Original title: Farcaster April Notes: Open Protocols, Social Layer and FarFi

Original author: 0xluo.eth, Farcaster Frontier Explorer

Many things happened on Farcaster in April, and Farcaster's daily activity 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 said goodbye 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 could only try to disassemble them and choose several different dimensions to discuss.

Being an open protocol

Let’s start with the Farcaster protocol and the main client Warpcast, which are led by the team. Farcaster launched the Actions feature this month, which is another important feature update after Channels and Frames. The Actions feature allows you to interact with Casts by clicking below Casts, such as liking, translating, giving rewards, viewing information, etc. You can also call Frames for more interactions.

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

In addition, it is interesting that @nbragg quickly developed a hot potato 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 it out as quickly as possible. 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 that can make full use of the Actions function and link with Frames and other functions to expand their gameplay in Farcaster and better promote fission in Farcaster with their main games.

The team is still working hard on many small details to improve the user experience (see /fc-updates for updates), such as setting the Priority mode of information flow and notifications in Warpcast to reduce the impact of spammy accounts. It is also 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 also growing stronger. They allow you to use them in an emergency when Warpcast crashes due to heavy traffic, which also shows the openness of Farcaster as a protocol. Recently, @slokh launched nook, which currently 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 content of interest.

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 hold activities on Farcaster, and claimed that it would also support cross-platform posting of Lens and Farcaster in the future. I believe that 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 more convenient browsing of articles on Mirror and Farcaster's native blog platform Paragraph, becoming a large and comprehensive on-chain social aggregation platform.

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

Being a social layer

The main tokens and NFT assets in the Farcaster ecosystem are currently 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. Naturally, it also serves as the social layer of L2, L3 and L4 where these memecoins are located, 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 means 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:

Such tokens are launched as Schelling points for decentralized communities with shared values and missions, where 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 space 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, which can be shared, rewarded, minted, traded, and constructed through $DEGEN.

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

Tip with $DEGEN: $DEGEN is the second round of airdrops, that is, each person has a certain amount of rewards per day, and can give rewards in the comment area of other casts. 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 minting platforms already support minting NFTs with $DEGEN. Zora also has an exclusive exploration interface for NFTs that can be mined with $DEGEN.

· Trade with $DEGEN: Since the short video app Drakula, the team club app Bracket.game, the prediction platform Perl.xyz and more and more Farcaster ecosystem applications support the use of $DEGEN for transactions. In the next FarFi chapter, you will see that most of the SocialFi products in the Farcaster ecosystem use $DEGEN as their circulating currency. 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 high 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 the growth flywheel of the Degen L3 ecosystem and its community by building DAO, games, infrastructure, and L4 based on Degen L3.

At present, 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 in DEGEN bonuses. As these projects are launched one after another, I believe that Degen L3 will become more dynamic.

https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity

Base

In the past month, we can see Jesse Pollak, the head of Base chain, everywhere starting the crazy sales mode, frantically recommending various projects on the Base chain, and commenting "based" everywhere. Under the background of Cancun upgrade to reduce transaction costs, Coinbase's full support and strategic cooperation with OP, Base chain continued its rapid growth in March, and TPS ranked 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 NFTs in the Base ecosystem also experienced explosive growth. For a few days, the entire OpenSea homepage was filled with 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 large-scale issuance of memecoins and NFTs on the Base chain from Farcaster. 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 mfer coin ($mfer) on the Base chain at the end of last month, many NFT projects have launched their memecoins. For example, Nouns DAO community member @dotnouns raised funds through Party.app in April to launch memecoin Noggles ($NOGS), which was 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 attracted much attention and was launched in the Farcaster ecosystem. Its iconic symbol ↑ and artworks created with it as an element can be seen everywhere in Farcaster, which once caused major Vs 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 a good name and symbol that is easy to understand and spread. James Beck believes that Higher provides a template that is easy to follow, a collection of artworks on Zora, and an attractive token that allows everyone to participate, thus 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

Since its release, Onchain Gaias NFT on the Base chain has been highly popular in the Farcaster community. In April, @ciniz released Zora NFT to detail its vision as "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, but we can only wait and see.

There are also interactive generative art swatches created by artist @jvmi. It was amazing when I discovered 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 NFT 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 services, aiming to attract more users to participate in on-chain activities through exclusive chains through games and social scoring mechanisms.

The common feature of these projects rooted in Farcaster is that by operating the community on Farcaster and accumulating reputation, they are able to quickly gain 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 the promotion and interaction of the main body of the game in the Farcaster community. CropXYZ, another popular game on Farcaster, which 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. By using Farcaster's social identity, chain games can quickly acquire customers, promote fission, and accumulate communities. 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 interactions 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 prepaying 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. The first is that Zora announced that it supports ERC20 token mint NFT 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. Mint 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 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 mediocre response at the beginning of its launch. It was not until early April that $ENJOY launched its second round of airdrop plan that can be rewarded on the Zora chain. Therefore, as a scene memecoin, $ENJOY has many application scenarios:

· Share with $ENJOY: $ENJOY also has a lot of meme creations around its logo, the blue ball and !!!.

· Mint with $ENJOY: Zora supports minting through $ENJOY. Zora also has a dedicated exploration interface for NFTs that can be mined using $ENJOY.

Tip with $ENJOY: $ENJOY is rewarded in the comment area of mint NFT, similar to $DEGEN in the cast comment area. Similarly, because the reward is a weekly share, it will be lost if you don’t reward, 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 also makes these two clients go from niche to well-known, which is another interactive win-win situation for the Farcaster ecological project.

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

Similar to $ENJOY, $IMAGINE has also launched its own reward plan, which can also be rewarded in the comment section when minting Zora NFT. Today, both $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.

All in all, Farcaster, as a social layer, has become the base camp of Base and Zora, two L2s, 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, inscriptions from the BTC community and NFT projects on SOL chose to start on Farcaster. It’s just that due to the founder, financing background, user habits and other reasons, 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

Over 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 which 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 them are significantly different from other SocialFi in the Farcaster ecosystem. The short video application Drakula built on Farcaster has become popular in a short period of time, which has already explained 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 ecological 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 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 currency in circulation within their applications.

Farcaster as an enabler for FarFi

Tradable profiles

Since the launch of friend.tech last year, the model of trading user profiles through keys based on bonding curves has become very common, and its transactions often have high fees, which are generally collected by the platform and shared by the creators. This model has become the first choice for building SocialFi applications based on Farcaster, but here, profiles use Farcaster's social graph.

uncuts and farcards

uncuts.app and Farcards

Uncuts.app is a collectible card game launched by REKT. 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 somewhat similar to it. It is a collectible card game exclusively for Farcaster users developed by @undefined based on mint.club. Everyone can easily use its frame to forge 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 we just hype identity cards, it seems a bit unimaginative and everyone is already tired of this kind of hype. It would be interesting to design a card game like 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 purchase a user's club token, you can unlock and view the encrypted content it sends in club cast. xyz and Farcaster's Frame.

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

Therefore, it is somewhat similar to membership websites such as Patreon, where certain content can be set to be viewed only by users who have subscribed to the membership. In terms of on-chain social platforms, this form of token-gated posts is also available in the Lens ecological client Orb, for example, you can set a post so that only people who hold a certain NFT can see it. I think this model should be an infrastructure, and there needs to be an application to support the sending of content that is only visible to subscribed members.

AlfaFrens

AlfaFrens is a SocialFi product developed by @Vijay that is similar to friend.tech and provides exclusive content to subscribers. 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. $ALFA can be used to stake and invest in Channels to receive $DEGEN rewards. The more a creator stakes, the more $ALFA a subscriber will 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. The subscription fee of Channles is based on SuperFluid and is charged by time stream, and you can also quit at any time.

The biggest impact of AlfaFrens may be that it has re-raised a question: Now most SocialFi products are using various Bonding Curves, but is Bonding Curve the best economic model for SocialFi? The increase in the key price of friend.tech comes from the addition 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. In other words, 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 the price fluctuations of "people", and it also avoids the moral concerns of the creator's reputation, as Joan Westenberg said:

Tying one’s personal brand to a volatile and short-lived token or key will have lasting negative consequences. If the key ultimately fails to live up to expectations or drops significantly in value (which is bound to happen sooner or later), the creator’s reputation will suffer permanent damage.

Tradable casts

The above often treats "people" as tradable commodities, and some focus on trading the content itself. For example, Tiser supports calling Frame through Action to buy and sell a Cast, which well implements Cast s 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 and makes the purchase of casts closer to sponsoring creators.

Top casts and keys page on Jam.so

Tradable channels

Now within 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 the entry threshold for posting, reducing the posting of spam within the channel. However, this is not on-chain finance, so there is no exit mechanism for channel subscribers.

Currently, the only known company that hopes to add SocialFi elements to Channels is Degencast, which is developed by Liang and is about to be launched. It claims to $DEGEN Channels. How it will specifically empower Channels remains to be seen.

Of course, FarFi’s possibilities 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 there may be FarFi products in different vertical fields. 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, and the gradual growth of $DEGEN into the liquidity layer of the Farcaster ecosystem also gives confidence to launch such products. Of course, there are also concerns at present. Many FarFi products can easily disperse the community's energy, which will also disperse the liquidity of participants. If the product needs to create additional content, the energy of the content creators will also be dispersed; if the product does not come with its own creative content, it will easily become a simple token speculation, which is difficult to maintain.

Of course, the most important point is that knowledge-based paid products must have real 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 most impressive things I saw on Farcaster in April in a fluent and diary-like manner. I hope it can 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, and 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 full of storms, the developer ecology and community culture of Farcaster make me willing to continue to be an optimist.