On farcaster, a social media platform built on top of decentralised blockchain infrastructure (Optimism, the Ethereum scaling network), there is an emergent tipping apparatus that turns existing norms on their head.
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What once started as farcaster’s (unofficial) native memecoin has become its lifeblood. Started in Jan 2024, the ethos underpinning its existence was to reward those who had been active and engaged creating value in the ecosystem by casting (posting), building apps/experiences and sharing meaningful art. Much akin to the original auspices of dogecoin on reddit, except this time on a sufficiently decentralised web3 protocol.
$DEGEN - the best bet for Base SZN
Amongst the memecoin frenzy that propped base up over the last week, one coin that we feel has mega growth potential is $DEGEN
Lets dive in
The community rallied, combining innovative breakthrough’s like frames with the memetic energy of artists, developers, engineers and designers to birth new services and experiences.
Bracket.Game: a Farcaster-native March Madness game powered by $DEGEN where players buy shares in the Fanbase Collectives of their favorite teams, and win based on how they perform in real life.
Drakula.app: a blockchain based short video app akin to Tik Tok wherein users can earn BLOOD by posting/watching videos, sharing links, and purchasing creator tokens. Creators earn a percentage of commission income from each token transaction.
Bankless x one farcaster founder, Dan — Youtube
And along the way became a hub for incredible artistic & intellectual endeavour.
Ask Me Anything conversations with the likes of Marc Andressen, Vitalik Buterin, Fred Wilson, Gary Tan & Elad Gil.
Kiwi News, a cryptonative alternative to Hacker News:
BountyCaster, a farcaster incentivisation tool using bounties.
Paragraph, a web3 publishing platform for blogs and newsletters.
Channels
There are several ways to access the protocol.
Warpcast — built and maintained by the farcaster team, the purple app.
Buttrfly—web3 social explorer across the leading platforms Lens/Farcaster.
Yup.io — a social media aggregator on Twitter, Farcaster, Lens, Bluesky etc.
Supercast (paid) — for powerusers with scheduling, multi-account support, polls etc.
Across all clients, casts (posts) are organised thematically into channels. We just launched one: /degendancing
A drakula native nounish derivative of /touchgrass
Given the excitement of degen recently launching an L3, the farcaster NFT market exploding, new memecoin ecosytems launching ($CRASH, $SENDIT, $HIGHER, $WOWOW), and much more — degendancing seeks to celebrate community and the outdoors through music.
“Dance and you’ll feel better.” –James Brown
Experiment
One aspect of drakula that has the opportunity to improve is curation. One goal here is to see if the use of channels will help with that.
Another aspect is to leverage the tipping meta to proliferate the culture beyond these purple walls through music, dancing, art and good vibes.
How?
Post a video dancing to a song of your choice in the /degendancing channel whilst outdoors (ideally).
If the link you share is a drakula video you will receive $degen tips
If the link you share (via any platform) uses these filters built by coraloca (snapchat only), receive $nogs tips, the nounish currency built by dotnouns
For now the lenses/filters can only be accessed on snapchat. The hope is that we can build out more of these with farcaster native memes.
Tag me for Recasts/shares
@papa on farcaster/drakula
@papajams on instagram
@papajimjams on twitter
@papaandthejimjams on tiktok
Especially if you do me the kindness of using one of my songs, Sweetie Rebecca is out today (Friday 29th March 2024) and can be downloaded via dropbox here; or is available on all web2 platforms e.g. Spotify & Apple Music
Inflection ?
A final goal of this experiment is to consider the opportunity for distruption. As a musician and writer, putting my work/art onchain has offered the tooling to customise the ways in which users, fans, and consumers can engage with and support its ongoing creation.
Selling one song on catalog generated the equivalent income as all of my music on spotify to date (30 songs total).
The income from collects/subscriptions i’ve had on mirror & paragraph (circa 30 articles) far supplants that from medium (over 100 articles).
I love and appreciate the distribution offered by web2 platforms like instagram and tik tok, so as new means become available to monetize, incentivize, or support the work that goes into making that content — particularly whilst on a smaller scale — experiments like this are a key way to communicate to other creators what the potential here really is.
Could a farcaster native song go to number one?
Could a drakula native meme go globally viral?
Could we spend way more time outdoors dancing?
Lets find out.
Connect
Farcaster @papa —  https://warpcast.com/@papa
Lens @papajams —  https://lenster.xyz/u/papajams
Twitter @papajimjams —  https://twitter.com/papajimjams