Hello hello
This marks my first newsletter/ post here (transferred from substack since couldn't get started) so please take it easy on me. Lately I jumped in yet another rabbit hole and figured might as well share some updates.
It's been a slow 2 years. And while the 'building' never stopped, we continued to reminiscence the good old days. The conferences began to blur all together in a collective memory we shared hoping from one to another. It wasn't until December that I finally felt a wake-up call that it's time to step away from this lucid dream. You probably felt it too - if you've been around long enough, you know the feeling of new energy bursting in.
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Long story short, the past week I spent on Warpcast, a social media app similar to X which is a flagship client of Farcaster, a decentralized protocol providing interoperability for social apps. Farcaster is interesting as it carries the essence of early internet - where users would own their audience and have freedom of mobility. If you'd like to learn more, this article gets more detailed on the technicalities.
Warpcast user growth has accelerated dramatically in the last few days (No111 yesterday and No39 in Social Networks on the app store today). The sign up is simple and if you want can use my invite link. The content on the app is divided into channels, i.e. /gen-art or /founders , where users find groups of interest and can select which channel to share their casts (posts).
The Art 🤌
An exciting element to observe here is how the culture is shaping the app; community co-creation lies at the core of Farcaster. The innovation has been also brought forward through the introduction of Frames. A Frame lets you turn any cast into an interactive app. A few days ago, Bankless shared an interesting overview of Frames that you can check out here. There have been many creative use-cases on the list, starting from minting straight from the app (Manifold even has an option to mint NFTs specifically through Warpcast) to playing DOOM!
Oh yes, the art! The seamlessness of the Frames experience is facilitating artist discovery and collection. However, it is a little early to provide a guide on best practices as many of the mints have been speculative - I strongly advise artists to explore the platform and play around with what's possible, as there are new features every day. I will probably return to this in my next episode.
For now, I'll highlight some of the wonderful art that rose as an inspiration from the platform itself. The thing is, there's a culture of its own growing which you notice through small details throughout the feed. For example, specimen No1, is $DEGEN, the sort of de facto meme coin, with its own channel, NFT collections, and even button - if you type $DEGEN the "like" button changes to a top hat icon 🎩 , which is also the logo of the coin.
You can spot people leaving certain numbers of $DEGEN tips in the comments of popular posts. This "tipping" started off somewhere between farming for Airdrop and showing appreciation for the post, however, by now I think it's just become part of the platform behaviour... like "gm" or "wowow", another native jargon with its accompanied buttons.
Some of the early collections to note is the OG Frame, airdropped to early active users (and a 2.5eth floor rn) and FarCats, a hilarious collection that just "makes sense" if you know what I mean. In the latter collection, each cat is a different medium and genre, but they all share the Warpcast's signature purple - paying tribute to the app branding. The collection was made by the early adopter @0xen, and you can read its story here.
Another delight has been spotting @sgt_sl8termelon, an incredible artists that I believe is still under the radar for many. His collection of Degen Haberdashers took several days to mint out, but has now become a symbol of $DEGEN association and the hats can be spotted across the profile pictures of many. (including moi!)
It's tied to funding their treasury and LP position rewards stuff.
It's comprised of fun…
Last but not least has been the latest appearance of Jack Butcher, or now he's just "Jack" 😏 I wonder what's he cooking? Ofcourse there's an /opepen channel already!
There are many many more updates to share, but I might leave these for the next episode and let you absorb this for now.
You can find me on @aart and once you're there, please say hi! If you made it this far it really means a lot ^_^
