If you've hung out on Farcaster, you must have noticed that many people have emojis in their name. Some have deep meanings and some are just for fun, but almost all represent something very important on the platform: community.
At first glance, these emojis may just look like emojis, but most of them reflect specific communities in the ecosystem and are used to signal to other users what communities you are a part of and interact with regularly.
Purple DAO πͺ
The earliest known use of an emoji to signify community comes from Purple DAO, a Farcaster native DAO built to promote the Farcaster ecosystem. Many users of the DAO rock a πͺ in their name to signify that they own a Purple Token and are committed to the future of the Farcaster ecosystem.
$DEGEN and The Haberdashery (aka Degen DAO)π©
On Feb 14, 2024 if you had the π© emoji your name, you got One Million $DEGEN to tip. However, if you removed it the next day, your tips were invalid. A grass roots gorilla marketing campaign began to remind everyone to keep the π© emoji in their name and βthe hat stays onβ meme was born. Many members of The Haberdashery aka Degen DAO also use the emoji to signify their membership in the DAO and their commitment to growing the degen ecosystem.
The LP Channel and the Ham Community π πΉ
When "Ham" tipping came online in late February, many users who owned the LP NFTS added the π emoji, which is the official tipping mechanism for Ham (aka $TN100X tokens) to their names to show support for the project. If you owned an original LP NFT, which was on the ETH network, you were able to stake your airdrop of $TN100X (which we got from holding the NFTs) via "baking golden hams" for 45 days. At the end of the "baking" phase after token claims, emoji tipping via the π emoji began and a new community badge came into existence, but there were some issues.
While much of Farcaster is English speaking, there is a huge contingent of Japanese speakers on and many of them joined the Ham community early and were large contributors to the culture. The word emoji comes from Japanese e (η΅΅, 'picture') + moji (ζε, 'character'), so almost all of the emojis we know and love today come from Japan. The π emoji in Japan is the "ano niku" emoji, in English "that meat". The Japanese members of the community were VERY confused as to why we were calling the meat emoji a "ham" and didn't understand why their posts about meat were not in the spirit of the "ham memes" encouraged in the channel.
Leaders from the Japanese speaking community got creative with explaining "ham" and used a well known anime in Japan called Hamtaro. The series focuses on a hamster named Hamtaro, who has a variety of adventures with other hamsters known as the "Ham-Hams" or "Hamuchanzu" in Japanese. They adopted the hamster emoji as their πΉ badge and call themselves the Hamuchanzu! Due to this creativity and helping bridge two cultures, you'll now find lots of memes and art in the channel featuring the LP, hams, hamsters, and all of the Floaties (other emojis that trigger real payments on Farcaster and Twitter) in the channel.
Other Community Badges
Ham was the first to use emojis as tips, but many other projects have been inspired by it and embraced their own emoji tipping systems. Some projects are also using emojis to help users recognize members of the team or those who identify strongly with the community. The above are just a few of the community badges you may see on Farcaster. Know another community with a great story of their community badge? Please let me know!
PS: I'm a member of The Haberdashery π©, Purple DAO πͺ, host the /sakura πΈ channel, I am the unofficial Hambassador π, an honorary Hamuchanzu πΉ, and the host of the /anime-manga π‘channel, which are all reflected in my Farcaster profile.
