two days as a degen(erated) builder

last week has been kind of hectic.

our initiative builders.garden is shaping up very well.

we are soon coming out with a landing page and cooooool logo.

jfyi: builders.garden is a sort of product studio thingy i'm building with my fellow builders orbulo and frank

a brief recap of what happened last week:

• our project pulse got a grant approval from masknetwork, so we're gonna work on it very soon, polishing it up and bringing it to production.

• split3 is proceeding well, it's been our second week working on it, and we'll release a short video demo later this week (no spoiler now), but in the meantime it's worth to say that we're closer to get a grant from request network in order to properly launch it.

• our collab with talent protocol on builder.fi is going very well, and we are very likely following it up in 2024 on a much bigger scale.

• memecoins on farcaster turned me into a degen (lol), had me buying early even before them being available on the market and building a farcaster bot (pointsbot) to track farcaster users swapping $points (eli5 here in case you missed it) and leaderboard of holders - i also ended up opensourcing and generalizing the repo for any erc20

yeah, you heard me right, there was a crazy memecoin wave on farcaster (not only $points actually but also $wowow and $farts) started on thursday and it was clearly all built around the "points" meme that has been spreading in web3 lately with all these applications coming up with offchain points distribution which some ppl think is bringing us back to web2 closed and permissioned shit.

you know how much i'm into farcaster and when i saw this meme spreading around i couldn't avoid getting part of it ahahaha

it felt very weird cause farcaster ppl are first of all builders, not degens, and indeed most of us where getting in touch with this shit for the first time, without even knowing how to open a liquidity pool on uniswap (yeah that's me 😆).

also: everything was happening on farcaster, where everyone is doxxed, kind of uncommond to see such things not happening with anon profiles, it felt like a reality show 👀

what i noticed is that this builder/degen vibe brought something interesting to the table, because we were not only fostering the $points meme, but actually finding use cases for it.

some ppl for example posted bounties paid in $points, and i was one of the bounty hunters by building pointsbot till 4 am in the morning for 20k $points lol, some other bounties were about creating a logo for example.

looking back i was acting crazy and it stressed me out a lot, bringing me out of my usual daily routine.

it was fun, but enough ahaha, however i learnt a lot of stuff and came up with some new ideas / inspirations.

this thing about the bot made me realize how the financial and social layer of web3 can be connected.

it was hilarious to see how farcaster users where trading those $points and mentioning them as soon as they were moving tokens around.

the intersection between social and defi is very interesting to me and it's been very interesting to see experienced builders going crazy around a meme token and also try to build things on top of it (instead of just meme-ing).

really looking forward to build more on top of farcaster, it's incredible how many things you can integrate it with, unlocking use cases that would have been impossible before, and bringing on the table social aspects and interactions where they have never been seen.

that said today is also an important day cause we're officially starting to work on ethrome 2024, tonight indeed we have our first weekly call to set the basis of the next year's hackathon: i'm very excited!