find your friends: "I personally found 28 people I was following on X / Twitter but had not followed on Farcaster."

Dash is a mini app for exploring videos uploaded to Farcaster. The latest update: "You can now view and post replies under videos without having to leave the app!"

Zapper's upcoming wallet will be available to test on Android soon.

Warps.fun is a "generative art game in a mini app," a new version of the concept behind the team's previous project Arrows.

"We built the most powerful AI for blockchains and put it inside a mini-app." You'll have to judge the "most powerful" part for yourself.

That's all for this week! Did I miss anything? Hit reply and let me know.

Cheers,
Sonya

Speaking of wallets! The biggest Farcaster news this week (despite lots of competition) was the debut of Warpcast Wallet on the web. Laptop users, we won. Finally.

The most viral mini app this week is probably Paperview (a twist on "pay per view," get it?) "Upload any photo or video, set any price to access ($0.01–$1M)." There is a NSFW toggle… jussayin'.

There were many more interesting launches, of course. Read on!

Precoin = "a tradable ERC-20 memecoin representing early belief in a creator's potential to launch a real coin. A permissionless speculation market on social clout."

BETRMINT is a new "Content Casino" that combines NFT minting with a lottery:

Each collected edition will give you 1 FREE ticket to spin the Wheel of BETRMINT, where you can win up to 100X your mint cost in Base memecoins like $RUNNER, $CLANKER, $CLANKFUN + more!

Trendcoins is "an ai powered bot that takes trending searches on google and automatically coins them." @keccers.eth elaborated on her thinking:

trendcoins itself is a somewhat satirical an art project — i don't think it will be the source of the next 1000x memecoin — but i think automated content pipelines like this are very useful to creators

take one thing — a trending google search, a podcast episode, a video, a blog post — and instantly create supporting materials for it like social posts and coins

Re7 Capital "raised a first-check fund focused on backing crypto social startups."

Alert for the data nerds: "It's now possible to analyze Farcaster's social graph via interactive network graph visualization."

"As part of Farcon, [Privy] demo’ed a new tap-to-pay experience that lets users purchase with their Warplet with a simple phone tap."

Privy competitor Para launched "guest mode" for onboarding-without-onboarding: "Create an account in seconds with zero social login or passkey. When it's time to level up, convert it into a universal embedded wallet and keep your address, assets, and history intact."

"Subscribe to keywords on Farcaster and get notified about them inside Warpcast Notifications," using the Buoy mini app.

The fresh version of Coinbase Wallet that includes a Farcaster client has an open waitlist.

Coinaroid: "Coin your content and share with your friends, all without leaving farcaster 📸"

Pinetree aims to be "the best video client for casters, with crypto rails baked in." The founders' thesis:

Our conviction is that ads-based video platforms are a local maxima and that we have an opportunity to unlock the global maxima — a video content network powered by a p2p economy.

Lastly, some treats for the devs!

Added three new experimental actions to the mini apps SDK in time for Builders Day:
- viewToken: navigate to a token page
- swapToken: open swap form with pre-filled tokens
- sendToken: open send form with pre-filled token & recipient

Also, Snapchain is the prerequisite to deprecating the Farcaster signup fee, which will be a boon for the whole ecosystem, especially alternative clients.

Short newsletter this week, but I think the projects in it are top-notch. Did I miss anything, though? Hit reply and share the link.

Cheers,
Sonya

While AI dominates headlines, equally transformative changes are occurring in financial infrastructure. Onchain payment rails and stablecoins are transforming organizations into borderless, permeable networks. Major financial institutions are engaged in a "stablecoin gold rush," seeking more efficient settlement options.

When payments become programmable and friction-free, business models transform fundamentally. Micro-transactions become viable, one example of which is "like to tip" on Farcaster this week. Revenue-sharing can become automatic. Cross-organizational collaboration becomes fluid.

That’s just a taste, read the whole thing.

Builder energy begets builder energy. “The onchain economy is a hotbed of new startups,” Jihad posted. “Farcaster mini apps are leading the way.” Fact-check: true!

Remember when TWiF had a specific section for mini apps? (We called them frames back then, in the olden days.) It would feel silly now, because mini apps are the whole game. If someone is shipping on Farcaster, it’s probably a mini app. There are a handful of nonetheless-cool exceptions... but they are exceptions.

Links

Time-sensitive 🔔 Coinbase is hosting a workshop on Monday, reviewing how mini apps will work in Coinbase Wallet’s upcoming Farcaster client.

As Jihad mentioned, Tip ‘n Earn allows you to send a micropayment every time you like a Farcaster post.

Matthew Chaim launched a new Farcaster-native radio show called Acid Test, to instant acclaim. Listen in the Acid Test mini app. The app was developed by Builders Garden, and the project comes with a clanker ($acid).

"Introducing Mini Apps search on mobile," so you can find the latest launch again after closing it. How it works:

Extended Mini App Metadata is now used for the new Mini Apps search feature on Warpcast mobile.

The more metadata you add, the better we'll be at providing good search results, especially "description", "primaryCategory" and "tags".

"We're considering ending support for v1 Frames in 3 months." RIP.

Meanwhile, geographic expansion from Warpcast: "You can use the wallet and earn rewards in Belarus, DRC, CAR, Libya, Myanmar, Russia, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Venezuela."

Clanker infra update: "With configurable starting market caps on WETH-paired tokens, API users may choose the starting market cap of each deployment (1 ETH market cap minimum) and clanker[.]world deployers may select from a few options upon token creation."

The Clanker team also introduced “casual clanks.” Proxy explained:

- reply: “get in here @ clanker”
- clanker pics up context from the convo, drops a coin
- clanker rewards are split between root cast author + reply 
- 1 eth mc on launch

Bankr acquired Payflow. “Payflow makes onchain social payments easy and accessible and this aligns 100% with our vision of simplifying crypto and trading.”

Heads up devs: "we just dropped a new Farcaster mini app Next.js template using @base's minikit" ✅

A novel addition to the mini apps roster: "buy data eSIMs with crypto!"

New from Zapper:

surface onchain activity based on a user's social graph ✨

this unlocks the ability to create personalized experiences for mini apps, wallets, or onchain products out-the-box with the Zapper API

For the visually inclined: "simple gallery miniapp to see a grid ui of any user or channel image feed."

"Deep Space: a Mini App hackathon by Orbiter," in which devs compete for a lifetime hosting plan and other prizes.

Megapot is hiring.

"Introducing Noms — a fully onchain, composable art project for making and remixing little characters." Cute!

Gems is a new daily game, “inspired by Minesweeper, Mines, and @warpslot.”

Cameron Armstrong is winding down Seemore, and shared some heartfelt founder reflections.

Tortoise Player now has an accompanying clanker to support the project.

Handy dashboard of Farcaster user metrics — here’s a direct link.

New channel "for sharing startup news, announcements, product launches, and showcasing projects, products, or services."

"BattleCast is a prediction game where you pick coins, track their price performance, & compete to win prizes.”

"We're building DAVINCI, a voting protocol based on a L1 zkRollup and designed to solve the problems of both traditional and onchain voting."

Politiswap: "We’re tokenizing every elected official in the world, whether they like it or not."

Tunecaster adds notifications.

Neat: "you can always access your /fluidkey stealth addresses, even without our app" through an IPFS-based recovery interface.

That’s all for this roundup. Have a great weekend!

Cheers,
Sonya

Meanwhile, Splits (the company behind This Week in Farcaster, in case you didn’t know) ran a composability experiment called Structure, which happened to involve tokenized content, or maybe content-ized tokens, depending on how you look at it. The hypothesis:

Consumer access to practical “money legos” has opened a new frontier in composability. While utmost customization will always require writing code, today you can do a lot by cleverly linking various services, tying things together with asset identities (usually contract addresses) and wallet addresses.

Structure involves two NFTs and three airdrops, the last of which will take place on Monday. There is still time to earn some $higher, if you’re interested.

Structure is kind of a DIY follow-up to our previous discussion of airdrops, and I’m going to write a postmortem of the project next week, dissecting what worked well and what didn’t. The best way to learn these things is by getting your hands dirty (in the gardening sense, not the crime sense).

Links

Ponder smart wallets got hacked, the team dropped everything to figure out what happened, and made users whole. Vulnerability details:

The root cause was an authentication spoofing technique in our API routes due to architectural constraints within our auth system. We've learned a lot from this exploit and are implementing more robust security measures to prevent a situation like this from ever happening again.

Ponder cofounder Ben Adamsky also noted, “We've been fighting off attackers since February, including weekly ddos attacks, mass collusion, and data scraping.” All popular mini apps will have these problems.

More user interaction data is now available through Warpcast dev tools.

How it would work to rename Warpcast back to Farcaster (its original name, which was changed to differentiate the client from the underlying protocol).

The $QR mini app added a winners page.

10K.WORLD, the latest “TikTok but make it crypto” attempt from the team behind Drakula, published a signup page. Intriguing because this is one of the first Farcaster-native Solana projects.

Amps.fun is now open for anyone to boost their casts.

Wholenote: “Discover music shared on Farcaster and listen to previews in-app!”

Find “full support for Mini App hosting on Orbiter. Not only can you host your sites and apps, but you can now create and launch Mini Apps with ease.” Appealing perk: “Farcaster users get 50% off our paid plans FOREVER.”

Farcaster infrastructure upgrade: Snapchain is live.

Speaking of which, “Waypoint is a memory-efficient, Rust-built tool for Snapchain syncing. Stream real-time events and query Farcaster data locally.”

Vibe-coding mini app for vibe-coding mini apps, read all about it.

Rounds (dot wtf, the tool for rewarding content in Farcaster channels) is downsizing.

And OG Zora ecosystem memecoin $enjoy is being released into to the ether: the project “will no longer have a team supporting the token full-time.”

Privy added support for login with WhatsApp.

Another mini app template to help you get started. Plus one more: "another minimalist Mini App starter, this time with SIWF!" (Sign in with Farcaster.)

The Shillr team revealed a new creative studio called Runtime.

The Recaster mini app offers user stats, cast scheduling, and Warpcast invites.

“I got nerd sniped by the new Trending Topics and wanted to see if I could do it in a better way.”

Crowdfunding mini app incoming from Seed Club.

"Introducing Duels ⚔ — where artwork competes in epic daily battles."

Modbot is sunsetting in favor of Cura, which is “building an entirely new, end-to-end experience for channels/communities.”

Alright, that’s all for today. Did I miss anything? Hit reply with a link.

Cheers,
Sonya

genuinely curious why so many project founders choose embedded wallets v. connect.

as a user it feels like death by a thousand paper cuts.

And chaser:

1. Embedded wallets work reliably on mobile.

The issue is the mobile operating systems have poor support for switching between apps, especially if it requires multiple rounds.

2. Most people in the world don’t have a wallet

Tradeoffs, always tradeoffs! Both solutions are inconvenient but in different ways.

What’s annoying about embedded wallets is that now you have assets here, you have assets there, with no unified view of everything — unless you set up an additional tracking dashboard, which is then another thing to manage. Nothing syncs between mobile and web, which is super irritating when your time is split between your phone and your computer. Also, users don’t have full control over embedded wallets; often you can’t even see or export your private keys. But if you can… great, more private keys to worry about.

However, the benefit of embedded wallets is that once yours is funded, it just works (within a given product). You don’t have to juggle apps or copy-paste stuff back and forth.

Degen founder Jacek shared an interesting perspective on how Warpcast’s own embedded wallet might evolve:

Maybe Warpcast just becomes a wallet with social as an add-on. If it’s listed in WalletConnect, you can use it with any dapp. The business model seems to be taking a cut of swaps and mini app activity, so if the wallet is the core product, social only matters to the extent it drives usage.

Some users may only care about the wallet. In that case, it’s just another option—one with built-in mini apps and a feed pushing buy/sell/borrow/earn flows. If you want a quieter experience, use MetaMask. Over time, wallets likely consolidate, and Warpcast could easily be used outside its own app unless there’s some technical blocker I’m missing.

Where do you fall on this debate? Hit reply and sound off.

Links

Maybe Warpcast will go back to being named Farcaster, like the underlying protocol 🤷‍♀ Meanwhile, the app-still-currently-known-as-Warpcast added trending topics and a “This Week in Mini Apps” livestream on Fridays.

New frontiers in vibe-coding: "Every app you create on Ohara automatically transforms into a Mini App on Farcaster. No extra steps, no extra code — just instant usability." One of the cofounders says: "our #1 job is to maximize distribution for every creator, so we're excited to build out more for the farcaster ecosystem." Here are two examples of resulting mini apps.

Another live audio mini app, this one amusingly called Spaces (just like on X). And from its creator, a mini app starter project to get you rolling.

Rundown of FarCon 2025 community talks. Also, apply to speak at the Neynar event.

"Coinllery lets users create custom galleries of their favorite coins on Zora using the Coins SDK."

Great builder AMA with Jing from Optimism. A quick sample:

I have hopes for plasma, zk, and many other solutions. All these fancy names are really mostly the same concepts with sometimes very small differences in design tradeoffs. More adoption and more usecases will elucidate which tradeoffs make the most sense, and the OP Stack is built modularly so that it can adapt quickly to changing tides.

Titles debuted a mini app for minting AI creations, plus an incentive program to go with it.

bariOS is a cute retro mini app that contains its own mini apps: "Paint. Chat. Lofi tunes. A synth. A web browser and a photo booth. All inside, one tap away. And yep, more apps are on the way."

Tortoise: "You can use it to stream, collect, and share music from your favorite artists on Farcaster."

With Hypersub CREATE you can "launch an onchain membership directly from a mini app."

Higher Market is open again — time to go shopping!

That's all for this week. Did I miss anything good? Hit reply to scold me.

Cheers,
Sonya

Anyway. Last week we discussed airdrops, in particular Warpcast as an airdropping platform. As the program ramps up, more info about its effectiveness is becoming available.

$hunt airdrop results:

967 addresses claimed so far:
- 71.15% held the full airdrop
- 3.93% bought more
- only 24.92% sold

$tab airdrop results include a 377.6% jump in app installs with notifications. Big percentage!

From Linda Xie, who is running this program, "data on the first several airdrop offers:"

- average of 1,900 users for each airdrop
- 69% claim rate
- 70% hold rate from claims ($ spent by teams)

"Love it or hate it," remarked Justin Ahn of Quidli, "the experimentation around programmatic value distribution is inevitable with the convergence of open social graphs & web3."

I will say, as a consumer evaluating these airdrop offers, my interest has drastically dropped... they're feeling random and overly frequent. Will subsequent developers need to up the ante to achieve similar ROI? I suppose we'll find out.

Itty-bitty payments

Phil wrote a thought-provoking cast about the "microtransactions meta" developing on Farcaster:

This shift is caused by several converging trends: low gas fees, social identity tied to wallets, and an influx of liquidity (e.g. Warpcast Rewards) that lets users play with "house money".

He's not wrong; microtransactions are happening. But as ever, microtransactions are a tough business:

• Any function that users have to pay for every single time, they will use less than they would if they were free. This problem is by no means insurmountable. However, if a free equivalent of your product can be monetized through advertising instead, that version will dominate in terms of user activity.

• You cannot sustainably monetize through fees without absolutely massive volume, in which case advertising probably works better anyway.

Warpcast

Our friends at Merkle Manufactory have been busy! (ICYMI, Merkle Manufactory is the company behind Farcaster, the open protocol, and Warpcast, the most popular client for that protocol.)

Warpcast's dev rewards program was expanded from a pool of $2000 with 25 recipients to a pool of $3000 with 50 recipients.

New weekly tips feature:

- Once a week, we summarize the people on the network you interact with the most
- You can opt-in to sending them a $1 USDC tip by tapping
- We batch all the tips in a single transaction

"Token pages now default to show holders that you follow."

A charity initiative uses Daimo to "enable cross-chain donations of just about any token on any chain in your wallet," supporting earthquake relief in Myanmar.

Two upcoming builder AMAs in April, with the cofounder of Optimism and founder of Product Hunt.

The new mini apps docs site is live 💃

More than 187k transactions originated from mini apps (via Warpcast) over the past ~month! Wow.

Last but not least, "You now have the ability to minimize your mini app just above the navigation bar at the bottom of your app," and immediately…

Links

…FC Audio Chat debuted on the timeline.

Zapper is building a wallet and Farcaster client. The team will send out invites soon, and is currently seeking name suggestions.

Tradeoffs, always tradeoffs: "embedded wallets break identity," with an example.

Zora shipped a "Coins SDK" for their token launchpad features.

"Bankr is live in Warpcast DMs for Bankr Club members! Swap, trade, send, get information, and place limit orders privately without leaving the app."

Interact with Hybersub via mini app.

Good blog post: "How can open social protocols fail us in 2025," comparing and contrasting Mastodon, Bluesky, and of course Farcaster.

"Digitizing Your Aura: A Guide," the tech stack behind Moshicam's viral mini app.

Speaking of viral mini apps, another guide: "how to build viral mini-apps on farcaster," which is "less about complexity, more about tight loops, social moments, and dopamine triggers."

An update on the $build project, including this milestone: "Made $BUILD a fully decentralized public good with 163B tokens airdropped to 40K+ community members and no more treasury or gatekeepers."

Paragraph snapped up paragraph.com (versus .xyz) and refreshed the homepage.

"Starting today, anyone can use Amps to purchase Likes from their followers."

Try out the Cura mini app focused on surfacing the best content from channels.

Reflections on building /poidh, including usage data.

Voilà, "a mini app that lets you make NFT collections."

Clankermon updates and roadmap: "overhauled most of the UI to lay foundations for a bunch of features that will really tie the experience together, this is crucial as introduce way more things to do."

Test Livecaster, "a mini client in a mini app" intended for livechatting.

That's all for this week. What'd I miss? Hit reply and let me know.

Cheers,
Sonya

Before heading out, I want to talk about airdrops, following up on last week’s topic of onchain advertising. The moment is apropos because Warpcast is leaning into airdrops; power users will be eligible for several more in the coming weeks.

First: What is the point of an airdrop, from the devs’ perspective? The public answer is usually “to reward our early supporters,” but these are the underlying reasons:

• Airdropping creates a constituency for the token — a group of people who will benefit if number go up. In theory, they will devote their efforts to making that happen. It is easier and faster to manufacture this group by giving the token away versus hoping enough people will buy it.

• Airdrops attract attention because people like free money, so airdrops can act as top-of-funnel marketing. “Project I’ve never heard of” becomes “project that generated buzz on the timeline,” potentially even “project that paid me for doing nothing.”

Well, about that part, the “doing nothing” of it all… Airdrops have predictable problems. Many recipients will dump your token immediately, because they don’t care about your ecosystem and would rather gamble on something else.

To mitigate this dynamic, many airdrop programs require measurable engagement with the product before handing over any assets. Devs dangle the carrot to incentivize user activity, thus guaranteeing some ROI from the airdrop process. This is, unfortunately, extremely gameable.

@jacopo.eth encapsulated the issue well:

Indiscriminate airdrops harm products by driving the ratio of good/bad users toward zero. 

They may give a short-term revenue boost but are ultimately long-term killer, as they drastically reduce quality feedback and skew the product’s focus.

He continued, “I know most projects try their best to design fair systems that reward actual participants, but the sheer number of people and bots trying to game them makes it hard to do it at scale.”

Plus this response from @dcposch.eth:

The problem is also that the mere hint of an airdrop completely drowns out [product-market fit] signal.

"Hey we have this cool new product. It does X, Y, and if you use it you might get $20,000 for free in the future." Good luck finding anyone who cares even slightly about X and Y

(This critique applies to any type of financially motivated engagement.)

Okay… then why bother airdropping? Clearly some projects still deem the short-term burst of hype to be worth the downsides. Admittedly, even the most naive airdrop can work; sometimes lightning is captured in a bottle.

However, a method with more predictable results relies on introducing user reputation. Warpcast has adjusted airdrop incentives so that recipients play an iterated game, poised to benefit from cooperating with project devs on a longer-term basis. “Goal is to make Airdrop Offers a great way for developers to get their first 1,000 aligned users.” Aligned users, not just any old users.

Warpcast’s broad approach was shared as guidance for eager users:

How to improve your chance of having a developer target you with an airdrop

1. Cast a lot
2. Use [mini apps]
3. Transact onchain

The more active you are, the better your chances are.

Additionally, we will share historical airdrop activity with developers.

So opting in to an airdrop and following the guidance from the developer will improve your reputation as a good user to airdrop to.

Bold added. There it is! If you sell immediately, or ignore the product associated with the airdrop, you’re less likely to receive future airdrops. Warpcast also provides developers with some sybil-resistance via layered account verifications.

These airdrops still require you to do something: add or use a mini app, cast in a channel, follow an account, and likely more options to come. “It's a claim flow, so only people who complete the flow receive the airdrop.” The upshot is that Warpcast airdrops have multiple levels of targeting.

Advertising is the natural way for a social network to monetize, and this is a crypto-native version: Warpcast has productized access to its best users. (Worth noting — Warpcast is a client for the Farcaster protocol, and this airdrop feature is specific to users of the Warpcast client.)

Warpcast is not the only player trying to improve airdrops. Brian Flynn, CEO of Boost (“marketplace for onchain actions”), summed up his take:

old playbook:

1. create tokens
2. tell users to buy tokens
3. users angry 

new playbook: 

1. create tokens
2. attach revenues
3. distribute tokens to users upon tx
4. users happy
5. earn even more

For example, “attach revenues” describes the Clanker model in which coin creators get a cut of trading fees. You could create a memecoin and then distribute the tokens to users who undertake action X, for many different values of X. Needless to say, this is what Boost does — to the company’s credit, they’ve been at it longer than most.

Flynn elaborated:

you want to think about token distribution as a marketing cost. so distribute as incentive to get users to buy. should be acquisition and retention lever. only pay out when users drive you revenue

A new product that facilitates this process is Infector, which makes it easy to airdrop tokens based on connections from onchain social networks (e.g. airdrop to anyone minted a given Rodeo post). “Holding coins shows what tribe you are part of, what moment you were there for, who you are,” says the launch thread on X. Call it vibe economics, perhaps.

In a similar vein, Quidli allows you to airdrop an ERC-20 to a specific group, based on factors like Farcaster channel membership and specific asset holdings. For example, you could airdrop to 1) your Farcaster followers 2) who hold $higher. Or there’s Rainbow’s new token launcher, with built-in airdrop functionality that integrates Farcaster.

What do you think, is it possible to design an airdrop that can’t be farmed? Have you tried any of these tools? I just gave Infector a whirl for my side project $petal and it worked like a charm. Composability is so cool!

Cheers,
Sonya

Follow @weekinfarcaster.eth, and subscribe to This Week in Farcaster on Paragraph.

1// With Amps.fun, charge a fee of your choice to automatically recast or like content from other Farcaster users. You don’t get to review the casts in advance, but only users who you already follow are eligible to buy your engagement, so it’s assumed that you’re sufficiently willing to share their content.

From the advertiser perspective, Amps is “a wonderful way to pay your favorite creators on farcaster to help spread the word about what you are building,” as @humpty.eth put it. Amps recently hit the early milestone of $1k spent through the service.

2// Warpslot is a virtual slot machine that dispenses memecoins; it’s free to play but daily spins are limited. Founder @colinm explained his thinking:

i believe games of chance are a perfect vehicle for discovery. there's something uniquely thrilling about not knowing what you'll get when you spin

this element of surprise makes collecting tokens far more engaging than simply purchasing them. you're not just acquiring assets — you're experiencing the joy of unexpected wins and discovering projects you might not have encountered otherwise

Memecoin projects can partner with Warpslot to distribute their tokens, using the game to spread awareness and grow the number of holders. Warpslot touts an “avg increase of 2.5k+ unique holders per featured token” merely one week into the product’s existence. Colin continued:

with seemingly infinite tokens, Warpslot offers a valuable service of distribution for token owners, and curation for users

the goal is to help token creators increase their distribution, while simultaneously giving our users a significant enough amount of premium tokens to keep them coming back.

Warpslot has already partnered with $QR, the memecoin-as-billboard business that I consider the coolest of these experiments. (Full disclosure, I own like $50 worth of $QR. High roller over here, watch out!) As it happens, @phil, the founder of Amps.fun — everything is entangled in the small-but-mighty Farconomy — called $QR “the front page of the blockchain.”

3// Here’s how $QR works:

• The logo is, unsurprisingly, a QR code. This QR code can be updated, so project creator @jake is able to point it to any link.

• There’s a daily auction on qrcoin.fun, bidding in ETH to have the QR code link to your chosen website over the course of the next day.

• Jake uses the auction proceeds to buy more $QR for the project treasury (presumably also keeping some funds in ETH, or diversifying into USDC, etc).

• Jake posts a profile of the winner on the X account @qrcoindotfun and signal-boosts from his personal X account as well.

Stunningly, “our first 15 QR auctions have had more than twice as many bids as nouns auctions during the same period (245 vs. 116).” This is not a knock on Nouns, but a good benchmark for the excitement generated by the $QR concept.

Realistically, no one is actually scanning the QR code. The traffic to winners comes from the homepage and being featured on social media. But it’s a great gimmick that draws participation to the ingenious auction structure.

4// Zero Rights Media released an “adcoin” on Base, using Zora’s new token launcher, to promote a client. With a future perk for buyers: “Buy some of the adcoin on @zora (from the frame below), and when Alpha Dot Fun launches, you'll automatically save 20% off a subscription just for having it in your wallet.” 🤔

5// Last but not least, sports prediction token $bracky just partnered with Warpcast for an airdrop. Apparently more airdrops are coming soon. “Goal is to make Airdrop Offers a great way for developers to get their first 1,000 aligned users.”

Imagine running a small business onchain. Now imagine that your business has nothing to do with crypto. So why bother?

@samantha joined TWiF to explain why Humankind Candles has such a presence on Farcaster, plus the ins and outs of Humankind operations. The episode is available on Pods, YouTube, and Spotify.

If you’re coming to Farcon, pick up a Farcandle!

Incoming: “A proposal to make Warpcast's Direct Casts an open standard that any Farcaster client can use.” Review it on GitHub.

Primary address: “Choose a preferred address for rewards, airdrops and payments.”

DC search: “Search results now include messages inside conversations that match your search terms.”

Boost your account credibility: “Verify your X, phone and onchain addresses to improve reputation.”

The docs for frames (soon to be rechristened mini-apps) are getting some love, and your engagement in the process is desired.

Neynar free tier: “Read user and cast data, and write casts for free (with rate limits).”

Also from Neynar, “a quickstart script to help frame devs with local frame v2 server development as well as production-ready builds,” available on GitHub.

This sounds useful:

native Farcaster user resolution is now live on all Zapper API endpoints⚡

this means any token holders, transaction participants, or NFT owners can resolve automatically to FIDs & metadata. allowing you to combine onchain + farcaster data out-of-the-box

Apemash is "a frame that lets you create token clashes and let the market decide who wins."

“Gina started out as one of the first AI agents that lived on the Farcaster feed. Over the last few weeks, we have significantly improved her capabilities.”

"This March Madness you can message me in-feed to trade live games with $bracky."

Hometown hero @pugson launched Pixeldrop, an iOS app for très aesthetique photo redaction, to general aplomb.

Megapot is “the world’s largest onchain jackpot,” and the team is hiring engineers.

"Most things we buy onchain are driven by social signals — who’s talking or swapping. But there wasn’t an easy way to track how coins flow through the feed." Which is why @tomu made checkr.social.

“yesterday, i vibe coded an farcaster frame app that lets you distribute ether or tokens to multiple farcaster accounts at once.”

Privy raised some money and is hiring.

Commonware is also hiring: “Looking for folks who are experienced & deeply technical in the blockchain space and interested in helping build out our Rust-based framework and services.”

“In Stoke Fire you grow your village onchain. You gather resources and can steal resources from your friends!” Now playable as a Farcaster mini-app.

Quidli’s updated mini-app makes it easy to airdrop your favorite ERC-20 tokens “to fc accounts directly from warpcast based on engagement (ex. your followers, channel followers/members, tokens held (erc20, 1155)).”

Bankr Club is live and accepting signups. Membership unlocks premium features.

Deep dive on Clanker mechanics from @matthewb — anatomy of the OG token launcher agent.

Speaking of token launchers, widely beloved wallet Rainbow now includes that functionality!

Phew, that’s all for this week. Did I miss anything? Hit reply and let me know.

Cheers,
Sonya

“Memesian beauty contest” references a famous economic thought experiment called the Keynesian beauty contest. It works like this:

• A newspaper is holding a beauty pageant, judged by the general public.

• If you vote for the ultimate winner, you get a prize.

• You should not vote for the young lady who you personally find the most beautiful, unless you’re convinced that your taste matches the crowd.

• Instead, vote for the contestant who you predict will be the most popular amongst all the judges.

• In other words, your goal is to vote with the majority (or plurality, as the case may be).

There’s a game on Farcaster called Social Predictions, made by Ponder, which productizes this concept, adding a couple genius twists:

• Instead of judging a beauty contest, you’re voting in a poll, which could address any topic. (Pineapple on pizza, yay or nay? Etc.)

• Anyone can create a poll. It costs 0.50 USDC as an anti-spam measure.

• The minimum fee to vote is also 0.50 USDC, but you can opt to “stake” more as a bet that your answer will win.

• All the voters’ stakes for a given question are combined to make up the prize pool for that poll.

• If your answer is the most popular, you split the prize pool with everyone else who voted for the correct option.

• Your share of the prize pool is proportional to the percentage contributed by your stake. (More on this aspect momentarily.)

“The idea is that you’re testing your intuition about what other people think,” Ponder cofounder Colin Johnson explained in a podcast interview with Splits (available on YouTube or Spotify). Evaluating poll answers from this angle is an adjustment, so “it takes people a little bit to get there.” But once the idea clicks, their curiosity is hooked. “It's a new way to kind of flex your brain,” Colin said.

The seeming simplicity of Social Predictions is backed by clever math, particularly when it comes to betting more than 0.50 USDC. Please note: If your eyes start to glaze over while reading the following bullet points, scroll to the next section.

Okay, nerd time. Let’s say 10 people are voting in a poll about pineapple on pizza. Their votes are distributed thus:

• Four people vote nay. Three of them use the minimum 0.50 stake, but one wagers 5 USDC.

• Six people vote yay. Four of them use the minimum 0.50 stake, but one wagers 3 USDC, and one wagers 10 USDC.

• The total prize pool is 22 USDC (including the poll creator’s initial 0.50 that started the pot).

• The nay voters get nothing.

• The yay voters are each rewarded in proportion to their bet amount with respect to the sub-pool of winners’ aggregated stakes.

• The yay voters’ collective total stake was 15 USDC.

  • Minimum voters: 0.50 ÷ 15 is 3.33%, so these four each receive that percentage of the total prize pool, including the losers’ stakes. In this case, 0.033 x 22 = 0.73 USDC.

  • Meanwhile, 3 ÷ 15 is 20%, so that voter gets 0.2 x 22 = 4.4 USDC.

  • 10 ÷ 15 is 66.67%, so that voter gets 0.67 x 22 = 14.74 USDC.

• Each winner earned ~46-47% ROI on their bet amount, irrespective of size. A voter’s winnings increase linearly with respect to larger bets.

• Bet more and you’ll get more back, on an absolute basis, if you win. But your ROI percentage remains the same regardless of the sum you stake.

• For the highest possible ROI percentage, the proportion of the total prize pool contributed by the losers should be as large as possible. Meaning you want your group to win by the slimmest margin that still establishes a plurality. This is difficult to optimize in practice, but interesting to ponder (heheh).

Polls can be boosted, with additional money added to them — sponsored, effectively, by someone who’s interested in seeing the result (or by the Ponder team, to encourage usage of the app). This gives the voters considerably more leverage when placing their bets.

Worth noting: when you vote in the Social Predictions app, the interface calculates the lowest possible reward share percentage (with respect to the prize pool at the time of betting, which will change as more people vote). The app shows what your cut would be if everyone voted for the same answer as you, and thus everybody “won.” While this undersells your possible winnings, it avoids leaking information about how many votes each poll answer has received so far.

That’s the underlying math. What about the psychology?

Social Predictions fascinates me because it is a microcosm of the larger crypto ecosystem.

All the participants know how the game works. So the incentive is to seek a Schelling point — “a solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication in order to avoid coordination failure.”

For Keynes’ original beauty contest, that probably means the blondest girl with the brightest blue eyes and a high-octane Barbie smile… because stereotypes sell. Or it could be the girl with the most friends, since collusion is also effective. (Luckily, Ponder has built-in collusion protection for Social Predictions, monitoring for statistically impossible accuracy and suspiciously correlated voting behavior.)

Crypto’s memesian beauty contest functions the same as Keynes’ classic: Number go up if, and only if, you correctly guess the coin that everyone else is guessing at the same time. “People are only interested in buying the assets they think other people will want to buy in the future,” I reflected last month. The most potent meme — or the meme with a KOL cabal backing it.

This whole process is recursive people-watching. You’re observing people to see what they’ll do, so you can make your own moves accordingly. However, so are they! What they will do is also determined by what they see others doing. This situation offers a first-mover advantage to savvy mavericks who can make the crowd dance. But it’s just as easy — easier, in fact — for a bold contrarian to step into the arena, then immediately fall on their face. (He just like me fr…)

All markets offer a form of this elaborate game, including traditional venues for investment. Demand conjures supply, and risk chases reward. However, TradFi is more tethered to ostensible “fundamentals” than crypto. Value investing, this is not — at least not how the degens “in the trenches” approach things.

Amid all the froth and PvP, there is room for legitimately fun products that use crypto to create novel coordination experiences. Social Predictions is a safer microcosm of the grand battle royale; it feels more like community sociology than gambling. And the Ponder team is not done. Upcoming features include launching pools with any ERC-20 on Base — and, most hotly awaited: rewards for poll creators.

Originally published on the Splits blog.

The most recent one features Mark from First Draft Club. Which you can also watch on YouTube or Spotify. Can you be a builder without writing code? Yes, but be warned, you might kindle the urge.

Next week’s stream, on Wednesday at 2pm PT / 5pm ET, features Kayvon from Rodeo. We’ll discuss NFTs versus “cointent,” and the ongoing evolution of the web3 art market.

A controversial new feature: “Warpcast notifies you when many Farcasters are buying a token onchain.” You can opt out if you don’t like it.

“Released a public API to fetch all members of a starter pack.”

Proposal in progress: "Allow a user to authorize multiple Ethereum addresses to Sign in to Farcaster on their behalf.”

Warps are fated for an eventual sunset. (If you’re not familiar with warps already, don’t worry about it.)

The first March Farcaster dev call is up on YouTube. “Reminder that Farcaster dev calls are held every other Thu 1pm ET and cover latest changes in the ecosystem.” Good news, you are invited!

The recording of “Building Mini Apps on Farcaster” with Linda Xie and limone.eth is also on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

Basket (dot farm) launched a frame for creating shareable token indexes.

“🖼 Farcaster Miniapp Wizard (Frame v2)” on GitHub, very handy!

iPod classic in a frame, for that hit of sweet nostalgia. Apparently “this is just a fork of ipod.js, I just asked cursor to turn it into a frame!” 

"We built a frame that lets you generate imagery with Ai and post it directly to @zora as a coin.”

"i'm working on /merv, a frame-first farcaster client for power users; the goal is for it to be the primary way of consuming farcaster, but no auth or anything required: launch warpcast, then launch /merv right away as a frame.” I heard you like frames, etc.

Clanker v3.1 will debut next week with “fundamental improvements to our token infrastructure to empower creators, developers, and communities in unprecedented ways.” Details in the thread.

“Meet Crossroads: the Farcaster-native angel group, investing in and amplifying the next generation of founders.”

Mark (same one from the beginning, steward of First Draft Club) is bringing back his "UXed for it" product feedback show. You can tell he’s a writer because that pun game is unstoppable.

The Farcaster-integrated livestreaming platform Streamm now offers analytics.

Two killer builder AMAs:

• Will Warren of 0x and Matcha

• Seb Audet of Zapper

Nifty tool, Txha.sh: "Add the transaction hash to the end of the url, once a transaction is found it will automatically redirect to the correct block explorer page." Why:

If you’re building multi chain apps on testnet and mainnet environments you’ve probably [encountered] the issue where you’ve posted a tx hash into the wrong block explorer only to sit there and wonder why it’s never appearing.

That’s all for today! Hope you’re having a great weekend. As usual, if I missed anything, hit reply to share a link and scold me.

Cheers,
Sonya

Upcoming streams, both on Wednesday, 2pm PT / 5pm ET:

• 🕯 3/12: Sam from Humankind Candles will discuss running a SMB onchain — and selling a normal product to crypto people!

• 🎨 3/19: Kayvon from Rodeo will discuss the creative and commercial frontiers of cryptoart. Are micropayments here to stay?

Now on the podcast: Fffflood is defining the visual identity of the Clankerverse. Available on YouTube or Spotify 🗣

Without any further ado…

Crypto: The Game is now in a frame 👾 And here’s a starter pack of Farcaster players.

“Earn rewards for inviting users to Farcaster!” Good users, that is.

An online session focused on building Farcaster mini-apps, with Linda Xie from Merkle and Limone.eth of Builders Garden and the Just Frame It buildathon — March 11, from 11am PT / 2pm ET.

“Scout Game is a weekly global developer competition. Developers earn points by contributing to Open Source.” Available as a frame, natch.

QR coin is such a clever idea. The coin’s logo is a QR code, and a daily auction sells the right to set the link for the next 24 hours. Auction proceeds are used to buy and burn $QR. Try out the frame.

“I suppose that with 120 lines of code, my Agent is probably the most simple and basic on Farcaster today” — take a look on GitHub.

The new official Degen frame is open source.

From g8keep, a Clankerverse service: “We now support custom token launches for projects.”

Warptext is a frame to “send redeemable crypto links though text.”

Did I miss anything? Hit reply to let me know.

Cheers,
Sonya

Next on the podcast: Fffflood of Operating System and $OPSYS on transforming his web3 design agency to embrace clanking.

Upcoming livestreams:

• Mark Fishman of First Draft Club, 3/5

• Samantha of Humankind Candles, 3/12

Advanced protection is available to secure your account.

Coming soon: "Users can choose one of their wallets (warplet or another connected wallet) to be their primary wallet for the purpose of sending them stuff."

Want to run a Snapchain beta node? Get in touch.

Pods put together a playlist of interviews with the Warpcast team.

Warpcast Leaderboard Rewards are evolving. This week, in addition to Degen and Dickbutt airdropping tokens to the leaderboard, the Base Colors project gave 1/1 color NFTs to each of the top 100 users. This program has become an intriguing permissionless spin on web2 creator funds.

Speaking of which…

Incoming: "Weekly USDC rewards to builders of most used frames." Verify your frame to participate.

Hot tip: "If you are making Frames, you need to be using this debugger, and not the one provided in the official documentation."

Excellent frame updates from Paragraph:

- In-app notifications: receive notifications from newsletters you're subscribed to, directly on FC
- One-tap subscribe: subscribe to writers in-frame
- Warpcast wallet: use Warpcast wallet to support writers & collect posts 
- Discover great writing: get recommended writing, directly in-frame, based on subscriptions & who you follow on FC

Love to see it! If you're reading this post in-feed right now, using the Paragraph frame, how deliciously meta.

Buoy just shipped a v2 frame for searching Farcaster.

The SEC is cool with memecoins now, so… clank clank?!

Clanker index: $CLX offers "Clanker's top bangers in a single, simple package."

Wild milestone: "Clanker crossed $2,000,000,000 in cumulative volume this week, $20m in total revenue." Damn.

"Excited to announce that the first-ever /appcon will take place in Milan on April 7-13! An entire week dedicated to showcasing the top @ethereum apps and experiences to a non-crypto audience."

Farcaster Boston meetup next Wednesday, 3/5.

Reminder that you can always cruise through the Events.xyz homepage to see what looks fun!

To make things easier for AI agent devs, Neynar's new API lets you "put in any two user [Farcaster IDs] and get back all their past interaction history."

"EOAs are about to get superpowers." Blaine Malone demonstrates in a diagram unpacking EIP-7702.

Indexy will "make tracking crypto market verticals easier." The beta "tracks 7 indices across ETH, Base, Solana, and more chains — covering infrastructure, AI agents, L2s, and niche segments."

Follow someone new: "DM to get a personalized match to someone interesting you don't know based on index.network data."

Rainbow is hiring a graphic designer to work with the growth team.

"From Session Keys to Sub Accounts: Through the Idea Maze," blog post from Wilson Cusack of Base. Demo link. Extra deets: "The challenges I see with app accounts today."

Keep an eye out: "we're building a channel-focused farcaster client for communities" 🫂

That's all this week! Did I miss anything big? Hit reply and let me know.

Cheers,
Sonya

Also next week, on Thursday, I'll be streaming with @fffflood to discuss his clanker $OPSYS, a unique business model experiment for his design agency Operating System. If you're free, RSVP to be notified when the stream starts.

Recently uploaded to the podcast:

• Justin Ahn of Quidli on Asian ecommerce, the pros and cons of building for Slack (!), Discord, and Farcaster, and embracing the chaos of crypto — YouTube + Spotify.

• Kenny of POIDH (pics or it didn't happen 😏) on his past as a rockstar, ETH versus BTC, the virtues of simple systems, and harnessing internet culture for good — YouTube + Spotify.

This is an interesting development. Users can now pay each other for recasts, via…

• Adbot by @agostbiro. He's dogfooding the product: "I grew @adbot to a user base with 3 MILLION combined followers in 2 days with paid recasts. It cost me ~$700."

• Amps.fun, a soon-to-launch "two sided marketplace that helps casters get distribution from people in their network." Join the waitlist. Here's a rundown from @jacy.

Zapper API supports Farcaster profiles, "a single query that unlocks the onchain world." Neat: "query by FID or username, then use the addresses to get transactionHistory, portfolio, etc."

Safe multisigs, how do they even: "Here's a flowchart breaking down how child multisigs can approve transactions on a parent multisig using onchain approvals."

Demo of hooking up Index Supply to Daimo. Detailed rundown on GitHub.

"Open-sourcing the Moxie AI agent skills repo. Anyone can start building their own skills."

There are a couple more dev-relevant links in the Frames section 👇

Tutorial for building onchain frames. And a debugging guide.

The "Are you a reply guy?" quiz is open-source, thanks @jc4p!

New frame for the Base Colors project.

"Distribution markets let you bet on ANY value and win within a range of your choice," interesting.

The Payflow frame supports Warpcast wallets (ahem, warplets). "This is especially handy to send out tokens not accessible/shown in warplet, or funding it with your other wallets!"

The "simplest version" of a TikTok-style feed of videos on Farcaster.

Prototype of Bankr "wallet mode," so you can "use bankr + natural language to manage your existing wallets."

"Coming April 18-20, Clankercon is a based metaverse convention" that will undoubtedly spawn even more clankers.

"Just shipped SomeoneBuild.fun, a Reddit-style explorer for the /someone-build channel," with Bountycaster integrated.

"Posts on Zora are now instantly tradable coins." To understand why, "Listen to @jacob discuss the philosophy behind the newest version of Zora — 'a coin for every piece of content' on Dialectic Ep. 9."

"Warpcast will remove 'likely to be spam' accounts from follow counts soon."

FarCon organizers are "raising 1 ETH from the Farcaster community to reimburse creators and artists."

Farcaster darling @tinyrainboot shared the gallery for her upcoming 3D collection even the devil once had wings. Minting opens tomorrow (Saturday). + @benna's thoughts on building the custom website.

"100k $higher will be distributed to participants" who post memes and art in the /higher channel this week.

Moshicam adopted Privy: "every new user will get an embedded wallet behind the scenes, it's invisible until they need to know."

That's all for this week! Did I miss anything? Hit reply to let me know.

Cheers,
Sonya