Daily activity hits a new high, review Farcaster's highlights in April: open protocol, social layer and FarFi

Original title: "Farcaster April: Open Protocol, Social Layer and FarFi"

Original author: 0xluo.eth, Farcaster frontier explorer

A lot of things happened on Farcaster in April, and Farcaster's daily activity also reached a new high, and continued to be around 40,000, becoming an increasingly important protocol/community in the crypto world. Of course, a large part of this growth may be due to the memecoin wealth effect within the ecosystem and the launch of various new products. Although Farcaster ecosystem-related assets are inevitably affected by the overall decline of the crypto market due to various risk factors, many friends who hold Farcaster-related assets happily ushered in April and sadly bid farewell to April, but there are still many impressive highlights on Farcaster that are worth reviewing.

https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster

When I was about to start reviewing, I found that the various public chains, applications, and tokens related to the Farcaster ecosystem were closely linked. I can only try to disassemble them and choose several different dimensions to discuss.

Being an open protocol

First of all, let's start with the Farcaster protocol led by the team and the functions of the main client Warpcast. Farcaster launched the Actions function this month, which is another important function update after Channels and Frames. The Actions function can interact with Casts by clicking below Casts to achieve such as likes, translations, convenient rewards, viewing information, etc., and Frames can also be called for more interactions.

https://warpcast.com/v/0xbb2ed1b9

In addition, what is interesting is that @nbragg quickly developed a hotpotato game based on the Actions function. Players can pass potatoes by clicking the "pass the potato" action under their friends' casts. The player who receives the potato must send the potato out as soon as possible. In the end, the player whose potato stays the shortest wins. I am looking forward to seeing some social games (onchain social games or onframe-gaming) developed based on Farcaster in the future that can make full use of the Actions function and link with Frames and other functions to expand their gameplay in Farcaster and cooperate with their main games to better spread and promote fission in Farcaster.

The team is still working very hard on many small details to improve the user experience (for updates, see /fc-updates ), such as setting Priority mode information flow and notifications in Warpcast to reduce the impact of spammy accounts. It is precisely because of this that Farcaster has been able to maintain a relatively good community atmosphere.

https://warpcast.com/0xluo.eth/0x39918502

At the same time, Farcaster's third-party clients are becoming more and more powerful. They can allow you to use them in an emergency when Warpcast is down due to too much traffic, which also shows the openness of Farcaster as a protocol. Recently, @slokh launched nook, which is a bright spot. Currently, its mobile terminal allows users to set rules and customize information flows by creating "Nooks" and "Feeds", such as limiting keywords, users, and channels, so that users can track the content they are interested in.

In addition, more and more clients support both Lens and Farcaster social protocols. After Buttrfly actively embraced the Farcaster ecosystem, Phaver of the Lens ecosystem also chose to come to Farcaster for activities, and claimed that it would also support Lens and Farcaster cross-platform posting in the future. I believe their choice shows that those who know the times are heroes. Firefly, a client used by Vitalik, not only supports simultaneous sending across different social platforms such as Farcaster, Lens and Twitter, but also further strengthens the cross-social platform aggregation function, such as making it easier to browse articles on Mirror and Farcaster's native blog platform Paragraph, becoming a large and comprehensive on-chain social aggregation platform.

The Farcaster personal homepage farcaster.in developed by David Furlong can easily link to the personal homepages of Warpcast and other clients, such as Supercast, Firefly, and Yup. More Farcaster ecological clients can be browsed on the one-stop navigation station Decaster developed by @haole, including clients, dApps, common tools, developer tools, common Channles, Frames, Actions, etc.

Being a social layer

The main tokens and NFT assets in the Farcaster ecosystem are all issued on the Base chain, which is also part of the Coinbase ecosystem. Today, Farcaster has not only become the launchpad for memecoins, but also serves as an incubator for many L3 and even L4 chains. Naturally, it also serves as the social layer for these memecoins in L2, L3 and L4, supporting their asset issuance, operation, promotion and community sedimentation.

Farcaster as social layer for L2s, L3s and L4s

Degen

Let’s start with $DEGEN, the leading memecoin in the Farcaster ecosystem and the Base chain. Some people say: "$DEGEN can no longer be considered a memecoin because it has many utilities", which implies that only memecoins that are useless are memecoins. However, according to Li Jin's classification of memecoins, $DEGEN can be considered a community-first memecoin, also known as a scene memecoin:

This type of token is launched as a Schelling point for a decentralized community with shared values and missions, and the token can play a role in enforcing rituals/norms.

In this sense, many memecoins rooted in the Farcaster community can be called scene memecoins, because the Farcaster community itself and its open framework can easily allow memecoins to design various types of application scenarios, opening up imagination for them.

As the leading scene memecoin, $DEGEN is rooted in the Farcaster community and actively interacts with various applications and projects in the Farcaster ecosystem. It already has a variety of application scenarios that can be shared, rewarded, minted, traded, and built through $DEGEN.

· Share with $DEGEN: As a meme spread, the iconic gentleman's hat, as well as the secondary creations built around this element, including various Channels, Frames, NFTs, and Tokens emerge in an endless stream. The "$DEGEN Memes and Symbols" section in The $DEGEN Archives has a more detailed description.

· Tip with $DEGEN: The second round of $DEGEN airdrops, that is, each person has a certain amount of rewards per day, and can reward in the casts comment area of others. The cumulative amount of rewards per person is the number of airdrops. Supercast and Degencast third-party clients support quick buttons for rewards, and now there are also Actions for convenient rewards.

· Mint with $DEGEN: Both Zora and Highlight NFT casting platforms already support minting NFTs through $DEGEN. At the same time, Zora also has an exclusive exploration interface for NFTs that can be mined using $DEGEN.

· Trade with $DEGEN: Since the short video application Drakula, the team club application Bracket.game, the prediction platform Perl.xyz and more and more Farcaster ecological applications support the use of $DEGEN for trading. In the next FarFi chapter, you will see that most of the SocialFi products in the Farcaster ecosystem use $DEGEN as their circulating currency. The Jeeves app also lists various applications that support $DEGEN transactions.

· Build with $DEGEN: That is, using Syndicate to build the launch of Degen L3 based on the Base chain, and developing and building on it, Farcaster naturally becomes the social layer supporting Degen L3. Since its launch at the end of last month, it has quickly attracted a lot of user attention. The launch of mememcoins such as $WAKE, $GOAT, $ATH, and FarCats Degenesis NFT has also quickly fermented in the Farcaster community and gained a high degree of popularity in a short period of time. It is worth mentioning that ATH ᖽ, which was born in the OG Degen Chain group chat on Warpcast, also claims to become a growth flywheel for the Degen L3 ecosystem and its community by building DAOs, games, infrastructure, and L4 based on Degen L3.

Currently, the TPS of Degen L3 has jumped to the second place in the Ethereum ecosystem, second only to the Base chain, but the various infrastructures such as DeFi and NFT market are still in the initial stage. Recently, in the "Deploy on Degen" activity week, 40 projects and developers received a total of more than 10 million $DEGEN bonuses. As these projects are launched one after another, I believe Degen L3 will be more dynamic.

https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity

Base

In the past month, we can see Jesse Pollak, the head of Base chain, starting a crazy sales mode, madly promoting various projects on the Base chain, and commenting "based" everywhere. Against the backdrop of the Cancun upgrade to reduce transaction costs, Coinbase's full support, and strategic cooperation with OP, the Base chain continued its rapid growth in March, with TPS ranking first in the Ethereum ecosystem. A large part of this is of course the traffic brought by the explosive growth of memecoins on the Base chain. Jesse also held high the banner of memecoins to build an on-chain economy, and even threw out a sack of memecoins in his PPT.

https://warpcast.com/0xluo.eth/0x39918502

https://twitter.com/0xLuo/status/1782413986102936003/photo/1

The NFT of the Base ecosystem has also ushered in explosive growth. There was even a few days when the homepage of OpenSea was full of Base NFTs. For a time, many people shouted slogans such as "NFT revival in Base".

Base NFTs take over OpenSea (https://warpcast.com/0xluo.eth/0x71bc221a)

Of course, I am more concerned about the projects on the Base chain that are closely integrated with the Farcaster community, including the memecoins and NFT projects that Farcaster has launched on the Base chain. Because of the existence of these projects, Farcaster plays the role of the social layer of the Base chain.

Scene memecoins

In addition to $DEGEN, Ham is another scene memecoin (token name is $TN100x) issued on the Base chain by the Farcaster community developed by @deployer, and its channel /lp has reached 30,000 followers. Similar to the rewards of $DEGEN, we can also see the rewards of its iconic icon in the comment area under each cast. More similar to the path of $DEGEN, it also announced in April that they will launch Ham L3, which has once again received a lot of attention. In addition, Ham has also launched a convenient on-chain reward tool Floaties, which supports various tokens including $TN100x, $DEGEN, $HIGHER, and $MEMBER in Farcaster and Twitter comment areas for rewards, helping more memecoins expand their application scenarios.

Since mfers chose to issue memecoin mfercoin ($mfer) on the Base chain at the end of last month, many NFT projects have launched their memecoins. For example, Nouns DAO community member @dotnouns raised funds through Party.app in April to launch memecoin Noggles ($NOGS) derived from Nouns IP, aiming to empower the entire Nouns ecosystem. At the same time, they also launched a reward program on Farcaster.

$Higher is another Base chain memecoin that has received much attention and started from the Farcaster ecosystem. Its iconic symbol ↑ and artworks created with it as an element can also be seen everywhere on Farcaster, which once caused major v to check in at the /higher channel. Zora and Highlight both support the use of $HIGHER to mint NFTs.

I think part of its popularity is due to its easy-to-understand and easy-to-spread name and symbol. James Beck believes that Higher provides a template that is easy to follow the trend, a collection of artworks on Zora, and tokens with investment appeal that allow everyone to participate, thereby successfully attracting all four consumer groups in the Aspirational Economy: connoisseurs, super fans, discerning buyers, and browsers.

$HIGHER’s Desire Economy (https://jamesbeck.mirror.xyz/5QkrHusMclOWsa9sKH4MQhG8UXMJZvi7iKXFy64YYTY)

NFTs

Base’s Onchain gaias NFT has been gaining a lot of popularity in the Farcaster community since its launch, and @ciniz released Zora NFT in April to detail its vision as an “Onchain General Artificial Intelligence Agents”: to be a revolutionary platform that allows ordinary people to access the development of general artificial intelligence (AGI). The ideal sounds grand, and we can only wait and see.

There are also interactive generative art swatches created by artist @jvmi. It was amazing to find that I could interact with those different colored shapes in its NFT interface.

The Onchain coin project, which has always been known for its "volumes", launched Prescription Pass and Onchain Pills NFTs in April. When the former was minted, Basescan, Warpcast and Highlight even crashed at the same time. Since then, it has also released the points game Chain Game, and announced the launch of Onchain L3 using conduit's services, aiming to better attract more users to participate in on-chain activities through games and social scoring mechanisms through exclusive chains.

The common feature of these projects rooted in Farcaster is that by operating the community on Farcaster and accumulating reputation, they can quickly obtain community support from preheating to release, and this support will also become a lasting driving force for their continued development.

Onchain games

In terms of blockchain games, EthXY, an MMORPG game on the Base chain, also announced that they will use the chaindrop service to build an L3 based on the Base chain. The "Luckshot Duel" and "Loot Drop" Frames previously launched on Farcaster also attracted widespread attention from the Farcaster community. It is a good example of using the Frames function as a window for promoting and interacting with the main body of the game in the Farcaster community. Another popular game on Farcaster, CropXYZ, a farm management game that has been preheating and selling seed NFTs but has not been launched, and also has its own game-exclusive L3 goldchain, also announced that it will support playing on both the web and Frame.

I have always hoped to see chain games combined with Farcaster social graphs to build on-chain social games. In the Web2 era, whether it was Facebook, Renren, or QQ Space, these SNSs had achieved rapid growth through social + games, and this chemical reaction may still be true on the chain. Farcaster has established a high-quality social graph and an active community. Using Farcaster's social identity, it can help chain games quickly acquire customers, promote fission, and settle the community. The only thing missing is the emergence of playable chain games. I look forward to seeing more and more on-chain social games in the Farcaster ecosystem. At the same time, it can be combined with Farcaster's Frames, Actions and other functions to interact with the community more effectively and facilitate social interaction between different users. Social games will have more user stickiness.

Zora

Zora has always been closely connected with Farcaster. For example, many NFTs on Farcaster are issued in Zora on the Base chain or Zora chain; Zora supports prepaid gas through the Boost function, allowing users to mint NFTs directly in Farcaster's Frame without gas. Therefore, Farcaster is naturally the social layer of Zora dApp and Zora chain.

Focusing on the Zora chain, in April, the number of active addresses and transactions on the Zora chain reached a record high in April. This should be related to two reasons. First, Zora announced that it supports ERC20 tokens mint NFTs on different chains, which provides an application scenario for many memecoins, such as $DEGEN, $HIGHER and $CRASH on the Base chain, and the two leading memecoins $ENJOY and $IMAGINE on the Zora chain. The second reason is that $ENJOY and $IMAGINE have announced their respective creator incentive plans, which greatly increased users’ willingness to use the Zora chain. Minting with a comment has also become a habit for many Zora users. The two reasons complement each other and promote the rapid growth of the Zora chain and the two major scene memecoins.

https://twitter.com/AlanaDLevin/status/1778151713263747269/photo/2

$ENJOY is the largest memecoin on the Zora chain. Although it has the background of seedclub, it received a mediocre response at the beginning of its launch. It was not until early April that $ENGJOY launched its second round of airdrop plan that can be rewarded on the Zora chain. Therefore, $ENJOY has many application scenarios as a scene memecoin:

· Share with $ENJOY: $ENJOY also has a large number of meme images created around its logo blue ball and !!!

· Mint with $ENJOY: Zora supports minting through $ENJOY. There is also an exclusive exploration interface for NFTs that can be mined using $ENJOY on Zora.

· Tip with $ENJOY: $ENJOY's rewards are in the comment area of mint NFT, similar to $DEGEN's rewards in the casts comment area. Similarly, because the reward is a weekly share, it will be gone if you don't reward it, and it is not an on-chain token, so users are willing to reward others. In addition, the multimedia NFT client Surreal and the on-chain activity aggregation client Interface both support more convenient rewards in the comment area when minting Zora NFT in the App. This move has also made these two clients go from niche to well-known, which is another interactive win-win situation for Farcaster ecological projects.

https://warpcast.com/interface/0x4eb465a7

Similar to $ENJOY, $IMAGINE has also launched its own reward plan, which can also be rewarded in the comment area when minting Zora NFT. Today, $ENJOY and $IMAGINE have become an important part of the Zora chain creator economy, and more and more artists choose to publish their works on Zora to earn income.

To sum up, Farcaster, as a social layer, has become the base camp of Base and Zora L2, and has become an incubator for many different types of L3 and even L4. Of course, in theory, Farcaster can become the social layer of any chain, because any project on any chain can choose to open Channels on Farcaster and build a community. The openness of Frames also supports interaction with any chain for asset issuance, which may be different in specific form. Previously, the inscriptions of the BTC community and the NFT projects on SOL chose to start on Farcaster. It is just because of the founders, financing background, user habits and other reasons that Farcaster is closer to the Base chain and the Zora chain. Will more chains choose to embrace Farcaster in the future?

Being an enabler of FarFi

In the past period of time, we can see more and more SocialFi/CreatorFi applications built around Farcaster, such as:

· Drakula: onchain TikTok

· Clubcast: onchain Patreon

· AlfaFrens: onchain OnlyFans?

· Jam: onchain Instagram

….

I have been trying to find a suitable word to describe them, so let’s call it FarFi (Farcaster-based SocialFi ➔ Farcaster Finance). FarFi is an application built on Farcaster social identity with its own token economics. Most of them claim to be used to empower content creators or create a co-creation economy between creators and users.

FarFi has two important components, one is Farcaster and the other is Finance. Both of these are significantly different from other SocialFi in the Farcaster ecosystem. The short video app Drakula built on Farcaster has become popular in a short period of time, which has already demonstrated the key points of FarFi: Farcaster's open framework and composability provide the valuable on-chain social graph required for the cold start of the application from the technical point of view and quickly acquire customers, while scene memecoins represented by $DEGEN can play the role of Farcaster's native circulation currency to provide the asset liquidity required for the cold start of the application. I once said that Farcater + composable application Lego + $DEGEN economics = onchain social summer, so we saw FarFi apps springing up like mushrooms after rain in April.

For FarFi, I tried to classify them according to the objects they trade, which are generally tradable profiles, casts and channels. Moreover, most of them use the most widely used scene memecoin $DEGEN in the Farcaster ecosystem as the circulation currency within their applications. Farcaster as an enabler for FarFi

Tradable profiles

Since the launch of friend.tech last year, it has become very common to trade user profiles through keys based on bonding curves, and thus the transaction often has high fees, which are usually collected by the platform and shared by the creator. This model has become the first choice for building SocialFi applications based on Farcaster, except that here, profiles use Farcaster's social graph.

uncuts and farcards

uncuts.app and Farcards

Uncuts.app is a collectible card game launched by REKT, where users can collect and trade cards from different users and form teams. The strength of different cards is determined by their activity data on Farcaster. Farcards is similar to it. It is a trading card developed by @undefined based on mint.club for Farcaster users. Everyone can easily use its Frame to cast a card of their own and trade other people's cards. Cards also have different levels according to the user's activity on Farcaster, but more gameplay has not yet been released.

If it is just hyping identity cards, it seems a bit lacking in imagination. Everyone has already become aesthetically fatigued by this hype. It would be interesting to design a card game similar to Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering based on different user cards.

Clubcast

The biggest feature of ClubCast is that it enables token-gated casts. If you buy a user's club token, you can unlock and view the encrypted content it sends in clubcast.xyz and Farcaster's Frame.

https://warpcast.com/clubcast/0xf5b90b02

So it is a bit like Patreon and other membership sites, where certain content can be set up for only subscribed members to view. In terms of on-chain social platforms, this form of token-gated posts is also available in the Lens ecosystem client Orb, for example, you can set posts to be visible only to people who hold a certain NFT. I think this model should be an infrastructure, and there needs to be an application to support sending content that is only visible to subscribed members.

AlfaFrens

AlfaFrens is a SocialFi product led by @Vijay that provides exclusive content to subscribers, similar to friend.tech. Users spend $DEGEN to subscribe to Channels created by different creators (different from Farcaster's Channels), get exclusive information about creators in the Channel, and earn $ALFA at the same time. $ALFA can be used to stake investments in Channels and reap $DEGEN rewards. The more you stake a creator, the more $ALFA subscribers get.

https://warpcast.com/0xluo.eth/0x3a357774

The obvious difference from friend.tech is that it no longer uses the Key model based on Bonding curve, but applies a similar dual-token mining model to SocialFi. Channles' subscription fee is based on SuperFluid and is charged by time stream, and can also be withdrawn at any time.

AlfaFrens' biggest impact may be that it has re-raised a question: most SocialFi products now use various Bonding Curves, but is Bonding Curve the best economic model for SocialFi? **The increase in friend.tech's key price comes from the entry of new players, not value creation, so it is difficult to maintain in the long run. AlfaFrens has real subscribers, which is equivalent to introducing external income. This is an extremely rare non-Ponzi model that is not a PVP arena, so it may be more long-lived. Of course, this requires creators to create truly valuable content and cultivate real relationships with subscribers to achieve a positive cycle.

In addition, the subscription model is more effective in preventing speculators from hoarding and arbitrage than the key model without supply. The subscription model also does not have price fluctuations of "people", and it also avoids the moral concerns of creators' reputations, as Joan Westenberg said:

Binding a personal brand to a volatile and short-lived token or key will have lasting negative consequences. If such a key ultimately fails to meet expectations or its value drops sharply (which is a matter of time), the creator's reputation will suffer permanent damage.

Tradable casts

The above often treats "people" as tradable commodities, and also focuses on trading the content itself. For example, Tiser supports calling Frame through Action to buy and sell a Cast, which well implements Casts trading within Farcaster.

Jam is a Farcaster creator economy client, so it first has the function of posting and browsing in its APP, but the post must be accompanied by a picture, so it is called onchain Instagram. In addition, it currently supports trading casts and Profile keys at the same time, and its trading volume exceeded 10 million US dollars within 72 hours of its initial launch. It is worth mentioning that although the trading casts adopts the pricing model of bonding curve, there can only be one holder at the same time, which is equivalent to auctioning casts in turns, which reduces the arbitrage of speculators to a certain extent, making the purchase of casts closer to sponsoring creators.

Top casts and keys page on Jam.so

Tradable channels

Now in Warpcast, there is already a Channel Pass that empowers channel owners. Channel owners can use Channel Pass to set a certain number of Warps as a posting entry threshold to reduce the release of spam within the channel, but this is not on-chain finance, so there is no exit mechanism for subscribers to the channel.

Currently, the only known hope to add SocialFi elements to Channels is Degencast, which was developed by Liang and is about to be launched. It claims to $DEGEN Channels. How it specifically empowers Channels remains to be seen.

Of course, the possibilities of FarFi are far more than this. Relying on the open and composable Farcaster protocol, there may be more scenarios that can be empowered by token economics. The media of communication can be text, sound or video, and FarFi products in different vertical fields can also appear. For example, the voice chat tool FarHouse claims that it will also join the token-gated spaces model in the future.

In general, the openness and composability of Farcaster as a protocol allow these FarFi products to be built quickly. At the same time, $DEGEN gradually grows into the liquidity layer of the Farcaster ecosystem, which also makes such products confident to launch. Of course, there are also concerns at present. Many FarFi products can easily disperse the energy of the community, which will also disperse the liquidity of participation. If the product needs to create additional content, the energy of the content creator will also be dispersed; if the product does not come with its own creative content, it is easy to become a simple token hype, which is difficult to sustain.

Of course, the most important point is that knowledge-paying products must really have knowledge, and the creator economy needs real creators and good content. Only in this way can real consumers pay for it and form a long-term and stable creator economy model.

Conclusion

I have reviewed some of the more impressive content on Farcaster in April in a fluent and flowing way, hoping to provide some reference for friends who want to understand the Farcaster ecosystem.

Farcaster will continue to be an open and composable social protocol in the future, giving birth to a variety of on-chain applications, and at the same time supporting the ecosystem of different public chains as a social layer. Farcaster in May is still worth looking forward to. The Farcaster Summit Farcon is about to be held. I believe that the gathering of ecosystem builders will spark more sparks. Even if the crypto market is about to storm again, the developer ecology and community culture here at Farcaster make me willing to continue to be an optimist.

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