Welcome to Season 2, Episode 5 of The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show, a podcast for the Farcaster middle class.
Clips:
The Token got more likely (+dwr's response) https://drakula.app/post/d2c559ec-44c2-4fc0-953b-15b5ca114025?invite=Nhbkqw&mintReferral=0x8D46349D6c41098b5f2a84E82250041E83731a51
I was playing Framedl https://drakula.app/post/fe2defda-ab2b-4fb2-835f-44079ecba1b7?invite=Nhbkqw&mintReferral=0x8D46349D6c41098b5f2a84E82250041E83731a51
BeavChris sez quis custodiet ipsos custodes https://drakula.app/post/8b2ac553-2ad0-4946-bed1-25eba3007555?invite=Nhbkqw&mintReferral=0x8D46349D6c41098b5f2a84E82250041E83731a51
The Quidli frame drop is fair https://drakula.app/post/6f8080fc-4547-47ae-9e85-c6ba261298f3?invite=Nhbkqw&mintReferral=0x8D46349D6c41098b5f2a84E82250041E83731a51
BeavChris asks the hard questions https://drakula.app/post/5ac49439-6893-4abf-acb2-9a4a95d1af96?invite=Nhbkqw&mintReferral=0x8D46349D6c41098b5f2a84E82250041E83731a51
Watch the episode on Zora, and Mint to collect.
Summary
In this second-to-last episode of The BCBH Show, we talked about the likelihood of a Warpcast airdrop and @artlu's favorite Farcaster projects, such as FarCats NFT and $DEGEN project. They discuss the integration of Quidli for facilitating frame drops and distributing tokens, while also spotlighting alt-clients like FarQuest and Firefly.
This episode was sponsored by Quidli.
Sponsor this spot for 0.1 ETH (90 seconds for 0.05 ETH).
Transcript
BeavChris
 Hello, we might be live. GM. GM. As usual, we have our nobody's here yet banter. I will miss this a lot as this is our penultimate episode. I hope that's the correct word for like second to last.
BArt-Head
Yeah, welcome to the second to last episode of The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show. We are on season two, episode five.
BeavChris
We're streaming on Unlonely. We're minting on Zora on the base chain, blogging on Paragraph with the help of Descript and ChatGPT and sometimes Claude Sonnet when I get tired of ChatGPT. Sharing clips on Drakula and our presence is managed by Seemore.TV. And now we also have our calendar reminders from Matthew at events. Caster.
BArt-Head
I got some dms or dcs from eventsbot.
BeavChris
Oh. Good. You should be. I think it really shows though right now 'cause you can see all the events that are going on live like for everybody. And I think yesterday they were like, just if you can spend all day here on Farcaster , it's like Disneyland.
Yeah. So what trouble have you gotten into? Oh, we have people in the chat. Oh, welcome. Welcome. We're just starting the show, and I want to preface this by saying that indeed the show notes is full of notes from Art, BArt-Head, as he has quite a lot to say and I will, as usual, interject and call him out as necessary.
And of course, you in the chat audience are always welcome to call everybody out. Yeah,
BArt-Head
Welcome. Thank you so much to everyone for joining us and chatting with us. I had a lot on my mind. Oh,
BeavChris
I'm sorry. I have to interject right now because I realized we forgot that I mentioned something really important.
Our sponsor for this episode is quietly sitting in the green room as we're neglecting him. Quidli is sponsoring this episode today. And Justin, who is the founder, co-founder of Quidli will be joining us to chat about the product. And of course, like many of you may be the recipient of a little bonus today.
BArt-Head
Yeah, top of the stream, I'll mention we just did two Quidli drops, one in ETH. If you have been following our channel on Warpcast and you have minted our episodes on Base, Zora, and Paragraph, you received some ETH in your wallet about 30 minutes ago. And if you follow our channel and have locked some $DEGEN in the Degen Vault, you received some $DEGEN in your wallet this morning.
And this is a, a nice new feature that Quidli has released, which allows you to gate your drops by NFT holdings as well as ERC-20 holdings. That helps us to target our drops a little bit more precisely. We looked at our channel, there are some 230 or 245 followers on our channel. We're not sure how many have, have actually watched our show and we have real money.
So this real money, we want more of it to go to our real fans than to people who have maybe clicked one time out of curiosity. And Quidli offers some really easy ways to mix and match different requirements. For example, and this makes me almost want to gag or puke, you can and you can send ETH, $DEGEN, any token to people based on filtering on the Power Badge.
BeavChris
Oh
BArt-Head
and that is a choice that that Quidli have made to offer you the ability to gate your drops by Power Badge. You can also
BeavChris
We didn't do that, right? I thought we were super ironic and we did that.
BArt-Head
Yeah, this time we did not do that. And I will never do that. If you do, that's your own permissionless keys to our crypto.
BeavChris
Oh my God. Don't be so hilarious. If after all this in the end, you're like, Oh yeah, we also drop stuff only to power badge holders.
BArt-Head
Yeah. I can't tell who's real, who's not. So I have to rely on the power badge to tell. Oh, fortunately I have a brain and I have different ways to do that. So we chose to split some of our drops to our minters, some of our drops to our, our supporters who also happen to be $DEGEN supporters. And, we're happy to share the contracts or, are all on chain. The transactions are there and they're reported by different bots. So there's really basically, nothing to hide.
BeavChris
Like, where did, okay, as someone who's been receiving, I don't know why I'm getting random optimism coming into my wallet. It's really confusing. Who actually dropped, is it from your account or from the BCBH Show ENS?
BArt-Head
Yeah the ETH on base came from the BCBH show. The intern actually did the clicking.
But, the $DEGEN came from my account, so that's not, that's coming from fafo.artlu.eth. And It should, I'm not sure if it arrives from the Quidli contract or from me. So it depends on your wallet, if it reads through the contract interaction to find out where the source of it was, or if it, if the transaction just shows that it came from the Quidli smart contract.
BeavChris
And
BArt-Head
Just to share with people, to distribute to over a hundred addresses, amounts of value that's $250. It cost about $2 across two transactions. And I had to make no SQL calls. I had to write zero code. I just had to copy paste some details into the Quidli frame. And let that smart contract handle the full distribution in an efficient way.
That's a, that's quite powerful. And it shows that Quidli has been building for a while and Justin can tell us about this, but they're leveraging a lot of this to, to this infrastructure, to interact with the Farcaster ecosystem. But Quidli is multi chain, multi account and able to handle lots of different things as Christin, you've discovered some Telegram integrations too.
BeavChris
Yes, I was as you said, sneakily onboarded by Justin into Quidli's telegram function. This is really powerful. And again, like we can talk about more about all these different ways you can use Quidli in our sponsor segment.
BArt-Head
Yeah but this week I actually wanted to spend most of our time with our audience sharing with you guys some of my most positive memories of my Farcaster experience and my biggest hopes for the ecosystem.
But to start out this week, we do go a little bit into what trouble we've gotten into. And I've been thinking a lot, about why people, WTF people come to Farcaster. And one of the really important reasons is to get paid. And this was true even before Degen and even before tipping. Degen and these meme coins, are paying each other in a little bit of, a little bit of a circle jerk, but we're also paying each other from the market, from future expectations in a little bit of a pump and dump.
And I don't like participating in circle jerks or pump and dumps. And there was another reason why people participate in Farcaster, even if they don't care about any of that. And that's the reason that people participate in various crypto projects and look very closely at the, the fundraising details and the backing of these projects, which is that this so-, decentralized social network and protocol and client are being built very strongly by a team, deep connections within the crypto industry, as well as a quite a large war chest of funds that they've raised from VCs. And, anybody in the world, especially outside of America will look at it and say, Oh, crypto project with a lot of money. They're going to want to expand their user base beyond the U.S. into the world and in doing so they will do some airdrops or issue some tokens and I want some tokens or I want some airdrops. So there are plenty of airdrop farmers on Warpcast in various forms and they pursue projects with lots of money. So Warpcast has lots of money. It has tons of money.
It's also backed by some of the key names of VCs and investors within the crypto space. So, recently with the political situation in the U.S., specifically around the crypto industry, I noted that the crypto industry and regulations in crypto are changing. And outside of just crypto, but related to politics, it's become much more likely that the U S will become more crypto friendly.
And that's something that a lot of us are cheering on. And the secondary impact of that is that there will be ETFs, for example, that probably
BeavChris
recently an Ethereum ETF, right?
BArt-Head
I think it's either five or nine of them are going to come out soon. And there's going to be various forms, including right after the ETFs come out, there's going to be Solana ETFs or ETFs with Bitcoin, ETH and Solana.
BeavChris
And
BArt-Head
they're going to stretch the limits of, they're already planning it, but they're going to stretch the limits of what is a security because it's in crypto's, the crypto industry's interests for certain things not to be considered as securities and be available to the public. At the same time,
BeavChris
Is this true of both if either Republican or Democratic candidate wins?
BArt-Head
So there are dynamics of power and fundraising and the need to win elections and the likelihood. So nobody knows what the future will hold, but the likelihood is that the Democrats that are, who are currently behind will need to move their positioning closer to the crypto industry and we can see signs like Kamala Harris is speaking at the BTC event, I believe, or I'm not sure if this is true or not, but it's being floated.
And if she does, it will be a, it will be interesting that she will not listen to Israel, but she is very receptive to listening to BTC heads. So there will be things that happen and this is generally around BTC and ETH, but it is extremely important to the crypto industry to have token based fundraising mechanisms be approved and be working for US investors.
And so at some point in the next four years, possibly eight years, the crypto industry will decide that they need a poster child to try a token based distribution and fundraise. So let's think, are there well connected, highly reputable founders with successful projects who have not raised a token yet, who have not issued a token yet or distributed token yet. Who would be a very useful case to, to test the system and also open the floodgates for all the other projects that these VCs have invested in.
BeavChris
I feel like, I feel the need to be like NFA, right now.
Our predictions and they have not come true consistently. Please. So
BArt-Head
this is my analysis personally.
And I want to actually, this is a good time. I posted this, or I casted this on Farcaster. And I said the likelihood of a token, of a Warpcast token, has increased in my mind about, five times over the last couple of weeks, the likelihood of such a thing.
BeavChris
Really? Oh, we're all joking
BArt-Head
finger in the air because Warpcast isn't, they just raised a Series A, they will need to raise another round and their investors are not here to give them money for the longterm. Their investors are here to make a return.
BeavChris
And
BArt-Head
within the investors portfolios, I've gone through and looked at which ones are going to be very interesting to release a token to the general public.
And there's several that you can circle. One that's obvious that people talk about often is WorldCoin with Sam Altman. Now they do have a token, it's out already. So they will be,
BeavChris
that's a creepy eye coin, isn't it?
BArt-Head
They do have an eye scanning orb. There are plenty of people on Farcaster who support the project and have, have maybe looked deeper into the technology behind it than the pure creepiness of it and have decided that actually it's, it's stronger than creepy. But there's also plenty of people in Farcaster and also in the general public that find it creepy.
So if that's too creepy, let's find some people who are less creepy, but still.
BeavChris
As,
BArt-Head
With sterling reputations and connections and history of executing properly. So you circle the teams and you circle the projects and, um, how do you get friendly
BeavChris
with
BArt-Head
the people who are distributing the token so that you get some.
There are different methods that you might do. So I posted this, or I casted this on Farcaster, saying that the likelihood of a token has increased over the past couple of weeks. And in my mind, it's about 5x higher than it used to be. So in reality
BeavChris
What should one do? Do you, do, should we like, shit post more? Should we behave and get in line and do more streaks? Like, how do you make sure you don't get left out?
BArt-Head
Yeah I think if you think that there will be a token drop, you should not be in the group of users who have put their blood, sweat and tears into growing the network who get banned or kicked out of such an allocation.
And, you got to make sure you're in the right in-group and you're on the right side of the decision makers. And it's up to you to figure out who's the decision makers, and there are different projects, but you could become a fan of people who are trying to build alt clients, but if the airdrop is coming, not to the alt client users, but to the Warpcast users, that would change your decision making.
Now, I do want to clarify that there was a reply, there was one reply to my cast. Not many people saying, oh yeah, you're right, or not many people thinking, saying, no, you're wrong. I think it's
BeavChris
because number one, even I'm like, have I seen that cast? And number two, was it written in such a cryptic way that no one understood it?
BArt-Head
I wrote it very clearly.
BeavChris
Oh,
BArt-Head
okay. I said, the likelihood of a Warpcast Token Drop will be high. And, by the way, it will not be sent to Farcaster users.
BeavChris
Oh, dang. That is scary that I did not see your cast.
BArt-Head
You didn't see it, but someone did. And someone with a pretty wide distribution did see it and reply to it. So anybody who's following dwr.eth will see that he replied to my cast and I'll read out his response.
BeavChris
Wow, that is scary. That I did not see at all then. Wow.
BArt-Head
His response is there is no special incentive now or in the future for using Warpcast. So this was signed by dwr.eth. It's protected by all the crypto that protects our accounts on Farcaster or on Warpcast.
He's verified his account with his ENS. So for someone to spoof such a cast would require you to have access to his ENS and that's protected.
BeavChris
Yeah, that's real.
BArt-Head
So this is from the real DWR, not from.
BeavChris
Randomarrow.
BArt-Head
Ran Domero, or not from dwp. eth, or randomerror. eth. This is from the real dwr.eth. So you can listen to either me or dwr.
BeavChris
I say, Here's the thing, did he say warpcast and not farcaster?
BArt-Head
He said warp, there is no special incentive now or in the future for using warpcast.
BeavChris
So having worked in industries where people like me have to craft these sentences, then that leaves room for the tokens or whatever for using the protocol.
Sure, you can lawyer read that statement. I don't think DWR is a lawyer, and I don't think he intends to, to make a very careful, carefully scripted statement. He intends, I think he intends to give a message that there's no incentive coming. I can see the clouds and predict that things are happening.
And he actually is the decision maker. So he has some say. He's one of two co-founders and he answers to investors. So my view is that the investor's needs are very heavy to have some team have a successful token distribution, and it behooves you to bet on those teams, on those different things in the sense of participating in the crypto industry's growth specifically in the United States, to the norm, to the crowd of normies, which, you know we mostly all hope for outside of some crazy punk
BeavChris
So I'm confused. So you're saying that there is no token now.
BArt-Head
I'm saying currently there is no token, but, and DWR says there's no special incentive now or in the future for using Warpcast. I still think that the investors will push the Warpcast team to issue a token
BeavChris
and
BArt-Head
they will have to make a determination at that point, what to do, how to do it and how to pursue their own, personal advantage and what they're working for. Their own personal goals, their North star, et cetera. So because of the changes in the world around us, participating in Warpcast is, is a more positive way than before to. Get a little bit of hope for a future airdrop or a future token that may or may not come.
BeavChris
I hope the audience doesn't feel like they just listened to 10 minutes of nothing burger.
BArt-Head
So my takeaway is that as we cheer for ETFs, the likelihood of a Warpcast token or a Farcaster token, whatever you want to call it, has increased in a similar way, in the same direction. The magnitude's maybe not the same.
BeavChris
I think okay, the reason why I'm, like, agreeing with this is because Kekkers has said something similar many times.
If you actually follow her Twitter accounts, of course, she says it very eloquently snarkily as usual. But I think she also thinks that there's this, my, in order to grow this place. We may not have a choice. So maybe in a way it's good that we're dipping right now. So for something interesting to happen so along the same lines
BArt-Head
Investors have said the same thing like on the record, some Warpcast investors have said It is likely that there will be a token at some point. I'll point out too in traditional finance, People make claims about their plans all the time and they change them. Like, circumstances change. So there's, things change all the time.
BeavChris
Speaking of things changing, I think maybe it's a good time for us to pull our sad in the green room, Justin onto the stage. Yeah, so let me do that. I hope I gave you plenty of heads up. Just welcome. Welcome. You are live.
Justin
Can you hear me?
BeavChris
I need to figure out where to put you. Yes.
BArt-Head
Hi Justin, I can hear you.
Justin
Sorry. I was playing framedl. Shout out ds8.
BeavChris
So here's the thing. When someone's in the green room in StreamYard, I can see their face and I was like I can't tell whether Justin's falling asleep or really focused on something. So I'm glad you clarified that it was framedl though.
Justin
I think it's Pro, so I'm not giving away anything. The second letter was Y, and I don't know what second letter Y works. What the hell is going on? I'm sorry, I don't have the wigs or anything. I do have a TLDR hat on right now at the moment.
BeavChris
Very nice. Well, Yeah for sure. Welcome. Yeah, I think now is a great little segment to talk more about the Quidli drop, so Art take it away since you were the one pressing the buttons though. I've used it myself for one of our earlier channel raindrop thing. Do you call it raindrop or just a quidli drop? I wanna make sure I'm using the right terminology.
Justin
Oh, I dunno if it's been accepted terminology, but we were trying to coin frame drop for a while, .
BeavChris
Oh, okay. All right. All right. Frame drop from Quidli. And it was very easy to use.
Justin
Oh, thank you. Oh, by the way, Art, um, it is a smart contract and it's more of a pass through. So it does go through the smart contract. But it's, we don't control that, obviously.
BArt-Head
Cool. Yeah I think the wallets, some wallets will actually look through and tell you where it came from. And then some, most wallets will say it came from a smart contract.
Justin
And it's still coming from you technically, but in the details you can see that it passes through our smart contract.
BArt-Head
Yeah, it's cool. We used Quidli Frame Drop, I guess on the day that you announced it, for The BCBH Show. And we just dropped some, yeah, some $DEGEN that I wish we had back.
BeavChris
Hey,
BArt-Head
we dropped it on our channel followers back when the channel was half as big as before. And I think most of those followers did not know that we gave them money and they never said, yeah, I would say most of them, they never said thank you. And I think maybe most of them didn't even notice it.
BeavChris
So here's an example of engineer versus marketer brain, because I had so many debates with art about this, where I was like, if you sneak some money into people's wallet without telling them a billion times, no one's going to know they received anything. Like most of the joy of these receiving these things, it's the notification, not the actual money.
BArt-Head
Yeah. We're doing this now ourselves. By casting about it very often to the point where we might get flagged as spam, but that's okay because it's called marketing, not spam. But we did two drops today, one in ETH to our channel followers who have minted our episodes.
So that was a nice kind of combination filter. And then we did another drop, which like Justin, you can tell us that if we're the first to do this, we, we gated it on the channel followers who have locked $DEGEN in the Degen Vault and that was more people than the people who minted our episode.
So that allowed us to reach more people, but it did require them to, to lock some $DEGEN in order to receive some of this.
Justin
Yeah, to my, it's for all intents and purposes, permissionless. Still on the front end, we need to enable the token, but the contract itself is permissionless. To my knowledge, I haven't dug through the contract this morning after you did it, but I don't think anyone else has used the LDEGEN before. Shout out $DEGEN community, when we're Jacek. Yassik? Jacek? Is, how did we say?
BArt-Head
I'm saying Jacek.
Justin
Okay, and then Wake. And there's like another guy now, right?
BArt-Head
Cadillion.
Justin
Was he always there? I've only noticed him recently. I know who Cadillion is actually, but I didn't know that he was part of the Degen team. Shout out Orange DAO.
BArt-Head
Oh yeah, he came from Orange. Maybe, we, Justin, you and I figured out how to do this. Because when you lock your $DEGEN in the $DEGEN vault, they actually give you an LDEGEN token, and that's an ERC 20.
So all we had to do is find the contract address and paste it into the Quidli frame as an ERC 20. So really shout out to permissionlessness, shout out to composability and shout out to on chain activities related to the $DEGEN ecosystem.
Justin
I think it also says a lot about building openly, or at least collaborating openly. Because when Art first asked us to do this, about locked degen. We were like, oh, how could we like do a callback to the locked contract? Like how would we be able to know that it would stake? How could we make that connection? but then we like It was such a more simpler solution. We were trying to over engineer this solution and then Art was like, but yeah It's its own token.
You get back a token when you lock it up. And yeah, we didn't even have to do anything extra. We just pulled the smart contract address like normal for any ERC-20 filter that's always been available for the past few weeks. And yeah, that's simplified the entire, otherwise we were just like, how the hell are we gonna, it's going to take some time to be able to pull like a locked contract up in here.
But so yeah, openly, I think working together is also a shoutout.
BArt-Head
Can you tell us a little bit more about Quidli? What we see is a frame and a really beautiful website. And what I see also is some of the, the user flows being very well thought out for specifically for a frame drop process. But Quidli clearly does more than frame drops. You've been working on it way before there was $DEGEN or frames.
Justin
Yeah, I feel like in this portion, for people watching it, there should be like a The paid promotion thing somewhere here because obviously we sponsored, there's a, an organic tell us about, but yeah. We have, I always like when other people explain what we do because I think they have a better grasp and explain it much simpler than I do.
It turns out, like I was talking to Jacob yesterday and he was like, give me a one liner for what you did. And I sent him something and he was like, this sucks. And he came up with something much better without even, working on our product, talking to our users and stuff like that. But I guess the dumb, my way of explaining it is it's a web3 middle layer for like social and collaboration apps.
Yeah, it's a bit deeper than Farcaster. I didn't really show what I did on Farcaster prior to launching our frame because Yeah,
BeavChris
You are all norm core and you only post norm core things. And it was actually really hard to figure out that you are a web 3 builder.
Justin
Yeah.
BeavChris
Justin unmasked.
Justin
Yeah. This could all be a psyop. This isn't even just no, but yeah, we basically enable, I think $DEGEN tipping, but you can do it from Discord, you can do it from Slack, you can do it from Telegram and GitHub. So Farcaster was a great experiment because it was one of the first more fully non custodial, permissionless, decentralized, whatever buzzword you want to use, integrations we built.
And it's great to have a more crypto native web3 audience to build exclusively for on Farcaster because on our other integrations, we're always like straddling the line between like more normies and just like clear airdrop farmers and stuff like that. And so there always is more compromises in the architecture, which I think is a good thing.
I don't say that negatively, but maybe for some hardcore blockchain people, that's horrifying. It needs to be decentralized, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, we have a whole suite of integrations. Our most popular one is actually Discord particularly with non EVM L1s that just need a little extra utility in, in the Software they're using to coordinate and collaborate and stuff like that.
But yeah, increasingly we want to take the, the artlu, the crypto mullet approach. Whatever app in the front blockchain crypto web3 in the back, which I think is the more we believe is the more feasible path forward to better adoption, like Farcaster or Warpcast or maybe art doesn't think so.
BeavChris
Yeah, I really love how even in the telegram demo you showed me, it was so easy. You invite a bot and then you can set any emoji to mean any currency. So you send me a poop emoji and it meant one USDC and I was so excited to be pooped on. So I think there are lots of ways you can play around with the Quidli if you want. Especially if you are running a community to be able to reward and incentivize like community members in all sorts of ways.
Justin
That's been like the major use case so far. We are more interested in like payments across the social graphs. Like not just a Farcaster social graph, but every kind of coordination collaboration app has a social graph.
It's a form of social graph, but yeah the use cases that have been grokked more immediately by users so far are like, yeah, community incentives and stuff like that. So if you go to our landing page, that's why people are always like, Oh, you're like a community tipping tool, but actually we're more like a social finance payments tool.
And it just happens to be that the biggest use cases today are community payments.
BeavChris
So what's your ideal use case then?
Justin
Oh, wow. That's a tough question. I didn't expect that from a paid segment. Um, I think longer term, the ideal use case is more complicated programmatic workflows where you can, start doing where you can do longer if- then scenarios where like completion of this or some degree of completion then determines the payout.
But I think those kinds of things, particularly for crypto with smart contracts, people talk about it like yeah, it's just on the cusp, it's going to happen, but it just requires a lot of integration and a lot of standardization of different behaviors and flows. And so it'll take a little longer, I think especially if you try to harmonize all the different tasks, software tools, level of completion results that, that can happen in any kind of given scenario. But yeah, ideally, that, those are the kind of payment workflows we'd like to do. But today, I'd say,
Honestly, the, maybe this sounds like a cop out answer, but, any use of it is always exciting for us. We like seeing serious use cases like, Oh, you hold our NFT, like you qualify for the drop kind of thing.
And even like dumb use cases like, Oh, you're holding this shitcoin. That's funny to me, please , I embrace, I know Art had this serious, Is that, does that qualify as a soliloquy?
He had a very serious discussion about anti, or I don't know if it's anti, but anti shitcoins. But yeah, for me, I like the Pandora's box that tokenization opens up and people can do, obviously it sucks with the whole scam part of it, but it's just interesting the different things that people can build.
BeavChris
Yeah, so definitely reach out to Justin if you have any interesting, complex interactions that you want to do with your community members or folks, other folks as well. Thank you so much, Justin. I'm gonna, I'm gonna boot you off now very politely.
Justin
Oh, but one thing I'd also like to note is that I've met both of you in real life, while neither of you have ever met each other in real life.
BeavChris
Oh, that is true!
Justin
I just think that's very funny.
BeavChris
That is very funny. I feel like you're the best at that. Globetrotting and meeting a lot of these, of actually, folks in the chat. Many of you've met. I've seen the photos and been jealous before. So thanks for being our Farcaster ambassador in your spare time.
Justin
Yeah. Yeah, please. No, my pleasure. And I hope Art doesn't leave. I know, I think the things he says are legitimate, but at the same time, Yeah, still it's fun and we can still hang out like this and not have to, I mean I always don't pay attention to the serious part of this app anyways. Like it's always just fun to F A F O.
Is it F A F O or F A F O? Do you say F A F O or should you just say fuck around find out?
BArt-Head
I guess you could Fafo.
BeavChris
Exactly.
Justin
Yeah. Don't leave. Yeah.
BArt-Head
Cool. Thank you for joining us, Justin. It's been our pleasure to have you on here.
Justin
Yeah. Thanks for having me. I guess even though I paid for it.
BArt-Head
Yes it's been our pleasure to take your money onchain through, by the way, it was mainnet!
You asked if you could pay us on mainnet, I said, all right
BeavChris
Wow
Justin
It should tell you how long I've been in crypto, like my, most of my shit. Most of my shit coining has been on mainnet. Gosh
BeavChris
Thank you so much. And yeah, i'm gonna remove you from the stage for now and we'll see you around.
Peace. All right. So now we're running on to the Bart has favorite things about his Warpcast experience, which by the way, when I saw the, though, that in the notes, I thought this is like one of those filler episodes in a sitcom, where they do like the flashbacks of various things in the past or something.
But yeah, can you do a relative lightning round of all your favorite things?
BArt-Head
Yeah, I wanted to make sure to give proper time on my farewell tour to the great things that I've loved and really deeply enjoyed on Farcaster and to highlight, to elevate and highlight some projects. because this week, especially with Justin here, I wanted to be positive and talk about shit coins and airdrops and making lots and lots of money.
And save the negatives or the regrets for next week. But I listed
BeavChris
Don’t trauma dump with our special guests next week, please.
BArt-Head
The more people that trauma dump on the better. So I listed four things and, and I wanted to shout them out. Just coming into Farcaster and Warpcast and finding some really unique thinkers and human beings that have brought things into the world that, that would not have existed otherwise.
The first is FarCats, the NFT collection by 0xen. It was an early AI generated collection, very high effort. And there's a lot of lore around it. A lot of it written by Cameron, who's a great writer and lore collector.
BeavChris
I didn't know that.
BArt-Head
And 0xen like put a lot of thinking into it. He's shared different things on, on Farcaster about the background of it, as well as his unique artistic perspective on what it's doing.
But it, it was also thought of as a decentralized mascot for Farcaster. And much like cats, they go wherever they want. If you tell a cat, don't do this, the cat doesn't listen to you necessarily. And yeah, the FarCats are fucked up. If you look at some of them, they're really shocking.
And I, I just really love the artistic expression that went into it as well as the intention of making it a decentralized mascot for our community. The second, the favorite thing, so I have four, the second favorite thing is two podcasts that kind of opened the doors for us. One is called GMFarcaster.
That's Nounishprof and Adrienne. They went all in on Farcaster to launch a media business, where they both left their jobs to do this, and it really opened the gates for many of us to see what would be possible. The second one is BNFarcaster, Buenas Noches Farcaster. By Ray F and What's Good Al .Two guys who are also OGs in the Farcaster community, who speak Spanish, with a real flair and style on their podcast. The emphasis on BN Farcaster is very different from GM Farcaster. And it's very different from BCBH Show. I watched where they were going and deliberately tried to steer BCBH Show somewhere different because I just felt we could not do it with as much style as those two gentlemen.
So GM Farcaster is on Unlonely and YouTube and Spotify. BN Farcaster is on YouTube and I believe Spotify. I'm not sure. And they have a channel, /bnfarcaster. It's a, it's lively. They have so many more views than us and it's quite impressive how, how they're building a Spanish speaking community, which even though a lot of their episodes are in English, which is really really
BeavChris
Oh, I did not know that. Okay. Cause I was going to ask, like, how can we enjoy it? We don't speak Spanish.
BArt-Head
Yeah. There's large portions of it that are in English, but the, sorry, large portions are in Spanish, but they flip back and forth into English plenty of times, especially with their guests. So the third thing I wanted to highlight was some, the rise of some viable alt clients to Farcaster.
Farquest, FarQuest Pro has been around for a very long time, but just either last week or the week before they announced that their Android native app and iOS native app are also wallets. So I've changed my PFP to the FarQuest PFP away from the goose. Okay. And I
BeavChris
is that what that cat is?
BArt-Head
Yes. It's, it's the far.quest cat.
BeavChris
Oh.
BArt-Head
And you can, when you log in, you can choose between five or eight different colors.
And, the new thing about it is that I am using my Warpcast private seed phrase to access my Warpcast signer in Farquest Pro, which means there is no signer associated with Farquest. And in fact, to the network, it is entirely, you can't tell whether I'm casting from Warpcast or Farquest Pro when I go in that way.
If I go in through the Farquest Pro sign on process, so that they're very normie friendly and they offer many different paths. And maybe it's a little confusing, but if I go through the normal signer process. Sorry, the normal onboarding process. I get a new account and they create things for me.
And I pay for a signer, which distinguishes my casts as coming from Farquest. And it shows up in Dune dashboards, et cetera. Another thing I can do is I can mint an NFT and not pay for storage and still participate in the Farcaster ecosystem just on the L2. So people in Warpcast will never see my cast, but I never pay for storage.
And Nico and JC, by way of the Farquest Labs, they pay for the storage on an L2. This alt client is pretty complicated, pretty deeply technical, but they are very normie forward and normie first. And it's quite quite impressive to see. That I could cast from FarQuest and it will never show up in the stats.
It's showing up from Far Quest. It looks just like a Warpcast account.
BeavChris
Can you ask, is it a different chain?
BArt-Head
Nope. It's, it works on the hubs. They actually have this thing called a superhub, which I learned about this week, which combines the L one and L two. So the, all of your Farcaster accounts are on the same smart contracts on OPChain as your Warpcast accounts.
BeavChris
And also speaking of nostalgia, this is how we met. I remember this is our first conversation ever, was about you describing a true world.
BArt-Head
So Christin, have you tried FarQuest?
BeavChris
Yeah, and then you were telling me there's all these people who are talking who see us, but we never see them. It was actually from FarQuest. So
BArt-Head
JC said they have 80,000 DAU. We're talking about the 4,000 some Power Badge holders on Warpcast. There are 80,000 DAU using Farcaster through far.quest Pro. And my comment is those numbers, you can discount them if you want, discount them by 90% or 99%.
But there are real things going on in Far Quest. And if you want to see the next kind of mass of accounts or activity to come to Farcaster. You should probably study FarQuest because that's probably where people are testing things out and
BeavChris
so we log in Is it like a lot of airdrop discussions? What is actually happening over there?
BArt-Head
Yeah, I should leave it to people to make their own judgments, I might. My view is no, what's the point of talking about airdrops on FarQuest? When you're not being seen by the people who need to see you.
BeavChris
Okay,
BArt-Head
people are doing, they're doing different things. You
BeavChris
And Geoff asked, are both far.quest devs anonymous,
BArt-Head
sorry. The FarQuest devs are JC Denton and Nico. He shared his last name before. They have a channel called Who Am I? Which is, which is quite interesting. It's a, it straddles the line between Anon and Fully doxxed people.
They've shared their career backgrounds as well. Pretty openly. They're serious, serious actors.
BeavChris
All right, Geoff, I can see this is a new, Please report back with your skills. What's going on there? I'm giving Geoff homework.
BArt-Head
My third topic is viable alt clients. Farquest is one of them, and I have four again. The second one is Firefly, which is one of two major alt clients that straddles Farcaster, Lens, and Twitter.
After I leave Farcaster, I plan to stay on Firefly, because I have a Lens account, I have a Farcaster account, I have an X account. And Firefly comes from the Mask Network. I really respect their founder, Suji, who recently went on I think it was on Twitter, but it may have been on Farcaster, in a really strong response to Two Bit Idiot, Ryan Selkis on one of the, one of the Twitter beefs that blew up. But I find them to be really thoughtful and longtime builders in the space.
The third thing is Lunch Break, who sponsored us for a couple of episodes, and from Borodutch and Jason Kim. It's another interesting alt client which combines your social graph on Farcaster with your accounts on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Twitter and it's along the lines of Read Write Own and owning your social graph.
And also there's something big dropping in August, which it's not too late to get in on it. And the fourth one is Wildcard, which is a project from defikaran, which is fairly new, but they have, they're tipping forward. They're global forward. They've just announced native Chinese and Korean, like translations in the app.
And they have open conversations that welcome people to, to join in without worrying about Power Badge or being subdued by the algo.
BeavChris
Wildcard is the one with the native voice note DCs, right?
BArt-Head
That's right. They're shipping very fast.
BeavChris
Yeah, I can see how that really works for native Asian languages. Parents, right? Voice note is how you receive messages anyway instead of typing. Yes.
BArt-Head
Yes. But they have translations too, which is really fascinating. So if you want to see what people are saying, if you have that curiosity about the world, about decentralized social, they are making it easy rather than saying, no, Warpcast is for English, like this is a place where if you don't speak English, it doesn't make sense for you. We're not going to invite you here. Wildcard is a different path, and I'm very excited about that.
The final and maybe the most important and most foundational one to me is the $DEGEN project. And to me, $DEGEN is the beating heart and soul of Farcaster.
Everything else is is subsumed within it. And for me, the hat stays on. It's in my ENS. And I've locked, I haven't locked the max because I had, I also had concerns about pricing out people. So I'm a small locker. They have this really fascinating thing called crucible, which is controversial. Like some,
BeavChris
is that the Dedegen thing?
BArt-Head
That's Dedegen. Yes. So there is a decentralized group of special accounts who get to Dedegen, and it's all on, it's all onchain, it's on Dune, it's in a dashboard, it's composable, there's cast actions that individuals have permissionless-ly built, to Dedegen, where if five of the moderators or, we'll call them, we'll call them moderators, Dedegen, a tip, It invalidates that tip and there's definitely a
BeavChris
Is that where that hall monitor thing came from. Is this related
BArt-Head
basedkarbon who was a pretty intensive user of Farcaster and participant in tipping games has gone on X to complain about $DEGEN, about these guys are just hall monitors. And I see some of the other tipping coins with very centralized curation. I also see $DEGEN in the past as a very centralized curation. And I see within the $DEGEN community a lot of call for Jacek to ban bad actors.
And Jacek has firmly said, no, to be decentralized you have to remove him, your dependence on individual actors, on individuals, such as himself. And he wants to try out the tipping mechanism if he removes himself from being a key player in, in curation, which is an elevation of good content process, mainly, but it also has to come with a stick or some punishment for bad actors.
And so the crucible, which is a channel, is an open space for the Dedegen holders to discuss and come to some conclusion. Wake has called it a meat computer, which is
BeavChris
Like a mentat?
BArt-Head
Yes. A mentat. [Ed. note: neither of them seem to know what's a mentat] He calls it a, he said, let the meat computer work which is just the minds, the humans that participate in Dedegen. Can be allowed some framework. You might call it a proto DAO, but it's even looser than most DAOs to make determinations with certain limited powers. And it's interesting to see it play out. They gave the curation power to different people, including some that don't lock their $DEGEN, which to me is quite interesting.
BeavChris
Oh, really? Okay. That, that, that sounds a little shady.
BArt-Head
Yeah it's a eye opening and I like it a lot that, it's, you're giving the, you're not holding on tightly to the powers, but you're giving it to see what happens. I also think, people are wondering why there's a 10K cap on tip allocations.
BeavChris
Yeah.
BArt-Head
The 10k cap, especially with the price so low, gives you a lot of room to play and make mistakes. If you can imagine that people staked, tens of thousands of dollars and got tens of thousands of dollars of value to tip. It'd be harder to justify
BeavChris
I see it's like a keeps the playground safe kind of thing.
BArt-Head
Yeah, it's you're taking steps in the right sequence to try to get to a final goal, which, I think a lot of projects in our space are doing, but the $DEGEN project is working through lots of controversy now over is this group going to turn into hall monitors?
Do people want to be hall monitors? And there's definitely some that want to be hall monitors, just like, you know, in a society of police and some are heroes and some are real dicks. How do you juggle that? Do you have an internal affairs department? Do you have things?
BeavChris
Who will hall monitor the hall monitor?
BArt-Head
That's right. Do you have body cams?
BeavChris
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I stole that from someone.
BArt-Head
Yes. You've been thinking about the Romans. Yeah, the Crucible is an open space for people to talk. And Burr, who's a leader amongst a group of $DEGEN fans and Farcaster fans, she was given the Dedegen thing and she posted a very loud and long, thoughtful message.
Reason why she's declining. And that got her a ton of engagement, which is fascinating. And like you can choose to play for engagement along those lines. And you can choose to participate, you can choose not to participate, and even the people who are given it, they don't have to do anything. It's not, I don't think it's going to be taken away if you don't do anything.
BeavChris
So I, at first I was like, oh no, because every once in a while I do pop in the /degentokenbase channel to see what's going on. And I was like, oh no, there's like things, there's disagreement. But I have to really think about how polite is everyone's disagreements. And also everyone makes a great point.
I think Jacek has a really hard job because as I think you pointed on a previous episode, right, in a way this season does cater to the whales and it's, there's different camps and if you favor some population, then the other population is going to complain, and there's no way to make everybody happy. But I think it's like how you say it is so tricky because in a way, Jacek is more direct than the Merkle team when things go wrong, which in a way is more like straightforward and good in a way, but it also like hurts people's feelings a bit more. So I think it's interesting to see different kinds of leadership.
BArt-Head
Since it's our show, I want to add in my view, is that this season hurts the whales more than it hurts the little people. That cap of 10k is a really strong tax on whales, and you find the whales who are willing to pay that tax. I think there's, that's the point of putting a tax.
I can see the view of people without the resources to put in a lot, of saying, Oh, like you, you're benefiting the people with the resources, but let's look at the real whales out there. They have not locked. And that's, that's interesting. I think the biggest lockers are the people who received $DEGEN early and held on.
And that's different from the people who bought, the whales who put in like lots of capital. I look at the capital movement. I don't see that capital is being put to bear to steal 10k of tips or 10k of tips per day multiplied by whatever, 7 or 15.
BeavChris
I'm just hoping that the next season will have UBI for us minnows or something. Just to make up the difference.
BArt-Head
So my drop Was meant as a UBI. If you lock one $DEGEN, I don't know what the minimum was. If you locked a thousand $DEGEN, you got dropped the same as the guy who locked 15 million.
So the Quidli frame drop mechanism is built to, to be fair. Like, the filter says, have you locked? Do you hold this token? It doesn't ask how much you hold. It doesn't give you an option to give more to the people who hold more of the ERC 20. It just says, did you lock a de minimus amount of $DEGEN? So I would encourage, the way I see the end state that I see, is that the $DEGEN lock is a low threshold for participation.
It can be 10,000 $DEGEN, which was the threshold before, but now it's even lower, right? The threshold has just gotten lowered from 10,000 to whatever the minimum size is of the smart contract. And that, that opens it up to even more people. And at the end state, if tools like Quidli enable communities and projects to reach $DEGEN aligned individuals for pro social marketing, then that produces a kind of UBI, it produces a pretty fair outcome.
It's more fair than requiring you to have to hold 10,000 in your wallet to participate. You can lock five hundred for three months or, check the exact terms, but you can lock the minimum and participate in the airdrops that may or may not come at exactly the same level as someone who's locked in 15 million.
BeavChris
Yeah. I guess the conclusion is hang on to your shit coins because you don't know what might come. So thank you so much all for joining. We're at the top of the hour. We will let you go. So thanks again to our sponsor Quidli. Go check out Justin's tools, see how it can be useful for your projects.
And of course, like our show notes and everything will list all of the BArt's favorite things if you want to check out all these fun alt clients.
BArt-Head
Yeah. Shout out to our permissionless partners Unlonely for letting us stream. To Base for building a great decentralized and cheap democratized chain. To Zora for making our mints easy, Paragraph for hosting our blogs. To Drakula for our short form video clips. SeemoreTV for combining our presence and events for providing our notifications and our schedules. Thank you all for listening. Thank you for joining our chat.
BeavChris
Take care. See you next week on Tuesday. Bye.
BArt-Head
Bye.
