A Bicycle for the Mind

Steve Jobs had a way of explaining complex technology in simple words.

In a 1990 interview, he recalled an article that compared how much energy different species used to move. The condor came first. Humans finished far down the list.

Then someone tested a human riding a bicycle. The human did not just beat the condor. It blew it off the chart.

Jobs used the story to make a larger point: humans build tools that amplify our natural abilities. The personal computer, to him, was a bicycle for the mind.

Since the Apple I launched in 1976, computers have transformed almost every part of our lives. But the relationship remained unchanged.

The computer helped us do the work. The human was still on the driving seat.

AI Gets Hands

When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, it felt like we had gotten our first real look at intelligence sitting inside a chat window.

You typed a prompt, watched it generate an answer, and then carried that answer to wherever the actual work happened. You copied the code into an editor, moved the text into a document, checked the facts, fixed the mistakes, and decided what to do next. Until you entered another prompt, the system remained idle.

Then models started getting access to the tools we used for work. They could read files, search the web, query databases, call APIs, use browsers, and run commands in a terminal.

The AI had acquired hands.

Frameworks such as OpenClaw make the next stage easier to understand. An agent can have its own workspace, memory, tools, and the ability to run tasks in the background. Instead of responding to one prompt, it can take an objective, act on it, observe what happened, correct its approach, and continue.

This changes the role of the human. We define the objective, provide the context, decide what the agent is allowed to do, and review important decisions. The agent handles more of the execution.

A chatbot waits for the next prompt. An agent continues to work even as you sleep.

The Age of Self-Driving Software

For most of its history, business software was designed around a function.

Salesforce and HubSpot helped sales teams manage customers. Shopify and Webflow helped businesses build websites and sell online. PostHog helped product teams understand how people used their products. Visual Studio and JetBrains IDEs helped developers write, test, and debug code.

These products transformed how companies operated. But they were still passive.

A CRM stored sales activity, but a salesperson had to update it and follow up with the customer. An analytics platform showed where users were dropping off, but a product manager had to investigate the problem and ask an engineer to fix it. An IDE helped a developer write code, but the developer still decided and executed every step.

A new generation of software is beginning to close these loops. The software is moving from helping us perform a job to taking responsibility of the job itself.

Visual Studio → Cursor → Devin & Vorflux

Integrated development environments such as Visual Studio and JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA brought writing, testing, debugging, and navigating code into one place. They made developers much more productive, but the developer remained responsible for every change.

Cursor and Windsurf put AI at the centre of the development environment. The agent could understand the codebase, edit multiple files, run commands, inspect errors, and revise its work. Instead of writing every line of code, the developer could describe what they wanted to build.

The developer was still sitting inside the editor and guiding the work, but now there was an agent working beside them.

Both Cursor and Windsurf have since added cloud agents that can work more autonomously.

Devin and Vorflux took this further. You can assign them a software problem much like you would assign a ticket to an engineer. The agent plans the work, writes the code, runs tests on its own machine, fixes errors, and returns a pull request.

The interface is no longer limited to an editor. It is increasingly becoming a task queue.

Visual Studio helped developers write code. Cursor allowed developers to build with an agent. Devin and Vorflux allow parts of software development to be delegated to the agent.

Webflow → Ploy

Webflow made it possible for designers and marketing teams to build professional websites without writing custom code.

But the human still had to decide which pages to create, write the copy, monitor traffic, study competitors, check search rankings, and make every improvement.

Ploy approaches the website as an active system. It can learn the company’s brand and design system, draft and publish pages, monitor traffic and search performance, track competitors, and prepare the next set of improvements.

The team continues to set the goals and approve important changes. But the software keeps watching what is happening and finding the next piece of work.

Webflow made website building visual. Ploy is beginning to turn website management into something that can be delegated.

PostHog: From Analytics to Action

PostHog started as a platform that helped teams understand and improve their products.

It tracked how users behaved, replayed sessions, monitored errors and performance, ran surveys, and managed feature flags and experiments. It gave teams the evidence they needed to build a better product.

The team still had to interpret that evidence and act on it.

PostHog’s new self-driving product functionality begins to close this loop. It watches product signals such as errors and session replays, groups related signals into a problem, investigates the code, prepares a fix, and opens a pull request.

A human still reviews and merges the change. PostHog then measures what happened after the fix, creating another signal for the system to learn from.

The earlier version told you what happened. The new version can begin changing what happens next.

From Interfaces to Objectives

Coding, websites, sales, and product analytics may look like different software categories. But the same underlying transition is happening across all of them.

Traditional software was organised around an interface. Every business function had its own application, and employees spent their days visiting these applications, entering information, clicking buttons, and moving work from one system to another.

Agentic software is increasingly organised around an objective.

Instead of learning how to operate every part of the software, you tell it what you want to accomplish. The software decides which tools to use and which steps to take within the permissions and guardrails you provide.

This will likely change the business model of software as well. SaaS companies traditionally charged per seat because every seat represented a human operating the product. If the software starts performing the work, the natural unit of value may become the task completed, the problem resolved, or the business outcome delivered.

We are still in the early days. Agents make mistakes. They need good context, clear permissions, carefully designed feedback loops, and human review. Many products being described as autonomous today still need considerable supervision.

But the direction is becoming clear.

For fifty years, the computer amplified human effort. It made us faster, more capable, and more efficient, but it waited for us to keep the work moving.

Agents do not remove the human. They move us one level up. We choose the destination, define the constraints, and make the difficult trade-offs. The software handles more of the journey.

The bicycle for the mind is evolving into a self-driving rocketship.

The 2024 US elections were the inflection point when they called the outcome ahead of mainstream media and captured global attention. Since then, volumes have grown 225x, proving every doubter who thought it was a one time phenomenon wrong.

But what feels new is actually a revival. Prediction Markets have been around for centuries now.

What are Prediction Markets

Prediction markets are markets where people trade on whether a specific future event will happen or not. People stake money on outcomes they believe will come true. At scale, these bets start reflecting the probability of the different outcomes.

Prediction markets can be created around almost anything with a clear outcome and timeline. In crypto, they might ask whether BTC will cross $70K by a certain date or if a token’s market cap will hit $1B. In tech, markets can form around product launches, IPOs, or major releases. Culture and internet trends show up as bets on whether a creator will hit a milestone in number of followers or if a movie will cross a revenue mark. Sports markets focus on match outcomes, player performance, or tournament winners.

Skeptics dismiss prediction markets as gambling or speculation. The way I see it is that some forms of speculation are more useful than others. Prediction markets create incentives for people to put money behind their views, which leads to more honest signals about how the future might play out. In a world where most information on social media is noise, marketing, or disguised opinion, prediction markets offer a clearer, more grounded sense of what people actually believe will happen.

The Origins of Prediction Markets

One of the earliest recorded instances of prediction markets on political events was around papal elections in 1503. Even then, it was described as an "old practice".

The 1503 Papal election and its associated prediction markets bear a striking resemblance to the dynamics of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election in the sense that how the markets were able uncover an outcome that didn't seem likely in first glance. The market was facilitated by Roman Banking Houses who acted as bookmakers offering odds. Bankers often formed partnerships with cardinals' attendants who were inside the conclave. These attendants would leak private information regarding voting tallies to the merchants and bankers

The main contenders in the election were Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, and Cardinal Georges d’Amboise. The market had Cardinal Piccolomini as the favorite with 2X better odds.

As the voting started, Cardinal Piccolomini was trailing with 4 votes to 13 for d’Amboise and 15 for della Rovere. However, in a surprising turn of events, as the election ran into a standstill, Cardinal d’Amboise threw his support behind Cardinal Piccolomini who became Pope Pius III proving the bookmakers right.

Why what happened happened

The 1503 election of Pope Pius III was defined by a stalemate between the French faction, led by Cardinal d’Amboise, and the Italian interest, led by della Rovere. Realizing neither could secure a majority, the opposing sides pivoted to Piccolomini as a "compromise candidate" to prevent their rivals from gaining total control. Piccolomini was seen as a safe, neutral choice, largely because his failing health suggested he would be a short-term placeholder. This shift effectively "paused" the political conflict.

By the 19th century, prediction markets had spread across Europe and the United States. People were actively betting on parliamentary outcomes, royal succession, and even wars.

But a clear pattern started to emerge. Whenever these markets grew, they faced pushback. The Catholic Church tried to curb betting on papal elections, and governments across countries began cracking down on them as well.

The Early Modern Era

Prediction markets saw a revival in the late 20th century, mostly in controlled environments within academia, corporate, and defence research. Researchers at University of Iowa founded the Iowa Electronic Markets back in 1988. IEM allowed people to buy contracts on events ranging from political events such as US Presidential Elections to Fed Funds Rates. In the 2008 US election IEM predicted the final vote count to within half a percentage point. IEM never attempted to scale beyond its research purpose. It operates under a special understanding with CFTC where the maximum amount a user could participate with in a market was capped at $500.

In July 2003, DARPA, the US Defence Think Tank, proposed the Policy Analysis Market, an initiative designed to trade in geopolitical risk to determine if such markets could help predict future events like civil stability, economic health, and military disposition. The project intended to offer contracts based on specific indicators, such as the growth of a country’s non-oil output or potential military withdrawals. However, a major political controversy ensued, with critics labeling the program "terrorism futures". Due to the intense public and political backlash, the proposal was dropped. Ironically, the predictive power of these markets was demonstrated when an offshore betting exchange accurately forecasted the resignation of DARPA’s head.

Technology Companies such as HP, Google, and Siemens experimented with prediction markets internally to forecast sales, project completion, and OKR accomplishment. Employees could trade on questions like product launch timelines, sales targets, or project completion dates. Because participants often had direct knowledge of what was happening on the ground, these markets were able to surface more accurate and real-time signals than traditional reporting or top-down forecasts. In many cases, they outperformed internal estimates and expert opinions. However, these markets were limited to employees within the company, and while useful for decision-making, they never extended beyond internal use.

Intrade arguably was the first modern attempt at Prediction Markets that gained broad adoption. Founded by by Ron Bernstein and Sean McNamara in 1999, it allowed users to trade on a myriad of events ranging from elections to weather. It was incorporated in Ireland and was able to bypass regulatory hurdles. Similar to how Polymarket and Kalshi gained traction during the 2024 US elections, Intrade saw its breakout moment during the 2008 US elections. In 2008, John Delaney, wrote a letter to CFTC seeking clarification on their regulatory stance

While Intrade serves a global community and has registered members from 162 countries, our 82,000 plus membership are predominantly resident in the United States ... it is perversely unclear as to whether Intrade, and indeed myself, are considered persona gratis by the United States.

In 2012 US Elections, Intrade reached a peak of million of monthly visitors. By 2013, combined with legal pressure and internal issues, the platform shut down, cutting short what was the first real attempt at scaling prediction markets on the internet.

Augur: The First Attempt at Decentralized Prediction Markets

The Ethereum Whitepaper was published in 2013. One the applications that Vitalik proposed in it was Prediction Markets.

Prediction markets. Provided an oracle or SchellingCoin, prediction markets are also easy to implement, and prediction markets together with SchellingCoin may prove to be the first mainstream application of futarchy as a governance protocol for decentralized organizations.

Augur was conceived in 2014 and ICOed in 2015 raising $5 Million and distributing its native Reputation (REP) tokens. After a beta in 2016, the protocol went live on Ethereum Mainnet in 2018. Augur allowed anyone to create markets on any question, with outcomes determined by crowdsourced reporting from REP holders. As a pioneer in the space, Augur faced almost every challenge that a decentralized prediction market could.

The first version of Augur was a full fledged Ethereum Node Client that users had to install on their computers. The app itself would take hours to launch. Trading on Augur v1 involved an order-book model and required multiple transactions (e.g. buying complete sets of outcome shares), incurring high Ethereum gas fees. The experience was clunky.

That wasn't the only challenge. With in weeks of launch, multiple "assassination markets" had cropped and the decentralized nature of Augur meant that the community was divided on how to address them.

A flaw in how markets were invalidated allowed market creators to exploit market participants. Scammers create markets with unclear questions. They placed small bets on unlikely outcomes to make the market look real. Then they sold shares in the more likely outcome to other users.Once enough money came in, people would notice and vote the market as invalid. The money in the market however was split evenly.

These hurdles meant that by 2019, activity on Augur had stagnated, and many markets had little to no liquidity.

Augur V2 went live just in time for the US 2020 Elections. For a brief period, it felt that it could all work out. However, after the end of the elections, usage cratered. Augur attempted a new release called Turbo, this time on Polygon, to take advantage of lower gas fees. However, the tides had turned by then.

The Rise of Polymarket and Kalshi

Polymarket and Kalshi are the two giants of prediction markets today. What’s interesting is how different their paths have been.

Kalshi was founded in 2018 and chose the regulated route from day one. It spent years working with the CFTC to get approval before even launching. This meant slow progress, but strong legitimacy. At one point, Kalshi sued the CFTC to list markets on US presidential elections, arguing that these are valid financial events people should be able to trade on.

Polymarket, founded in 2020, took the opposite approach. It went crypto-native and launched on Polygon, allowing users globally to trade on real-world events using stablecoins. This gave it speed and flexibility. Markets could be launched quickly and participation wasn’t restricted to the US. But this path came with its own challenges. In 2022, Polymarket was fined by the CFTC and had to block US users.

Both approaches worked, in different ways. Today, both are doing billions in monthly volume. Kalshi has seen strong traction in sports markets, which make up a large part of its volume, while Polymarket is more balanced across politics, crypto, and global events.

Like in previous cycles, the 2024 US Presidential Elections marked a turning point. But it wasn’t just about the surge in trading volumes. September, 2023 - Polymarket launched a market speculating President Joe Biden dropping out of the race. The initial months saw the odds of that happening hover around 22.5%.

With time, the odds started climbing. In July, 2021 despited Biden explicitly saying that he would be in the race, the odds stayed at 66%.

Joe Biden

@JoeBiden

Let me say this as clearly as I can:

I’m the sitting President of the United States.

I’m the nominee of the Democratic party.

I’m staying in the race.

167.6K

1:07 • 6 Jul 2024

2 weeks later, Biden announced dropping out of the race. The theme repeated again as the conventional polls suggested that elections were going to be close with Kamala Harris in lead where as Prediction Markets such as Polymarket had Trump in lead. When elections finally concluded and Trump was elected as the next president, the world took notice. The crowds saw it coming before the experts did.

A Cambrian Explosion

The success of Polymarket and Kalshi has triggered a surge of new prediction market startups and tools. From the outside, it may look like the category is already figured out and heading toward maturity.

Prediction markets are already on a run rate of over $250B in annual volume in 2026. But most of this activity is concentrated in a small set of markets. On Polymarket, for example, there may be ~12K open markets at any time, but only about 1K of them drive more than half the volume.

The user base is still small, with around 1–2 million transacting users.

This is not a mature market. It’s just getting started.

Top 7 Crypto | Analytics & Alpha

@top7ico

Prediction Markets Landscape 

Prediction markets driven by @Polymarket and @Kalshi went from a niche crypto products to one of the hottest sectors in finance in under 12 months. DeFi natives, regulated exchanges, AI-powered and sports-focused platforms – the landscape is way

148

22:45 • 27 Mar 2026

There are three broad themes emerging in prediction markets today.

First is scaling supply. Prediction markets are an infinite canvas. But even with around 12K open markets today, it barely scratches the surface of all the questions humanity has about the future. New products are focused on increasing the number of markets. Some are going vertical, like Noise exploring social trend markets and Limitless focusing on short-duration price markets. Others are pushing toward permissionless creation, like Context Markets where anyone can create a market. At the infrastructure level, teams like Melee Markets are working on new AMMs to better support long-tail markets. The idea is simple: more markets means better coverage of reality.

Second is scaling demand. It’s not just about creating markets, but getting more people to participate. Products are rethinking the experience. Pred.app is making prediction markets feel like trading apps, especially for sports. Kash.Bot lets users participate directly from social feeds. Instead of asking users to come to a trading app, these products are bringing markets to where users already are. The focus is on making participation easier and more natural. Gondor.fi is building DeFi primitives like lending and borrowing on Prediction Market positions to improve capital efficiency.

Third is aggregating and improving trading. As markets spread across platforms, tools are emerging to bring everything together. These tools help users discover markets across platforms, compare prices, and trade more efficiently. This is similar to what happened in crypto, where aggregation became important once liquidity fragmented. The goal here is to make trading simpler, faster, and more efficient across the ecosystem. Fireplace and Tradefox are two players working towards this.

The road ahead

One idea I keep coming back to is this: prediction markets as an oracle for the internet.

Today, most of what we see on social media is noise and propaganda. Opinions, narratives, and incentives to say what sounds good and gets you the clicks, not what is true. Prediction markets flip that. They force people to put skin in the game and express what they actually believe will happen.

Instead of scrolling through endless takes, you get a probability and instead of narratives, you get a price.

The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed

The Genesis Block

I discovered crypto in 2017. But for the most part, I stayed on the sidelines watching passively as the space evolved. It wasn’t until the summer of 2021 that I really looked.

I still remember the feeling. It felt magical then; setting up a self-custody wallet, swapping on Uniswap, depositing ETH into Aave and taking out a loan, minting my first NFT on Rarible and paying $200 in gas. I found two ideas specifically incredibly powerful; the freedom to build on an open, permission-less network and the fact you held sovereignty over your assets .

Later that year, I quit my job and raised a seed round to start building in crypto full-time. I had spent endless hours and nights diving deep into trenches and had this thesis that DeFi was going to change the world. But we need to simplify the UX to make it usable for normal people.

Today, I think crypto adoption isn’t blocked by UX alone.. It is lack of useful products. We keep comparing current state of crypto with early days of Internet. But we miss an important detail. Even when the internet was slow and clunky, it was still growing fast because it was obviously useful.

Early Years: 2021-22

The first product we built was Brew Money - a simple app that helped you earn yield on your crypto through DeFi.

This was peak bull market. Bitcoin had hit new highs. Millions of people across the world parked billions of dollars worth crypto in centralized platforms like BlockFi, Celsius, and more to earn yield.

These platforms were opaque. The yields were attractive, but the users were not aware of the risks involved. Our belief was that DeFi offered a safer, more transparent alternative. *

We were directionally right, but not entirely. Billions are lost to DeFi hacks and exploits. The difference is the risks are visible and onchain.

We launched the Private Beta in Feb, 2022. We had built an iOS app that was dead simple to use. A user could in matter of taps move funds from their bank account into an Aave USDC pool and start earning yield. And we did all of this while keeping the app non-custodial.

The big challenge was onboarding. Fiat-to-crypto remains one of the hardest parts of the stack. We spent the next few months improving the onramp experience with our partner, adding more protocols onto the app, and ironing out early product quirks. We also built something really cool where people could move their funds between protocols in a matter of taps.

May, 2022: Tera Luna happened.

US Terra was an algorithmic stable coin that maintained its peg backed by the LUNA token . At its peak, the market cap of LUNA and UST was $40 Billion. It all crashed to 0 in a span of 3 days.

At that point we had a small number of users testing the app on a Beta Testflight Version and few thousands on the waitlist. We were working towards launching the app on App Store. But the world had changed. I just did not realize it back then.

I was looking back at the deck I was using to raise a round then. I had a slide on the competitive landscape with around 8 competitors. 6 of them don't exist any more. 1 has pivoted and still trying to find PMF. 1 survived but has shifted focus towards serving institutions. (which I think was a very smart move)

The next few months were brutal. A series of CeFi platforms including BlockFi and Celsius filed for bankruptcy. Growth stalled. We were having a hard time converting people even on our waitlist.

Then November came. FTX collapsed. What was supposed to be one of the shining stars of the cycle filed for bankruptcy.

I ignored what was happening in the market and we kept grinding.

In December, we launched publicly on Product Hunt. We did everything “right.” The app was pixel-perfect. The tagline "Earn with self-custody" felt earned.

Brew finished #3 Product of the Day. It felt good.

However, we added single-digit new users.

It was clear that what we had was not working or the market for it didn't exist anymore.

I believed a well-crafted product would find its users. Our underlying thesis about the risks Ce-Fi entailed had come true. What I hadn't internalized though was markets don't care about your craft and beliefs during a macro shift.

The Search for a New Quest: H1 2023

December 2022 was a dark. ChatGPT had just launched, and many crypto builders I knew pivoted to AI. Some did well too.

We had a bunch of ideas, but they were vague and we didn’t have a clear next step. A CRM for DeFi protocols. A Uniswap for staked assets. A full-fledged EVM wallet, because we hated every wallet back then. Some of them were good ideas, but I couldn’t build conviction. The common thread was a decision to focus only on crypto natives. With the bear market setting in, it felt like only the believers would remain.

This wasn't wrong. What I underestimated though was how much we still had to learn. Brew had been built for a crypto-adjacent audience, and by going deeper into crypto native users, we were stepping into an entirely new world.

I was going through my monthly updates and this was the note I sent across on Dec, 2022.

We think a product like Brew that helps users earn yield on their crypto with self custody is something that is going to be difficult to grow in current market conditions. We remain bullish on crypto overall. Uniswap is still seeing 130K new traders every month, Lido is growing 10% month on month and will probably grow even faster once the Shanghai upgrade goes live in March, and about 300K consumers still buy NFTs on Opensea every month.

Even in the midst of what felt like a start of a long crypto winter, I was intrigued by what the dune dashboard for Opensea showed me. While trying to find out a space that still had significant user activity, I chose NFTs, probably right at the top.

Dawn: An NFT Instagram

Opensea was the go to NFT marketplace, Twitter had launched NFT Profile pics (the cool pentagon container), and Instagram allowed NFT posts back then. The thing that felt a bit weird was for a visual artwork, the primary mode of discovery was crypto twitter.

Our hypothesis was that a visually native social platform could become the discovery layer for NFTs. I had just joined Farcaster then. I shared a Figma prototype, dwr recasted it, and the responses felt encouraging.

This was February 9, 2023. Two weeks later we shipped an MVP as an iOS App on Testflight. I enthusiastically casted about it. I got zero response.

Nobody installed the app. Nobody replied. Nobody even liked the cast.

At this point, farcaster was a tiny tiny network. It was just a bunch of people who hanged out together online and dwr was still manually onboarding users.

It was a little perplexing considering the enthusiasm we had received two weeks earlier. I took it as a sign that this was one of those things that people say they want when in reality it is an optional vitamin supplement for their life. Also looking back today, I feel it is entirely possible that most people took me for a sketchy crypto hacker out to steal their private keys. (I was a new user with few frens)

Tasseo: Web3 CRM & Analytics for Crypto Artists

Somewhere between mid-Feb and end of Match, we stumbled upon an interesting little corner of Crypto - the crypto art space. NFTs had for the first time enabled digital visual artists to monetize their creations.

An excerpt from a memo I wrote back then on Crypto Art and Open Editions.

The State of NFT Market
The NFT market cap is estimated at $11-15B, with Crypto Art accounting for 10%. Although not fully representative, Opensea and Blur's secondary sales show signs of recovery with weekly trading volumes at $750M, 50% of its peak in 2022. Amidst the slowdown though, a new phenomenon of Open , Timed , and Limited Edition NFTs have seen explosive growth in the last 6 months.

Manifold, a no code tool that allows creators to release open edition drops has seen a growth of 200% to 300% month over month. ~5K artists used Manifold to launch editions in January up from ~2900 in December. (February has been a flat month though) e.g. You can see a timed edition by Amber Vittoria here. She made close to $150K last year from different kinds of editions.

Editions enable collectors to get exposure to artist’s work at a lower price point. The tradeoff artists make is that editions typically will have lower price appreciation. In return they get access to a larger collector base, some of whom can level up to higher price points 1/1 in the future.

Mehul wrote a series of scripts and Dune queries to generate detailed reports for artists. They took hours to put together and we DMed them to artists we believed would find them useful.

I made a classic mistake highlighted in the book The Mom Test: I confused polite encouragement with real demand for something people actually want.

The next month, we again generated a bunch of reports and shared them across. We would get public shoutouts, rave reviews on these reports, people were seeing insights and learning things about their work and collectors they had never known. But there was no inclination to pay.

One thing was clear to us. Just showing insights were not enough. We needed to offer something that could have a tangible impact in their lives.

Tasseo: A Web3 Patreon

We got the idea of a web3 patreon from a program that Sabet had run. He launched a economically priced open edition called X-Ray. Holders would get to mint a free artwork every month for the next 12 months. Over 800 people minted XRay & in under 3 months, it has already generated a secondary volume of 22 ETH.

Our goal was to help artists earn predictable income by launching programs like these for their community. What Sabet had done with a set of available tools, we wanted to productivize that and give a unified experience both to the artist and their collectors.

There was one problem. We didn't have a customer.

Looking for 1000 True Fans: 2023-24

After building in crypto for over 18 months, I decided to attend our first conference. We had a direction but we didn't know the next step. I was hoping to unlock that.

The Non-Fungible Conference was happening in less than a month in Lisbon and a lot of artists whom we admired or had some relationship with were planning to be there.

I've mixed feelings from the visit itself.

The event itself was breathtaking. It was hosted in the Pavilhão Carlos Lopes.

You had digital artworks displayed on massive screens and interesting panel discussions. People were hopping in and out of the main event and going through a lot of side events and parties.

A lot of them I couldn't make sense of. You had people going into these side events, having a good time, and getting out without a clue who sponsored the event and what they did.

I did get to meet a lot of artists. I just didn't think it was as impactful as I would have liked. Our goal was to close at least one artist willing to work with us.

I didn't have that.

A Ray of Hope

I had had one conversation that had stood out . A Danish artist, CustomHorror had found our idea interesting. After returning back to India, we set up a call with him. It took a few weeks but he eventually agreed to work with us.

CustomHorror launched a 3 months program called Moments. Holders of the reMEMBER Pass would get access to 6 free editions plus an exclusive access to participate in 1/1 auctions. During a time when art sales had dried up pretty badly Custom was able to generate a total earning of around ~$4000.

That wasn't the only thing though I think in some ways it did help him bring his community together at a time when things were getting really tough in the crypto art space.

We spent incredible amount of time planning and executing the program. For that one whole month, the only goal we had was to ensure Custom succeeds with this program.

It seemed we had managed to make that happen.

The Grind to Scale

We had assumed considering the outcome we would be able to onboard more artists quickly. I massively underestimated the effort that would go into convince artists and to launch a successful program.

We signed up a bunch of artists. But a lot of them dropped off mid way. Considering the market had been bad for a year now, the general sentiment was pessimistic and artists assumed that a program like this could only work for larger artists. Second, by design, these programs were high effort, high outcome. This meant artists preferred something that was simpler to experiment with.

We launched only 3 more programs over the next 8 months.

The Micro Pivot to Editions++

In early 2024, two things happened. Farcaster started growing rapidly. Around the same time, Base, a Layer-2 chain launched by Coinbase began gaining traction.

To address the issues we’d seen in the earlier version, we made three changes:

• Shortened the program duration to just two weeks

• Moved the app to Base to reduce gas costs

• Used Farcaster as the primary demand engine

Then things started to shift. It had taken us months to ship four programs. We were now launching 4 in a single week. That year, we went back to the Non-Fungible Conference. The response to the product was strong, but it stood in sharp contrast to the mood on the ground, which was bleak.

Many of the artists I’d met the year before didn’t show up.

The highlight of the trip was meeting Ev. He was the founder of 500px, an A16Z backed photography platform that, at its peak, was the default home for professional photographers. He had entered crypto a few years earlier and had built and scaled Sloika, an NFT marketplace focused on photography, to millions of dollars in volume.

His advice was blunt: the market was shrinking, and in his view, already dead.I had seen the same trend in the data on Dune.

However, I had this naive belief that Base could reverse the downtrend.

The high point was launching a program that was a collaboration between 4 artists across the world - Customhorror, Ava, Swrks, and Peter and curated by Edward who was previously the Community Lead at the OG Crypto Art Platform, Knownorigin (acquired by eBay). Over 100 people showed up to be part of this journey.

This actually helped me understand more deeply one of the super powers of crypto. Crypto excels in aggregating liquidity from all over the world.

The Reckoning

We managed to grow volumes month on month for six straight months. Still, I could feel a reckoning coming. I had pivoted from Brew two years earlier in search of a larger market that still had life. Instead, I found myself in a small niche nested inside a shrinking corner of crypto.

In October,2024 I decided to wind down Tasseo. The team was down to four people, including me. My co-founder, Mehul, had moved on earlier that year.

We gave everyone time and space to find their next role. I met our lead investors soon after. Both were kind. One advised me to take a break. The other reminded me, gently, that the opportunity cost was very high.

I hate giving up. But sometimes choosing closure over persistence can open doors. at that point, I wasn't sure what I would do next. I just knew that I wanted to continue building in crypto.

I still have fond memories from our time building Tasseo. People paid their bills and rents. One artist took his family on a vacation to Japan. For a brief moment, we were able to help people pursue their passion.

Building for the joy of building: 2024-25

I met Puneet through a close friend . It was fortuitous that he reached out when I was in tail end of my journey. He helped out with Tasseo towards the end. We both wanted to build in crypto and decided to team together in search of something meaningful to build.

Clanker Live

In November, 2024 proxystudio and Jack Dishman launched Clanker on Farcaster.

Clanker is a token bot that enabled you to launch a token right from the farcaster social feed on Base. It was a very very interesting approach. Note that at that time Solana had pump.fun which was driving like a massive amount of trading volume.

The next few days were crazy with thousands of people going berserk launching tokens every day. Puneet and I for a moment forgot about our original quest to build something and jumped into the trenches trading clankers.

The amount of clankers that were getting launched made it difficult to identify ones that had potential.

This is when Puneet and I built Clanker Live along with generous help from another fren.

We shipped this with in 2 weeks of Clanker launching. A bunch of people started using this. Proxy himself dropped a DM and shared some encouraging words.

I don't think Proxy realized the significance of his words then, but at that point in time, and the state of mind I was in, it did feel nice to be seen.

In December, 2024 I flew to Delhi. Puneet and I met in person for the first time to sketch out our next steps. There was one insight we had run into. While Solana had advanced trading terminals like Photon, BullX, and later Axiom Trade, Base being a new ecosystem still didn't have any power tools for trading.

We decided to build the Photon for Base.

Photon is a Solana-native trading terminal built for speed, with real-time charts, swaps, and wallet tracking in one interface. It also offers power features like limit orders, stop-losses, and advanced execution tools for active traders.

We also did an exercise where we reached out to around 100+ folks on farcaster to get their inputs on how they trade. Quite a few of them replied. We published our learnings here: https://paragraph.com/@rch/how-farcaster-trades

Reconnect

This was an detour I took to learn React.

Also, this was the only app that I built completely on my own in 2025. I had last written production code almost 10 years back. In January of 2025, I picked up a course on React and completed it. I wanted to practise my new-found skills coupled with the super-power you got from new age AI tools like cursor.

Reconnect was a farcaster mini app that showed you frens you had lost touch with. On frontend, I used React + Vite and on backend I just wrote a dune query. It was very slow, had one active user, me. But it was incredibly fun to build.

Dune is a crypto analytics platform that lets anyone query on-chain data with SQL and turn it into public, shareable dashboards.

Clanker Ranker

While I was honing my frontend skills, Puneet was building out a solid backend for the trading terminal we had in mind. We didn’t want to ship something with no user feedback. So we chose to launch a simple mini app first to get attention and build a waitlist.

Clanker Ranker showed the Clanker Tokens that you were top holders of and generated a (badly designed) banner to stan your holdings.

I think we got like 10 people who signed up, 2 of them were Puneet and I.

Baseedge

3 months into 2025, Baseedge was slowly coming together. We had a tool that we were using internally to run our own trades. We could set exit rules such as stop loss, laddered profits, and trailing stop loss (something senpi calls dynamic stop loss). Moreover, we had built a simulation environment where we could write python script to simulate how these rules would have worked over a test date range.

But we were still far from launching a user facing product.

Baseedge Trade Simulator

In search of user feedback, we launched a web app that showed users the amount of additional money they could have made or saved, had they had an automated trading strategy in place.

I found it incredibly interesting. No one else did.

It sucked. I thought that I had done a bad job in distribution and coded a farcaster mini app just to see if that would get us more eyeballs. It didn't.

Baseedge: trade simulator++

There was one thing that had stood out though. I don't recall who and where but someone remarked how they didn't know that they had made a bag on a token months back. They didn't talk about how much they could have saved or could have made more.

I think I had enjoyed the feeling ot building just for the sake of building. But we were approaching the second half of 2025. We both wanted something more.

So, we took the one thing that showed any sign of working and turned that into a mini app. It did just one thing. It showed you your top win and biggest L.

Puneet shared the app with Ted and Saxena Saheb. Both were kind enough to share it on farcaster. And then something weird enough. The mini app with an unimaginative name kind of went a little viral.

People looked at their best wins with nostalgia and their biggest Ls with kind of amusement. The App broken into top 50 mini apps leaderboard on farcaster for a day or so. At its peak, there was someone sharing their stats every 30 seconds.

The hype stayed for 2 days and then like most shiny things in crypto it died.

Virality is critical for consumer apps. We had moments of virality, but nothing truly goes viral unless the k-factor is above 1. Another learning was that virality doesn’t compound without a critical mass of users. That likely explains why this app got some attention, unlike our earlier mini apps.

The Clankline: A Leaderboard for Clanker Token Traders

The previous app gave users little reason to come back. It had a one-time novelty, but no sustainable pull. Once again, we looked to users for the next step.

We had built a leaderboard as a small add-on feature. A surprising number of users called it out. Sometime back, Farcaster itself had launched its native weekly leaderboard, ranking users by engagement and paying top performers in USDC. I found myself checking it multiple times a day. There were users who were sharing screenshots of their ranks. The behavior was obvious.

Launching Ver 1.0

We set out to build a weekly leaderboard for traders holding and trading tokens launched via the Clanker launchpad. Rankings were based on weekly PnL%, weighted by trade size and holdings. We normalized the impact so that a $1,000 profit didn’t automatically score 10× more points than a $100 profit. We wanted to reward people for their skills and not necessarily size.

We also put in more work in planning the launch of the app. We took inputs on the product from the Clanker team and a bunch of frens from Farcaster.

The first version was very simple. People could check their rank, their streak on the app, and share their rank. Plus there was a leaderboard showing a global rank for the week. A highpoint of this part of the journey was finishing a week among the top 100 mini apps on the Farcaster Dev Leaderboard. I had spent a year reviewing and using mini apps in the top 100. This was the first time we had built something that landed in top 100.

The whole app was built on a hypothesis that people would be interested in tracking their trading rank on a weekly basis.

It worked for a while.

Utility x Vanity

Some things expand your abilities. They quietly make you more powerful. That’s utility. Other things expand your ego. They give you a kick. That’s vanity.

The first version of Clankline over indexed on the vanity axis. People would look at their ranks and share their ranks. But there wasn't much to do beyond that.

We started adding more utilitarian features to the app. We started showing folks their Clanker Portfolio i.e. the list of Clanker launched tokens they held and their PnL position on them. We showed folks trending Clanker tokens which was in a way a relaunch of the Clanker Live functionality just with a better UI and more insights. We had shipped a leaderboard and now we were shipping tools to help people ace that leaderboard.

At some point we added the feature where people could buy and sell using the mini app sdk swap feature. I was curious how many people would transact based on the information we were showing them.

In 2 weeks we got 3 transactions.

Stuck in a Limbo

When we launched The Clankline, we had set a goal of 1000 DAUs and 100 Transacting Users with in 2 weeks of launch. We were two months in without the goal in the sight.

Our DAU had stabilized between 50-100 people with hardly any transacting users.

We were going with the motions, keeping the product alive, making some incremental changes but we were stuck.

Action produces information

I should give credit where credit is due. It was Puneet's idea to try something new. We built a simple voting app that simulated a Prediction Market. Users could come in and vote YES or NO on a token hitting a certain MCAP by a certain time. People who got it right won additional points that helped them rank higher on the leaderboard.

Will Bracky's Marketcap be higher than $16 Million at Sep 3, 3:00 PM UTC?

102 people voted in 24 hours. After the initial launch hype, this was the first time we had seen this level of active engagement in the app. Just to be sure that this was not an one off incident, we launched another market. 65 people showed up.

We had something.

I keep coming back to the one decision that set everything in motion. The immediate catalyst was the growing chatter around prediction markets in crypto. It may have looked serendipitous from the outside, but it wasn’t accidental. It was reinforced by the time Puneet and I had already spent building and using these systems. I had been an early user of Polymarket. Puneet had been deep in the Solana trenches. Between us were hours of debates on price trends, tokens, and emerging metas trying to speculate about how the future will play out.

The Clankline: A Social Prediction Market for Token Prices

I think by now you would have spotted the pattern that we followed in 2025 - taking the one thing that showed any sign of working and iterating on it.

We started working on an onchain prediction market. We read up on early attempts on prediction markets and a few papers. Puneet wrote a simple simulator so that we could test things out before writing the contract.

We launched the first market on Oct 8. It was a price prediction market for an app coins, BITQUIZ, that Ev was launching. Puneet and I had set a goal of 100 participants. We had decided if 100 people showed up then we probably have something. If not, then we need to step back and rethink our lives.

We didn't get to 100. We did get to 49 though.

It was enough to keep going.

A New Beginning

Last 2 months have felt like a whirlwind. The chart below illustrates our frantic effort to keep up with the growth we're seeing. There is a powerful sentence in the iconic essay "The only thing that matters" by Marc Andreessen - "In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup."

Puneet and I can feel the pull.

A lot has transpired in these last few weeks. We have had some of the best minds in crypto launch markets with us. Base India sponsored us for a a founder's house which was an interesting experience. We got a grant from the Base Global Ecosystem out of blue.

The Mini App itself has consistently ranked among the top apps in the Farcaster Ecosystem. (there are over 6K mini apps today) The best part however has been the user love.

In all the apps we built earlier, we would ship things and people would hardly notice. This one even before we made a product announcement people would notice things and give a public shoutout.

It goes the other way round too.

We're still a small team - Puneet, me, and Harshada recently joined to help with product comms. A lot of things in the product are still manual.

I remember there was like a week where we were really busy between product dev and some other stuffs in motion and I missed sending out notifications and making an announcement one the market resolves.

A user called us out on that. We haven't missed making a market closure announcement since then and we intend to keep it that way.

It is still hard. Every day we have a much larger list of things that we need to do than the time we have. But it is much much better than being in a place of indifference where no one really cares about what you are building.

Sometimes you know things, but you only truly understand them after living through the pain. My biggest learning from this year of building, especially when I contrast it with the three years before, is the importance of reducing cycle time. The faster you move and learn, the faster you get to something genuinely valuable. If I had internalized this one lesson earlier, I would have saved myself years.

The Road Ahead

It took us sometime to really understand what we have and what it can become.

We believe that the best prediction markets don't exist today. Incumbents, Polymarket and Kalshi take a top down approach of deciding what matters and which markets should exist. We want to flip that and give that control to the people.

Today, we (almost) have a product that lets any crypto analyst to turn their alpha calls into price-prediction markets.

Soon, we will empower any creator to turn their takes into markets.

What excites me most though is once we have build out what we have envisioned, we would have given every human on internet a personal oracle to look into the future.

Farcaster is a playground for crypto experiments—there’s something new to try every week. This is my attempt to log those discoveries. I missed posting one over the last few weeks so this one has the highlights from the last 2 weeks.

Clanker World Meet

I spent the last few days in Delhi. ETHGlobal was happening over the weekend. A couple of days before my flight, Puneet floated the idea of doing a Clanker meetup.

We’ve been building around the Clanker ecosystem since it launched, and it’s safe to say we’re big fans of the product and the team. We reached out to Dish, and he was immediately excited. From idea to event, we pulled it off in a week. Dish even agreed to do a talk and shared his journey building Clanker. Oh! He even wore a Kurta to the talk :)

Jordan presented Empire Builder and walked through how builders can use it to not just launch a Clanker token but also grow a community around it. We added a fun twist. Jordan pitched his product live to Divyansh, the builder behind the popular gaming mini app recessdotfun.

Divyansh shared his experience building recess, and how launching with Clanker helped them gain traction and liquidity.

Its been a while since I last organized an IRL event. There were a few last minute hiccups but overall it was super fun. I do hope to see more Clanker World Meetups to happen all over the world especially considering we have such a thriving builders community around Clanker.

gmtribe

gmtribe is your farcaster agent that helps you reward your users to help you go viral. You can summon gmtribe to set up a reward to recast your product announcement, to give your new account a follow, or/and do an onchain action on your mini app. The way it works is you tag gmtribe and share your instructions on the farcaster feed. The gmtribe bot replies to your prompt with a miniapp where you can lock your rewards. The bot will disburse the rewards based upon your criteria plus inform the folks who got rewarded.

gmtribe differentiates itself from other similar apps by its focus on rewarding high quality users and building a genuinely engaged community. If you are a farcaster builder, you should have a chat with Rohit.

Mitsukeru

Mitsukeru is your own Jarvis that protects you from malicious scams, social engineering, and bad contracts. Founder, Colin did a very interesting thing and made a public raise.

Puneet and I pooled in to be part of this. NFA. DYOR. But here’s why we found it compelling:

1. Big, painful problem. Crypto security is one of the most important and underbuilt areas. Billions are lost to scams and hacks every year. That alone tells you how big this market already is and how much bigger it’s going to get.

2. Builder with depth. @bytebot is the kind of person you bet on. Deep open source and tech background, thoughtful about the space, and building with real urgency. If you haven’t spoken to him yet, fix that.

3. Community-first raise. The structure of the raise itself is interesting—starting with a community round on Farcaster. It's rare, it's transparent, and we’re curious to see how it plays out.

Everything in crypto is high risk. You might as well bet on the right people. We’re glad to be part of this in a small way.

What I've been upto

Puneet and I are working on the next big iteration of the clankline. Was a bit slowed down by travel and all. But hopefully will get to announce it soon.

Farcaster is a playground for crypto experiments—there’s something new to try every week. This is my attempt to log those discoveries. Between work, poor health, and procrastination, I missed a few updates.

Picking it back up today. Instead of a weekly log, here are the top 3 since my last post.

Felt

Felt lets you create a custom feed of your closest frens on farcaster. You start by picking your best frens (upto 15 farcaster profiles) and then you can see their casts when you launch the app.

I really like this idea. Most Social Networks including Farcaster are primarily social media apps first. The content is at the centre and connections are at periphery. For instance, how often have you find yourself wondering - hmm! been a while since I last saw a cast from <my purple bff> to realize that the person had been casting and it's just you who hadn't been seeing their casts on your feed.

I know this can be solved by just turning on notifications. But I’ve had my phone on silent for over a decade and I’m not a fan of notifs. That said, it probably works fine for most people.

Felt reminds me of some of the older iterations of close social networks such as Path and Google Plus which had an interesting feature called Circles that would allow you to create a circle of close friends and see their feed. Today, I guess we solve for this through group chats on whatsapp, telegram, and iMessage (?).

The feed experience feels a little clunky. Also, you need to toggle between the mini app and the app to interact with the casts. But otherwise it is fairly straightforward to use and an interesting V1 overall.

Give it a try and if you don't yet, give Chris a follow.

Bitquiz

As the name suggests, Bitquiz is a quiz you play and you just might win a bit of Bitcoin (Sats). There are 10 Questions. You have 5 seconds for each question. You score points based on your accuracy and speed.

Questions are interesting and range from Geopolitics to History, Science, and Technology. It is fun, light, and you should be done with a quiz in a few mins. There is a weekly leaderboard based on your highest score of the week. Check it out and let Tch know your feedback.

Building in Consumer Crypto

This is one of the best essays I have read on building in crypto in a while. Mac was previously at Kiwi News and shares insights into what makes building in consumer crypto challenging and and the many ways founders accidentally can shoot themselves in the foot.

What mom hasn't told you about building in consumer crypto

How exactly is consumer crypto different from normal consumer startups? Also, what does it mean for the founders and how to find signal in this world full of noise?

https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com

I don't want to add much commentary here and would rather have you read the OG post. If you are a founder or someone planning to start something new, give it a read. I wish I had known all these when I was starting out in crypto 4 years back.

What I've been upto

I lost a week and then some more to a really bad cold. That was not fun. Outside of that, I spent most of my time working on The Clankline.

0xPuneet and I had been iterating on the clankline to make it more useful and fun. It's been an interesting journey. We have a small set of users who consistently use the app.

One new thing we tried was getting folks to predict price movements of new tokens. We were kind of surprised by the response it got. Note - The participation was good. The prediction not so much. There is something new new we are planning on this line to launch on Clankline which we are very very excited about. More on this soon.

Finding the inspiration

Over the last one year, 0xpuneet and I built a series of small apps. Some born out of curiosity. Others just for fun.

The inspiration of The Clankline came from a small mini app we built that showed your biggest win and loss on Base. It struck a chord. Hundreds shared it. And then, like most mini apps, it faded.

It was ephemeral.

It took us a while to process what had happened. Puneet explained it well on why it took off.

The initial lift came from kind shoutouts by Ted, Saumya, and the FBI (Farcaster Builders International) crew.

But another reason was it showed people something remarkable. If you zoom out, there are folks who had had insane wins. For some it was $degen, others $clanker.

Its flaw was that it stopped at one snapshot. You saw it once, shared it, and there was nothing more to do afterwards. We had something that showed signs of resonance. We just needed to make it more useful and interesting.

Trading is a social and competitive activity.

A leaderboard centred around Clanker felt like a logical next bet. A Weekly Leaderboard gave it structure and opened avenues to introduce both utility and interesting mechanics.

Designing the Scoring System

There were three principles that went into designing the scoring system. Fair, Simple, and Playful.

We wanted a scoring system that rewarded skill and not just scale. It should tie in organically to contribution to the Clanker ecosystem. Finally, numbers shouldn't be the only thing that kept people coming back. Small touches that made every round lighter and fun.

The rules for scoring grew out of these principles. We normalize scores so that a $100 portfolio and a $100,000 portfolio can be compared on skill, not just size. Realized gains carry more weight than unrealized ones, since closing a trade takes more discipline than watching paper profits. And to keep the game alive beyond the trades themselves, we added bonus points for daily check-ins and streaks. Small rewards for showing up and staying consistent.

The result was a more diverse leaderboard. One where you had folks ranging from known names to smaller accounts, and sometimes even bots.

The Tech

There were three steps to computing points. First, track each user’s portfolio — the tokens they held and traded during the week. Second, identify which of those tokens were Clanker tokens. Third, calculate the PnL % and turn it into points, adding bonuses for daily check-ins and streaks.

Tracking Portfolios

We seeded the leaderboard with Farcaster accounts we knew were strong Clanker traders and investors. Also, whenever someone opened the mini app, if they weren’t already on the leaderboard, we added them to the leaderboard and their wallet went onto our watchlist.

We monitored each wallet for the Clanker tokens they held and the trades they made. A trade could be selling some or all of a token, buying into a new one, or adding more to an existing position.

We used Moralis for tracking user's portfolio and Zerion for tracking the user's transactions and filtering out trades.

Identifying Clanker Tokens

Nearly 400K tokens had been deployed through Clanker. To make it more efficient, we created a list of top Clanker tokens based on market cap and volume traded. We also built a system where we would add to this list new Clanker tokens that crossed a certain threshold. We used the Clanker World APIs for this.

Calculating PnL and Points

This surprisingly was more difficult than we had anticipated. While Zerion had a PnL API but it supported the overall wallet and not a subset of tokens which was our requirement. We did found another set of APIs built by an indie developer which was really really good. However it wasn't actively maintained. Eventually, we decided to build the our own solution for this.

There are two approaches in calculating the Profit and Loss. FIFO (First In, First Out) and Average Cost Basis.

FIFO (First In, First Out)

• Assumes the first tokens you bought are the first ones you sell.

• Example:

  • Buy 100 $CLANK at $1 → cost $100

  • Later buy 100 $CLANK at $2 → cost $200

  • Sell 100 $CLANK at $3 → you “sold” the first batch at $1, so profit = $200

Average Cost Basis

• Takes the average price of all tokens you hold to calculate cost per unit.

• Example:

  • Buy 100 $CLANK at $1 ($100) and 100 $CLANK at $2 ($200)

  • Average cost per token = ($100 + $200) / 200 = $1.50

  • Sell 100 $CLANK at $3 → profit = $150

We decided to use the Average Cost Basis approach. Calculating token cost became the key step. At the start of each round on Wednesday, we assigned the current market price as the cost of any tokens already in a user’s wallet. From there, the cost basis would update whenever they made new purchases during the week. For new tokens, the cost was simply what they spent to acquire them. Inbound and outbound transfers made things a little tricky, so we chose to ignore those and only calculate based on the tokens or portion of the tokens that stayed in the wallet.

Points and ranks were computed every 6 hours. And whenever a user opened the mini app, their score and rank refreshed in real time.

We used coingecko api's for the price feed of the tokens.

The Little Touches

Every Round has a name. The last one was Echo Rally and the currently running one is Infinite Ascent.

At the end of every round, we give a shoutout from the official @theclankline handle top the top 10 folks on the leaderboard. We also airdrop a commemorating NFT them. This has become a weekly ritual and one of my favorite times of the week.

It is interesting seeing who ranked where and why - something we're planning to surface for others to see too.

Why Clanker

Our own journey on Farcaster began with Clanker Live, which we launched within two weeks of Clanker itself. It showed a live feed of new Clanker tokens as they were deployed.

Since then, Clanker has continued to evolve and with its constellation of builder, creator, and artist tokens, it has a strong and active community around it. This convinced us to centre the leaderboard around Clanker.

We are especially excited about the recent V4 release reflects that direction: sniper auctions to keep launches fair, token vaulting to encourage long-term vision, and LP fees routed directly to creators. As a builder-first launchpad native to Base and Farcaster, Clanker is designed to align incentives.

We think this is going to lay foundation for lot of interesting token mechanics we will see in future.

Where we are and where we are headed

Our focus in the first wave of development was to build leaderboard for the Clanker community and the scoring system. We are now working on building tools that will help people to get on the top of the leaderboard.

Clankscan is the first feature launched on these lines. A fast read of what’s trending and why. Tags like: 🧨 Strong Buy Spike 📉 Heavy Selling 🏔 Near Highs to give people a quick view of what's happening and which tokens they need to pay attention to.

We are shipping smart notifications this week. It will show you key price trends for the top Clankers.

Farcaster is a rare place where social and technical signals can blend to help people find alpha. New app coins being launched, how those apps rank on the mini-app leaderboard, who is buying what, why someone is leading, and the smartest trades being made. Each of them is a valuable signal. Put together, they form a map for discovery.

The goal is to make The Clankline the best place to discover and trade Clanker tokens.

It has been an interesting journey building Clankline.

What we built is simple. What comes next is making it matter.

Acknowledgements

We're all standing on the shoulder of giants. We absolutely love farcaster and it has been rewarding building here. Humbled by the love and support we got from everyone on the launch day. Dish and the entire Clanker have been super helpful throughout our journey building The Clankline. Grateful to Neynar, Zerion, Moralis, Coingecko for the infrastructure that made building The Clankline a little easier. Also, a huge thanks to Nastya who shared her learnings from building reachbot - a mini app that shows you trades made by the best traders on base.

Farcaster is a playground for crypto experiments—I find myself discovering and trying something new every week. This is a log of my experiences.

BETRMINT

$BETR token has been on the tear last 2 weeks. BETRMINT mini app even more so and consistently trending in top 3 on the purple app.

BETRMINT turns supporting onchain creators into a game of speculative fun. New rounds drop Mon/Wed/Fri at 3PM EST with $1500 prize pools. They go really quick. Collect content, get a free ticket, spin the wheel, maybe hit 100x.

The app nails the vibe. Signature neon look, degen BGM, slick animations. It’s fun, chaotic in a good way, and lets you support creators while spinning for upside. The one thing I wish was different though is rotating the spin times such that some of them occur at a less ungodly hours for folks in the eastern time zone.

Pinball: all stars

Pinball is a fun game. Pinball: all stars bring the fun in the form of mini app to farcaster.

There are two rooms - degen and farcaster. Each with it's own custom vibes. Look carefully and you will have degen hat, horsefacts, dwr, and more of fc in each of those rooms.

Crypto Incentives

Samuel posed an important question that I believe is not discussed much in crypto space.

What if the incentive is a need for the product? Like really. Why incentivize people to use your product when you can just have it be so good they naturally do? hearing lots of adding quests and money for people to do xyz. Can't we just build good web3 products? - Samuel

The thread has some thoughtful comments and you should check it out. This is something that has bothered me for a while.

A blockchain is an economy. The incentive is there to bootstrap it. A classic example you can see in Farcaster where the degen tipping and the native rewards bootstrapped a economic wave.

Done right, it helps kickstart real usage. But today, most of the attention comes from investors and speculator, not users. This creates a weird challenge where you don't know if your product actually working or is it because someone who holds your token wants it to goes up and it is fine as long as the product works just well enough to keep the narrative going.

Eventually life catches up. The token becomes the product. The product stops mattering.
and it all collapses.

Tokens are a powerful tool and I love the principle "users becoming owners" as a feature. I just don't know if we have found the right answer yet.

What I've been upto

We wrapped up Round 5 Echo Rally of The Clankline on Wednesday. Wednesdays have quietly become my favorite day of the week.

Right after one round ends and the next begins, I spend a few hours prompting GPT to create an artwork. We mint it and airdrop it to the top 10 rankers. Each week I pick a different artist or style. So far we’ve done Ghibli, Van Gogh, Picasso’s Cubism, Monet, and this week, Goya.

We haven’t figured out the token or economic layer yet. That comes later once we’ve nailed the fun and usefulness of the mini app. But one day, I hope we can sponsor real artists to make these commemorative NFTs.

I also scroll through the leaderboard, check what top players were up to, which tokens gave them the best PnL, what trades they made. It’s fun. We don’t surface those insights in-app yet. Hopefully soon.

That was the highlights of this week. Keep Clanking. Keep Farcasting.

Farcaster is a playground for crypto experiments—I find myself discovering and trying something new every week. This is a log of my experiences.

Digits

Digits is a fun little math game by Daksh. You get rapid-fire arithmetic questions like “What’s 58 ÷ 7?” and have 60 seconds to get as many right as you can.

It’s simple, fast, and brings out your inner competitive nerd. There is a leaderboard. So, you can check out the top Maths folks of farcaster. For me, it was mostly a reminder of how much slower and older I've gotten.

The app’s delightfully designed. Give it a spin and give Daksh a follow. He’s building cool stuff.

Rch on Farcaster

I scored 24 in digits, can you beat me? Very very fun https://formula-game.vercel.app/24

Farcaster

Lizard Spock Rock Paper Scissors

Loring is a man of interesting interests. Last week he put an open challenge for Lizard Spock Rock Paper Scissors. We played this on a really cool web app that uses MPC Framework. MPC enables multiple people to compute something without revealing the values they hold.

I took help of our ever helpful chatGPT to come up with a simple explanation of how it works and this is what it shared.

🧠 Goal of MPC:

Let multiple people compute something together, without revealing their individual inputs to each other.

---

🔧 How it works (Conceptually):

There are a few core techniques, but here’s a basic idea using “secret sharing.”

🧮 Example: Average Salary

Let’s say 3 people want to know their average salary,
but no one wants to reveal their salary.

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💡 Step-by-step:

1. Split your secret

Each person breaks their salary into random-looking pieces and gives one piece to each of the other two.

For example, Alice’s salary is 100k:

• She splits it into: 30k to Bob, 40k to Carol, keeps 30k.

Each person does this.

---

2. Add up the pieces

Now each person adds the pieces they received.

Because the math works out, they get a total sum —
but they never saw anyone’s actual salary.

---

3. Compute the average

Together they divide the total sum by 3.
Everyone knows the average, but no one learned the others’ salaries.

---

🔐 Techniques used in real MPC:

1. Secret Sharing – like the example above.

2. Homomorphic Encryption – do math while data is encrypted.

3. Garbled Circuits – a fancier way to build a digital black box for computations.

4. Oblivious Transfer – one party learns something, but the sender doesn’t know what was learned.

Well, I ended up besting Loring 2:1 and he was kind enough to sponsor an ice cream for me.

Pokemon Miniapp

I love when people dogfood their own products.

Linda’s been doing just that and exploring the dev side of building on the Farcaster mini app ecosystem. She’s been on a bit of a spree, releasing a bunch of fun experiments. The latest: a Pokemon Mini App that looks at your casts and tells you which Pokemon you are.

I’ll admit, I barely know anything about Pokemon but apparently I’m a Machamp.

Give it a spin. And if you’re building on Farcaster, don’t hesitate to reach out to Linda—she’s been super helpful.

What I've been upto

Last week we wrapped up the third round of The Clankline.

Incentives, especially monetary ones, can blur the real signal around whether people actually care about what you’re building. So it was encouraging to see that, even without any rewards running, a solid number of folks still logged in and shared their ranks.

We’ve shipped a bunch of improvements since the V1 launch three weeks ago. You can now check your Clanker portfolio, track how you're doing within your friend group, and see a live scan and feed of the top Clanker tokens.

Farcaster is a playground for crypto experiments—I find myself discovering and trying something new every week. This is my attempt to log my experiences. I write it for myself. I hope you find it useful too.

Collectable Casts

Earlier this week Farcaster (the client) launched a feature where you can collect a cast as an NFT (ERC-721) Creators can opt in to make their casts collectable. People can bid on these casts. The auctions runs for 24 hours (unless they are really old in which case it runs for 7 days)

I was a bit skeptical about the feature. I'm sure some of you still remember the Jack Dorsey's OG tweet screenshoted and auctioned off as an NFT. I have come around though, a bit.

There are some content that make you feel so strongly that you would like to express your appreciation in ways more than just a like. I did feel that way for one cast, this one by @frametheglobe, about the Bengal Famine.

While I lost track of that auction, I did manage to snag a few I resonated with or felt would be nice or funny to own.

About 1500 people have placed bids on 5500 casts so far. [Reference. Thanks Mahesh]

My hunch is the initial euphoria is driven either by speculation or a desire of being part of something collective. Having said that I see it as an interesting primitive of expressing appreciation and you get something in return recorded onchain in return of that expression.

Likes became tips. Tips became bids.

Simping

SIMPS R US is a new mini app by Kasra. I think I first discovered Kasra from a mini app called bounce or falling that he launched way back in Feb this year. He has been one of the most voracious shippers of the Farcaster ecosystem. One of his many skills that I really admire is his ability to catch up on a farcaster meta and launch something that captures people's attention.

SIMPS R US shows you folks, the casts, and the people whose casts the person is bidding on. It's a fun app and has Pugson on top right now. Kind of wild seeing people spend thousands of bucks collecting casts. Head over to the app. It's fun.

Building in Web3

This post by Hypersub founder Jonny resonated very strongly.

"we don't bear the risks and opportunity costs of becoming founders so that other men will come to our rescue. we do it because of an irrational belief in our own abilities."

Jonny Mack on Farcaster

hi been heads down on something new. wanted to share some thoughts on building for creators and consumers in crypto the past ~3yrs there's roughly 10k (+/- 5k) real monthly transacting users in consumer crypto and their desire for new metas is insatiable for builders, this presents two possible outcomes: 1) (default) you build a thing and no one cares. no one uses it 2) you build a thing and it becomes a meta (hypersub experienced this briefly). people use it for a little while but eventually get bored. a new meta emerges and everyone moves on from here your options are: 3) go back to the drawing board 4) chase the new meta gaining traction is really hard and most builders don't want to give it up. so most chase, hoping their thing will eventually transcend the cycle and achieve breakout success by gaining adoption among a wider audience but outside of infra and trading, thats never happened. (fun thought experiments: why not? will it ever? if so, what are likely to be the causal factors?) so— 5) you can stay the course, keep grinding, and hope that the castle you've been building in someone else's kingdom eventually prospers or 6) exit 5 leads to burnout if you're bootstrapped and bankruptcy if you're vc-backed. hope is not a strategy (sorry) you can exit to a categorically different market, or to a different segment of crypto. the former likely means ai, the later means infra or trading. the problem is that you're late. the market has matured, incumbents have a lot of leverage, and its hard to differentiate we don't bear the risks and opportunity costs of becoming founders so that other men will come to our rescue. we do it because of an irrational belief in our own abilities. my advice: build where there's durable demand. sans infinite runway or corporate sponsorship you'll die otherwise i realize this sounds negative and pessimistic. sorry about that, not my intention. this message is for the builders who are trying to figure out where to invest their time and energy. its what i wish someone shared with me when i started if you're a founder and struggling with figuring out where and what to do next, hmu happy to share more 1:1 rooting for every single one of you 💛 https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/e538362a-45b3-4181-d7fb-f6a2a4f55000/original https://farcaster.xyz/nonlinear.eth/0x96c90863

Farcaster

4 years in crypto, 14 in startups before that, and I still wake up feeling like a noob. As a founder, you learn quickly you can’t fight the market. You can only try to understand it.

Most of my time goes into this one question - what is the market truly hungry for that crypto can uniquely serve significantly better than anything else out there?

The world has a insatiable appetite for investing and speculating that gives people a shot to uplift their lives. Crypto serves this well and is reflected in the applications we see onchain and offchain that enable that.

But I keep wondering: is there something deeper, still hidden, waiting to be built?

What I've been upto

Over the last few weeks, 0xpuneet and I have been building The Clankline - a leaderboard for the Clanker Community. What started as a fun experiment has now crossed 1,000 users, with a few hundred logging in daily.

We're now focused on making it more useful. Last week, we shipped two key features:
– You can now see your Clanker tokens and weekly PnL
– And compare your performance with your best pals on Farcaster.

Plenty more in the works. It’s fun building. Stay tuned.

The Builder energy is strong on Farcaster. Every Friday (or around Friday) I write about the top 3 highlights of mine from Farcaster. Farcaster is a hub of crypto experiments. I have found myself trying something new every week. This is an attempt to log my experiences

Buoy

Buoy is one of the OG Farcaster native apps. You use it to power search. It is magnitude of times better than the farcaster native search. Yet, last week was the first time I ended up using their mini app almost once every hour. We launched The Clankline last week and one of the wild things that happened was we got hundreds of folks sharing the mini app. I used buoy to keep track of all the shares, learning what problems people were running into, and what was resonating. (No, we didn't have any sophisticated instrumentation) Buoy also made it possible for us to run a few campaigns where we were experimenting with incentivized sharing by making it simple to track shared casts.

If you haven't yet, do gives buoy a try, boy, you will be surprised, in a good way.

🟦 Base App / TBA

I guess about a year ago, Coinbase merged the Wallet team with the Base team. And what came out of it is the Base App, the new version of Coinbase Wallet.

It’s one of the best crypto UX I’ve experienced. Clean, smooth, and thoughtfully built.

Base wants to bring a billion people onchain. One of their core bets to make that happen is bringing creators onchain first. The proposition is that crypto rails provide a better ecosystem to creators to monetize.

You can see that thinking in the way the Base App is built. It’s part wallet, part app store, part social app since it’s also a Farcaster client. Every post you make mints as a Zora Coin, and people can ape in.

My understanding is that the first time magical experience they are driving towards is to get new users to their first dollar onchain as fast as possible.

It is an ambitious bet. But then you have a cracked team working towards it. The App is still in Private Beta. Head over here if you want to join the waitlist

https://join.base.app/

🎩 The New New Degen

Jacek is a machine. A year back he launched the degen experiment that probably played the single biggest role in bringing in the first massive wave of users on farcaster. He had been constantly iterating on the tipping mechanism and other stuff around degen ranging from degen ens names to a L3 chain.

The latest bet is on a dedicated farcaster client that treats tipping use case as a first class citizen. The Degen Mini App upgrade is the first step towards it. The current tipping allowance is expected to go away to make way for direct degen tipping against each like. Oh, and 10% of the tipping amount will go towards a weekly lottery pool. Truly degen!

In 48 hours, over 60K $DEGEN were tipped. It will be interesting to see how the next wave tipping cycle plays out.

What I have been upto

Clankline. All Clankline. Last week we launched The Clankline - the leaderboard for Clanker Community.

Rch on Farcaster

Introducing The Clankline A weekly leaderboard for the Clanker community. A new round begins every Wednesday. Your PnL counts. So does your contribution. How strong is your clank? 🔻 https://theclankline.replit.app/?fid=7910&address=0xcffbda2841ef95df3e977982ecc55429b8d82eb5&inFeed=true&action_type=share&action_sub_type=best_friends&cc=KSIV&utm_source=farcaster&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=best_friends&utm_content=home&utm_term=7910

Farcaster

Over 1000 people have now checked out the mini app. Around 200-250 Clanker Connoisseurs check out the app daily. You see your rank and the leaderboard. We also show you your Clanker Portfolio. This Wednesday the genesis round ended and we kickstarted a new round Alpha Dreams. We dropped a little something as a gift to the wallets of top rankers.

If you like the style above, you can mint the Summer Pupil for yourself here

https://manifold.xyz/@rch/id/4185434352

These are exciting times to be building in crypto social. Right now, I'm figuring out things on the go. But yeah, it's been fun seeing Clankline resonate with folks.

Every Friday (or around Friday) I write about the top 3 highlights of mine from Farcaster. Farcaster is a hub of crypto experiments. I have found myself trying something new every week. This is an attempt to log my experiences.

MiniMint

MiniMini is a dead simple way to mint an NFT on Base. You launch the app, create the project, and then mint your NFT. Literally took me 5 minutes to mint mine and then you can hit share and put it out on farcaster. The only hiccup I ran into was when I wa strying to hit the mint button and nothing happened as I had left the description field blank. I believe it's an ERC-1155 contract, uses thirdweb underneath, and you have complete ownership over the contract.

Rch on Farcaster

Check out Vibe Coding on a Starry Night! on @minimint-app https://farcaster.xyz/chriscocreated/0x217744ba https://minimint.app/0x02Ce6D4145eC7853E4F6446d4c6B26D86AFd9917-0?v=default

Farcaster

Last few years have been brutal for cryptoart space. Most platforms have either shut down or pivoted into something else. It is refreshing to see someone build for the artists on farcaster. Builder Chris is an artist and a Farcaster OG. If you don't yet, give him a follow, and do try out the mini app.

Product Clank App of the Day

Product Clank helps builders achieve community powered growth through interesting token incentives. Lior recently launched a new feature where you can bid on a 24 hour auction for the App of the Day. The "App of the Day" gets you featured on the top of the list on Product Clank.

We got hundreds of people checking out the listing, giving shoutout, and feedback.

Lior has spent quite some time thinking deeply about collaboration, community development, and token incentives. If you are building looking to launch an app, you should definitely speak to him.

Introducing The Clankline

This week, @0xpuneet and I shipped The Clankline - a leaderboard for the Clanker community. Probably the most fun I have had in a while.

Every Wednesday, a new round kicks off. You earn points based on your Clanker portfolio performance. Your portfolio size matters, but not as much as you would think. Your PnL% however matters more. And to add to that, daily check-ins and bonus tasks get you extra points.

What happens at the end of the round? Well, something interesting for sure. We're cooking as we go.

We’ve been fascinated by Clanker since it launched back in November. Over the past few months, we’ve been quietly tinkering and building in the background multiple things around Clanker.

The idea for the leaderboard was sparked by two things. First, the Farcaster Rewards and the aptly named The Leaderboard. Second, a curiosity about who were the folks doing the best trading Clanker and adding value to the ecosystem.

We thought building a leaderboard would be simple. Turns out, ranking people fairly is harder than it looks. You are constantly trying to figure how to quantify something fuzzy and the trade-offs to make. This deserves a complete post of its own and something I'm planning to do soon.

Do check out The Clankline. Hundreds of people have. Find out how strong is your clank...

NexArt by Arrotu is a platform to create and collect generative art on Base. You have three creation styles: Geometric Shapes, Fractal Noise, and Code Mode. As the names suggest Geometric Shapes and Fractal Noise gives you kind of pre-built templates with enough configurability to let your creativity fly. If you want to go further, you can pick the code mode. Code Mode lets you write custom javascript with p5.js and create your unique generative art. Even if you are not a programmer, you can get started with chatgpt. It was fun to create the following two pieces

The workflow from creating a piece to minting it onchain is very seamless. There is a mini app too. If you are an artist or someone who like playing around creating abstract shapes with code, check it out. You will like it. I did.

Quidl

Quidl by Justin is an app that lets you airdrop ERC-20's to your community no matter where they are. It works with Slack, Discord, Telegram, and Farcaster. I checked out the farcaster mini app and you could pick recipients based on usernames, members or followers of channels, folks you follow on farcaster or folks who follow you. You can make the airdrop claimable i.e. people have to explicitly claim the airdrop or you can do it the simpler direct way of transfers.

The app has its own smart wallet that you can fund to do the airdrop. Or if you wish you can head to the settings and pick your facaster connected wallets.

I found it incredibly powerful way of rewarding your community. And of course, brownie points for a dead simple user experience. I am guessing it would have similar capabilities for the other platforms (Slack, Dicord etc.) too. Sp, if you run a discord server, a TG group, or a Farcaster channel, check it out.

Social Forensics

I knew Geoff for his banger casts and for being one of the folks on the top of the farcaster rewards leaderboard. But boy did I miss the biggest bangers. He has built this really cool visualization tool you can use to view the farcaster network. He has very neatly classified sub-networks such as the degen community and potential bot networks and more. You can look up your profile and see how your network is connected across farcaster. It was really cool for me to see how some of the folks I follow fall into one of these bot networks.

If you are a data junkie or generally are curious about your own network, give it a spin here. It's fun.

What I've been upto

@0xpuneet and I had been working on something that we were supposed to ship last week. Well guess what. The last 10% of the work is the 90% of the work. It just didn't feel complete. Without revealing too much, scoring isn't as simple as it looks. Immense respect for the folks trying to do that.

Anyways, after a lot of grinding, I think we are almost there. If you are a fan of Clanker, I believe you will love it. Stay tuned!

Once every week, typically on a Thursday, Ahn opens up a Google Meet Link where anyone can hop in. I have seen him to do this for quite some time. Yesterday, I decided to hop in.

There were three of us; Ahn, me, and Lee. The conversation flowed and we talked about things we are building and built, Polygon, the tech scene in Bangalore / Bengaluru, Centralized and Decentralized Yield Platforms and more. It was fun.

Ahn is building Quidl - the simplest way to airdrop tokens to folks on Farcaster, Telegram, Discord, and email. Lee is building Streme - a token launchpad that distributes 20% of its supply to folks who stake their holdings. The rewards are streamed every second.

It's nice meeting someone IRL (or in this case semi IRL) after knowing them URL for a while.

That's us.

Guess the Flag

Flag Frenzy by Mika is a simple super fun game where as the name suggests you got to guess the flags of countries. It's trending at #2 on Top Mini Apps Leaderboard. Very fun and very well deserved. Give it a try.

Kickback

Kickback is a fun little game by Jacob. As the name suggests you kick a ball and try to aim for your frens. If you hit, your frens get a tip. You got to avoid the bomb though otherwise the game is over. It is very well designed with nice graphics and background music.

There are quite a few casual games launching on farcaster and reminds me of the early days when facebook opened up its platform. The network is small but it is an interesting time to hone your creativity before mass adoption arrives (hopefully 🤞)

What I've been upto

In a few words, lot of coding. Very close to launching something that is going to be incredible. So, if you are a fan of CLANK, keep an eye out 👀

22 people have played over 365 games of framedl. I’m one of them. I'm not saying this to flex my consistency (although I'm a little proud of it). I'm saying it because it speaks to the craft and love Dusan’s poured into building it.

Framedl is Wordle in a frame. I know we call them mini apps now, but when Dusan built Framedl, it was all frames. The thing is I’ve known about Wordle for years. Played it a few times. But Framedl is the first time I actually stuck around and played something consistently.

Part of it is that the game is just fun. But there are a few other things that keep me coming back.

First, the competition. You don’t want to lose your streak or drop in rank. It’s gotten way more competitive over the year. But I keep coming back.

Second, the social trigger. I’d see people I follow or frens with post their wins and sometimes their Ls. That nudge usually gets me to take my turn.

And third, I’m not playing with strangers. I’m playing with people I have some weird Farcaster connection with. It feels like a little tribe. A quiet, nerdy corner of the purple app where some of us became frens because of Framedl and others started playing because our frens were playing them.

If you haven't yet, give framedl a try. I promise you. It's fun.

The tryst to find undiscovered gems

Patricia is one of the winners of farcaster rewards leaderboard. She did something amazing that I truly respect. She went on a tryst to find 125 casts by people she didn't follow and had less than 100 followers.

She put in massive effort and rigor into doing this. I highly recommend checking out her cast and learn more about her experience. It is an interesting exercise that sheds light on content discoverability.

Patricia Lee on Farcaster

Final update: After a slow start in the primary feeds and channels, I looked at every person on the rewards leaderboard. Yes, I looked at the casts of 3,000 accounts today. Across my entire search, I came across 203 users I wasn't already following and have <100 followers. I viewed more than 4,000 casts and only found 37 casts that fit my original criteria. I've decided to split the $125 reward among those 37 casts using likes with Noice. Why so few compared to my goal? Ultimately, I did not compromise on my original criteria: (1) cast by an account I don't follow already, (2) has <100 followers, and (3) I find genuinely interesting. I didn't intend to prove any point about the algorithm, and I'm not sure it does. I simply wanted to pay my rewards forward. But going down this insane little rabbit hole sparked ideas + questions for me about new user discovery here, which I'll share eventually. For now, I'll include links to those 37 casts in a reply below. https://farcaster.xyz/patriciaxlee.eth/0x0a93cc3e

Farcaster

$SIMP

A new mini app by borodutch. Many folks got an airdrop of the $SIMP token. You run participate command and complete a transaction get a ticket. At random times, 50 winners are picked to split the pot, from one Legendary Gem winner down to 32 Lucky Loot winners. Rewards vary by tier, and 10% always goes to the team.

What I'm upto

Apart from the fact that again missed posting last week (consistency is hard), Puneet and I shipped an upgrade on the baseedge token stats mini app. We now also show you the top 3 tokens from your base portfolio and where you rank based on that.

It was an interesting challenge figuring out how to support two different share flows in the same mini app, each with its own personalized, embeddable image. The infra bit had been equally interesting and deserves a post in itself. But all these experiments has led Puneet and I to a mini app idea that we are incredibly excited about. Hopefully shipping soon. Stay tuned!

Dash probably launched a month ago, but I stumbled on it just last week. It’s a neat little mini app. If you’re someone who misses video content on Farcaster, Dash gives you just that in a TikTok-style feed.

It worked pretty smoothly. Yes, it’s Farcaster, so I expected most videos to be about Farcaster. But turns out that wasn’t entirely the case. There were memes, travel clips, gm snippets, even UFC fights. A surprisingly diverse feed.

We’re still a long way from TikTok-level bangers. But honestly, the feed’s not bad. Give it a try.

JesseXBT

As the name suggests, it is a bot trained on Base's founder Jesse's content. It is a pretty neat idea. Here is me trying out the agent

A D, [9 Jun 2025 at 5:49:25 AM]:
/start


jesseXBT, [9 Jun 2025 at 5:49:50 AM]:
/start


A D, [9 Jun 2025 at 5:50:05 AM]:
I launched a mini app that shows people their biggests wins and losses on base. It kind of went mini viral and over 500+ people tried it. what should i do next?


jesseXBT, [9 Jun 2025 at 5:50:34 AM]:
first off, that's awesome. love to see it.

so, a few things you should definitely do. first, optimize your app store presence. check out base's mini app store guidelines and make sure you're following those closely. that means nailing the icons, keeping descriptions concise, and making sure your visual previews are top notch.

next, you want to keep the momentum going. think about adding community features like leaderboards and letting people share their wins and losses. also, keep users engaged by regularly updating the app, squashing bugs, and iterating based on what people are saying.

you should also be prepping for more users. use base’s RPC endpoints to get your transaction throughput sorted out so you can handle the growth. just remember the network's block gas limit of 140,000,000 when you're designing for scale.

lastly, share your stuff—your website, github, any docs. the more people can see, the better they can evaluate how scalable and technically solid your app is. and who knows, maybe there’s funding in it for you.

you got this.


A D, [9 Jun 2025 at 5:51:18 AM]:
I have done all of this. Can you share something more


jesseXBT, [9 Jun 2025 at 5:52:43 AM]:
sounds like you're making solid moves with your mini app! a few things to consider for keeping that momentum going:

first up, definitely look into using base's RPC endpoints. it's all about enhancing transaction throughput and scalability, especially since you're already over 500 users. gotta be ready for more.

next, check out the new AI tools for analyzing token movements. they can really help clarify what's going on for your users, giving them a better sense of their wins and losses onchain.

also, think about adding some onchain NFT features. there's a lot of expertise around this, and it could bring some unique benefits for your users.

finally, make sure you're following the mini app store guidelines. focusing on app store optimization, community features, and solid documentation will really help boost your adoption.

if you have questions on any of this or need more detail, just shout!

It's a good start. The advice is mostly generic but I'm guessing as the interactions grow, hopefuly the specificity and efficacy of the advice will get better. Plus there is a sweet deal. if you are in the top 10% of builders using jesseXBT, the real Jesse Pollak will want to meet you.

Solana Bags

seedclub team launched Solana Bags that shows you your Solana tokens traded, your wins along with your biggest win and loss.

It pulls in data from your verified Solana Address on Farcaster. You can also look up bag stats for other folks by searching their username. It's very well done. Check it out below

What I'm upto

This was something we had not planned. But while seedclub was working on Solana Bags, we were working on a version for Base completely unaware and we both launched on the same day. It was a more of simpler iteration on the trade simulator mini app we had built the week before. This was the fourth app Puneet and I worked together and boy were we in for a surprise.

At this point, close to ~800 folks from farcaster have tried it. It was featured in the trending apps on the new beta Coinbase Wallet too.

It looks a your verified ETH address and your last 100 transactions to find out your best and worst trade. We also have created a leaderboard and you can check out folks with best wins. Some of them are insane. You can check out Puneet's cast to get a better idea of how it works and try out the mini app.

8 days ago, $noice took over our timeline. Created by the team behind cast.money, the launch was creative, well-executed, and the product itself is pretty interesting. In their own words - Noice makes every interaction on farcaster instantly liquid.

Noice lets you tip people automatically for every interaction on Farcaster. Like, reply, recast, or quotecast. Each of those actions can send tokens to the person you are interacting with. More interestingly, you can tip in the token of your choice. It just works. Where Clanker made launching new tokens easy, Noice makes tipping with them super easy.

The tipping culture and mechanics has gone through a few iterations on farcaster. First was $degen. You got an allowance. You replied “69 $degen” to a cast. Tip sent. Everyone saw it. It worked because it was simple, loud, and more importantly free. (You couldn't claim the allowance for yourself)

Then came Moxie’s version. Tipping was automatic. You didn’t send anything and the moxie tokens streamed quietly based on engagement you received and could be claimed later. It was clever although had a lot of complexity which made it hard to understand. That plus I guess the whole way it worked it felt more like the protocol rewarding you for good content as opposed to people showing their appreciation for your work.

More recently, Farcaster introduced a native tipping feature. Every Tuesday, it shows you people you interacted with the most. You can tip them with USDC using the farcaster native wallet. It is manual but fast and seamless. Plus, farcaster has designed it in a way that people talk about the tips they have sent and received which brings the visibility back.

Noice takes it further. Every interaction becomes a tip. You don’t think about it. You just interact. The tip happens in the background. The best UX are often invisible and that's what in my opinion makes Noice super cool.

However, there is a tradeoff. Visibility. Good deeds such as generosity and gratitude should be seen. Not just for product visibility, but because it makes people feel good. When you know your gesture landed, it means more. And I feel that’s something worth designing for.

The Leaderboard

The Leaderboard is cryptic and maybe that’s what makes it fun.

You open the mini app and, true to the name, you see a leaderboard. I'm still not sure though what the leaderboard is about. But it’s got this oddly satisfying flow that nudges you through a bunch of actions like sharing the frame or tipping random people 69 $degen (actual wallet-to-wallet transfers). As you go through it, your rank keeps updating. The notifications are well-timed. You’re not entirely sure what you’re chasing. But it works.

I have seen quite a few folks sharing this frame. I do hope it evolves into something more.

Precoin

I've so got very mixed feelings about this one. I absolutely love the concept here. The execution though leaves a lot to be desired. Precoin lets you book coins that people of farcaster haven't launched yet.

The first one was Phil’s. You could buy Phil precoins, and when the real token launched, the app would auto-snipe it for you. You’d get your share based on how many precoins you held. The catch? You’re hoping Precoin snipes early before the actual snipers show up and dump it on you. That’s exactly what happened. And yeah, I and many got rekt. Down 90% in minutes of launch and it wasn't fun.

That said, it’s a hard problem. But also an interesting one with a pretty interesting proposition baked in.

What I'm upto

I shut down Tasseo towards the end 2024. Isn't easy letting go of things you had been working on for years. Since then I been experimenting and trying to figure what I should be working on next. Clanker happened in November and I got pulled into trading tokens. It has been an intellectually stimulating exercise. Last few months, I and Puneet had been iterating and building tooling for ourselves to trade a bit smarter with automatic controls such as stop loss and laddered sells in place.

This month, we took part in the Base Builds hackathon (results drop today 🤞) and shipped a mini app that scans your wallet, looks at your trades, and shows how things could’ve played out with controls like stop loss and laddered sells.

You can check it out here:

I think I’m a little happier than I was in the tail end of 2024. There was a bit of a fog back then. But I’ve started building again and I been writing code after a long long time. It’s been fun. Feels good to feel like myself again.

Farcaster is a playground for crypto experiments—I find myself discovering and trying something new every week, and more often than not, I’m surprised. This is my attempt to log my experiences.

Earlier this year, I started coding again after a long time, of course, with a lot of help from Cursor. One idea that’s fascinated me about new AI bots is having an intelligent companion that helps you with your tasks. Now, there is one task that is ubiquitous in crypto. Almost everyone in crypto trades or invests in tokens.

Ask Gina is a wallet you can talk to. You can ask her for prices, trends, what tokens are hot right now, and you can ask her to do transfers and swaps for you. And it will do all of that for you and more.

To get started, set up a Privy wallet on AskGina.ai, fund it with USDC on Base, and you’re ready to start your prompting journey.

Don't be me though. I had a false start, primarily because I ignored the instructions and sent across ETH 🙈 After that I tried asking gina to transfer some ETH to a different wallet which she failed to. I'm guessing presently Gina can operate with only ERC20 tokens. Anyways, it does have a export private key feature so am assuming you can import the wallet into your regular wallet and still use it. The onboarding was otherwise fairly seamless for me.

Now, there’s no doubt—an agent that can transact on-chain on your behalf is impressive. The experience however that came close to magic for me was a research prompt.

what is the potential price impact we can see on CLANKER TOKEN once it gets listed on coinbase? support insight with data of past listing in last 12 months

I'm skipping the full response in interest of keeping this post short. The response was significantly better than what I got from Perplexity Deep Research (which was riddled with inaccuracies) and comparable with that of Chat GPT's Deep Research. A few other prompts that I tried were around researching Aave's revenue and pricing trend and identifying the biggest risks in my portfolio. The responses were generally helpful. This is one use case I am excited about. The ability to do a deep research on a token or category, brainstorm on different trading strategies, and then put them on automation.

There are so many different ways the product can evolve. An onchain research assistant that can trade for you . A trading assistant that can help you with your research. The difference is subtle but significant.

framedl is one my favorite app on farcaster. A wordle game a day right in a frame. I have played over 300 games now. But this week for the first time I tried out the framedl arena.

As the name suggests, you have an arena with a fixed number of spots where people can join. There are 5 games. And people are ranked based on their average score. While the games are played asynchronously, you can track real time update of the score which makes it super thrilling.

One of the reasons why I couldn't post Farcaster Fridays last two weeks. I was knee deep picking up React and trying to learn to code a frame. Introducing Reconnect.

Reconnect helps surface old frens you made on Farcaster but lost touch with. I’ve always found it a bit sad that algorithms optimize for engagement, not for the people you meet along the way.

Built this with a lot of help from Cursor, using React & Node. The data runs on Dune, so yeah... it’s slow (free-tier struggles). Hope you give it a try and reconnect with someone!

Rch on Warpcast

last month, started writing code again after a long time. my first frame. we made frens along the way - some we lost touch with. maybe it's time to reconnect. https://reconnect-frame.replit.app

Farcaster

Farcaster is a playground for crypto experiments—I find myself discovering and trying something new every week, and more often than not, I’m surprised. This is my attempt to log my experiences. A day late but 10 weeks in now.

I wrote about bounce a few weeks back - a fun game on frames by jc4p. Since then jc4p has been on a tear, teaming up with keecers to launch a bunch of amazing frames.

Enneagram analysis is like a cheat code for understanding why you (and everyone else) act the way they do. It is is a nine-type personality system that helps explain core motivations, fears, and behaviors. The frame looks at your casts and guesses your personality type.

Kasra Rahjerdi on Warpcast

Today’s frame is… enneagrams! Yes we are just going go through every single personality measurement framework. Fun fact: My actual type is Type 2, but i guess my public persona is enthusiastic! https://enneagram.kasra.codes?fid=977233

Farcaster

This is one of the oldest personality classification apparently. Like the Enneagram Analysis frame, this one also looks at your casts and guesses your personality. I learnt from this frame and the previous that I'm or at least my farcaster persona is an enthusiastic choleric melancholic.

Kasra Rahjerdi on Warpcast

Is this anything? Is anyone here into Humorism? I'm 70% melancholic! Check out your own temperament analysis by pressing the button below. https://temperaments.kasra.codes?fid=977233

Farcaster

Your own certification of how good a reply guy you are.

Kasra Rahjerdi on Warpcast

I'm a certified Community Builder! Identify yours now! https://reply-guy.kasra.codes?image=og-977233-1739922059190

Farcaster

And that isn't all. Am sure I'm missing a bunch more. Give jc4p a follow if you don't yet. jc4p and keecers are cooking something really cool from what I can tell from their casts.

One tech shift I’ve been thinking about is how advertising evolves in a decentralized world. We saw one iteration with moxie earn frames. amps.fun pays you to get your frens to recast. (if i am understanding it correctly) Here is woj buying a recast from phil

​woj on Warpcast

just bought a recast from @phil on amps this will be huge https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/4f6f8145-3987-4ed1-dca2-f88b1dc46c00/original

Farcaster

You can sign up on the allowlist below.

amps.fun on Warpcast

Amps.fun helps you get paid when friends post. http://Amps.fun

Farcaster

Native is one of the most ambitious products getting built on farcaster. It is still early days, but I find Derek's vision fascinating. Native holders can now get third party stamps. If you are headed ETH Denver, do check it out

derek on Warpcast

Wait. What's this? Third party stamps? More utility for $NATIVE and Passports? Yes. If you're a Native Passport holder, collect two stamps at @EthereumDenver: 1. The @farcaster meetup with @splits and @purple - https://events.xyz/events/178373a0 2. A currently unannounced event. 😏 https://supercast.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmTG4LZJ4ZVFvvq5VPDubU1emCBYNh1BFodkwAoHSUSmyK?filename=Screenshot-2025-02-19-at-2.41.33-PM.png

Farcaster

About a month back, we did a research post to understand the trading experience on base.

How Farcaster Trades

Trading on Base: Insights and Experiences from Farcaster Users

https://paragraph.xyz

A popular strategy that emerged is laddered selling—taking profits gradually as prices rise. We wondered how our trades would have played out if we had used it. So we set up backtesting.py, a Python library for running trading simulations. Spent a good chunk of time testing different scenarios—turns out, it was pretty fun.

All of this working towards building something much cooler though.

Farcaster is a playground for crypto experiments—I find myself discovering and trying something new every week, and more often than not, I’m surprised. This is my attempt to log my experiences. 9 weeks in now 🦾

faragent let's anyone turn their token into a tipping token. I discovered it via a $VEIL tip i got from nico.

How does it work? Just call @faragent and request to tip. I have seen a few versions in play where one the agent itself decides the token to tip or in some cases the person invoking the tip can specify the token to tip in. The agent returns with a frame where you can easily claim your tips.

I find this interesting for a couple of reasons. It’s a solid way for a token to bootstrap its community—what better way than people talking about it and gifting it to others? $degen has already demonstrated its success. The real challenge is figuring out how to grow the network of tippers. One opportunity I see: designing a flow where someone claiming their tips naturally becomes a tipper too.

Built by the far.quest team, Founder, Nico is a farcaster OG. If you don't you should give her a follow. faragents is in private alpha. If you want to join the waitlist, head here: https://far.quest/agents

Productclank is a product launchpad that leverages memecoin virality to drive attention and bootstrap growth for new products. Founder, Lior, insights comes from observing the successful launch of quite a few products that used Clanker to kickstart growth such as Native and Clankfun. As a builder you can sign up on Productclank, it will create a custodial wallet for you, and launch a token (using Clanker) on Base. I'm guessing on the backend the platform will expose the product to its community and help founders get visibility.

Lior dogfooded his own product and launched Productclank on Productclank a week back. Their token currently has about 2000 odd holders.

Lior🦇🔊 @Lior on Farcaster

@GoldenbergLior

After a year long of building in the tranches & 8 years living, breathing, sleeping and investing crypto, communities, DAO's DEFI, memes BD, growth & everything in between, I'm super excited to share this product we launched today

This is how u can support me & fellow builders

ProductClank

@productclank

Introducing ProductClank: Turning Users into Growth Evangelists

Today, we're solving the biggest paradox in software: Building is nearly free.
Getting noticed is incredibly expensive.

Here's how we're changing that, and how YOU can win with us

190

2:32 • 7 Feb 2025

At this point, we have hundreds of thousands of tokens launched everyday. There is a certain level of fatigue that is setting in. Launching a token let alone a product with token successfully is much harder now than it was a couple of months back. This is where I see the opportunity and where Productclank can add value. If you're a builder looking for launch support, check out Productclank—the Product Hunt web3 needs.

I found commit very very cool. It is an onchain accountability protocol. You create a commit which is as the term means you commit to do something by a certain period. There is a commit window where other people can join you in this commit. You will need to stake a certain amount of tokens specified by the creator of the commit. People or communities can add a reward pool. Once you are past the deadline, the staked amount and the rewards are distributed to the people who completed the commit successfully. The ones who didn't complete the commit lose their staked amount.

One aspect that was unclear to me was how is it determined who completed the commit. My guess is it is either the commit creator or the community of participants.

Rev has been building commit for a few months now. I find his posts on building insightful. So, give him a follow if you want. And maybe while you are at it make your first commit too.

We shipped Clanker Ranker this week! 🚀 A simple, fun frame that shows the Clanker tokens you hold, plus some cool stats. Tokens thrive because people hold and believe in them. So we built something fun to check out, share, and flex your biggest conviction plays.

Give it a try here 🔻

Rch on Warpcast

@0xpuneet and I did a little clanker building I AM 👑 CLANKER IMPERIUS. A proud bearer of Clanker tokens, 🔥 forged in the fires of the Base Chain. How mighty is your clank? Unveil your power in the frame below 🔻 https://clanker-ranker.replit.app/fid/7910

Farcaster

Farcaster is a playground for crypto experiments—I find myself trying something new every week, and more often than not, I’m surprised. This is my attempt to log my experiences. 8 weeks in now 🦾

Frames V2 has sparked a gaming renaissance on Farcaster. New games are dropping weekly—this time, I stumbled upon Falldown, thanks to @dwr.eth.

Dan Romero on Warpcast

Have you bounced yet? https://falldown.kasra.codes

Farcaster

Falldown is a simple, fast, and fun.The objective is to keep the ball from getting stuck at the top or falling off the bottom. Swipe left or right to guide it through gaps in the moving platforms. If the ball falls off or gets pushed out of the top, you lose—gravity wins!

Give falldown a try! And give Kasra the builder behind it a follow!

I have to admit, I almost missed this. Since Clanker took off, plenty of token launchers have popped up on Base. But a cast from @df made me take a closer look.

df on Warpcast

uniswap v4 provides programmable legos in liquidity huge flaunch already leveraging these in interesting ways many problems to solve in aligning things between holders, launchers and LP providers. one thing I'm undecided on: what happens on base? Aerodrome has more liquidity network effects on base, but Uniswap v4 >>> Aerodrome. Split market? Memecoins on uniswap, stablecoins, altcoins & eth on aerodrome? https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/aa10868b-94b4-4388-bc57-8534e604bc00/original

Farcaster

flaunch launched publicly on Jan 31. Since then, over 2,600 tokens have launched on the platform, generating $87 million in trading volume and paying out 60 ETH to launchers. There are a few things that flaunch does differently that makes them interesting.

This is how it works:

• When a coin is launched, its price stays fixed for 30 minutes or until all fair launch coins are sold. After that, price discovery begins, and anyone who bought during the Fair Launch can sell at the same price.

• Everytime a coin collects 0.1 ETH in trading fees, it invokes a buy back.

• 100% of the fees goes to the creator of the token and the community. The creator can decide the split between themselves and their community.

• So if all the fees is given away, how does the platform generate revenue? They use a v4 hook to lend liquidity on Aave, earning yield safely.

All of this is very cool. And I do think like from an earning standpoint, flaunch is very creator friendly. But with so many token launchpads and new tokens popping up, standing out is getting harder.

My guess is to succeed, launchpads need to do more than just launch tokens. They need to build better tools or find new ways to help the best tokens get noticed. Strong distribution and discovery mechanisms will be key for making sure great projects don’t get lost in the crowd.

At this point, we're probably launching north of 100K tokens every day across all chains.

While I did write about Basket, last week, I didn't expect they would launch so soon. Ver 0.1 went live yesterday. Here is how it works

• You invoke the @basketdotfarm to launch a basket.

• You specify the token tickers you want in the basket and the percentage breakup.

• It confirms the CA and then shares a frame with you.

• Anyone can now buy the basket of the amount they desire through the frame. The experience is very smooth.

If you are looking to try it out, may I suggest my own based basket "based agent". You can try it here

Rch on Warpcast

gn frens ✨ you gotta check this out. @chinmay.eth very very cool! Wow, that was easy. Just bought this basket of $VIRTUAL, and $CLANKER in only 1-click 🧺 Feeling good about this one! 🚀 Who else is on board? https://basket.farm/baskets/6b8b90fe-e6f7-4334-a1ca-f76bf35e71e6

Farcaster

Not a financial advice. Not even a life advice.

Puneet and I have been working on a fun new frame - Clanker Ranker ⚒ ⚔ 👑

coming soon!