Farcaster is growing up, Farcaster is blowing up. Bankless said using Farcaster feels like living in the future. Welcome to the future kids, are you bullish? The past two weeks have been something like: "Are you on the purple app, anon? You got to register a FID, whats your FID, 250,000? That's not even OG bro, you aren't even a q/DAU. Buy more warps, stop airdrop farming, maybe read the channel norms. You're obviously a value extractor, Farcaster is for real builders."
Everyone is really excited, I am excited. There is real opportunity on the purple app, real growth and its happening right now, its gonna happen tomorrow. Crypto is more fun when its social, this is what happens when a culture that has brewed since 2008 hits escape velocity and suddenly has enough momentum to occupy a decent amount of space on the internet. Or maybe tokens went up so much there was simply enough funding for Dan to build something cool, to take a good idea out into the world. I'll leave those whys & origin stories for smarter people who have been here longer. Let's just acknowledge again: everyone is bullish. .
It probably did feel something like the future when once-quiet channels emerged from the doldrums and were suddenly getting 100s of casts a day - caught in a squall of new users (low FIDs). Sure, a lot of them were begging for $DEGEN, posting poorly made frames, trying to mint out a low-effort Zora collection. But they were doing that stuff on Farcaster, not on X.
Okay, so you're bullish on the Dan-app, you think crypto is more fun on multiplayer, you want to order girl scout cookies in a frame. You are engaging in every new product that is casted: farcandles, hypersubs, party Rooms, token-gated Frames, gimme gimme gimme, let me log in on an alternative client, warpcast is down.
Usually, when people are bullish on a narrative (decentralized social), and when that narrative is occupied primarily by a standout protocol (farcaster), crypto traders want to buy TOKENS.
I want to long casts, I want /skininthegame, I want $PERL, I want a bigger $DEGEN airdrop 2 allocation. But mostly, I want to buy any token that feels like a proxy for the growth of Farcaster. Here's the thing: there isn't really a lot to buy that fits that role. If I'm bullish on "modular, open-source blueprint for highly scalable, highly interoperable blockchains of all kinds" (OP Stack) I can buy $OP, its not a perfect proxy for betting on the OP Stack, its a governance token, but hey - it's been going up for a long time, its as good a proxy as the plebs will ever get.
If I'm bullish the Metaverse as a general concept I could buy $APE, or if I'm bullish on Base I could buy $TOSHI or $TYBG. I'm not saying that anyone should buy these tokens, or that they are the best proxies for going long Optimism or the Metaverse, or that buying a PUNK is equivalent to betting that NFTs in general will see huge growth again. But these are the calculations that narrative traders make, and in crypto every degen with "researcher" in their bio is a narrative trader.
To long farcaster the options are few and far between. Obviously there is $DEGEN, and after the quality of the contributors & the project's level of execution& experimentation this is part of the reason that the token price went up so much. Some 24 year old crypto bro on X who doesn't have a FID but sees all the attention $DEGEN has received might say: "I want Farcaster exposure" and buy $DEGEN.
But there isn't much else. Off the top of my mind there is $TN100x or LP, which is interesting but way less established narratively than $DEGEN. $FRAME is not a bet on the growth of Frames (frankly I don't even know what $FRAME is, please someone explain it to me!) This week one of the best performing tokens on Base was $CIRCLE, which had a /channel but seemed to get barely any attention on Farcaster at all. It appears to be some sort of ponzi token, I'm sure it will crash eventually, but while it was was going up this week, I was surprised that it felt as though no one in my channels and on my feed seemed to care - in the slightest.
And that is okay, we are seeing an explosion in user experiences, tooling and individual products on farcaster. A lot of the stuff I've done on farcaster does not involve hitting the green button and buying a token. Whether minting a free-mint NFT, or posting a bounty on /poidh or /bounties as I did twice, none of these ways of engaging with Farcaster involved buying a token. But can engaging social experiences - even tokenized ones - replace buying tokens as the dominant way people engage with 'crypto'? Maybe this is where we are today, I'm getting more and more bullish, and besides $DEGEN it really is uncertain what else I might buy to bet on Farcaster: I'll just have to use that ETH I would have spent on a token to extend my /clubted subscription, book more 1-on-1 meetings to get advice on building a product.
But in the absencce of tokens to buy in a bullish market sector, people tend to just make new tokens. Last night Yoyo.meme launched a new product: users can post a meme on their platform and launch a 'meme-token', the token is bought and sold on a bonding curve so no one has to provide liquidity. These aren't project tokens, and they aren't meme tokens as we traditionally understand them, they are user-generated, and advertised directly via casts (yoyo.meme links appear automatically as Frames on farcaster, smart Yoyo team). On friday, a lot of these memes were launched and almost none of them saw a huge amount of trading volume, instead people bought $YOYO, which they felt was a proxy for betting on everyone using YOYO.meme, even though it's really just another meme token.
It made me think though: you have individual degens launching meme-coins and trading their friends meme coins, people are restless to buy tokens, they are bullish, and there is almost nothing to buy. Will it continue like this? If Farcaster continues to grow and more attention comes this way, what will people buy to bet on this attention and growth? I think /fabric is building amazing products, I use hypersub and would throw lots of money at fabric, but they don't have a token - they have cool products lots of people will use. Wen token? No token? Never, ever a token?
I'm not sure what anyone should buy, maybe we should just all be users and buy only Warps. Here's at least one token you could buy, this screenshot essay as a token. Don't buy it, I don't think its a good proxy for Farcaster's growth. Which, by the by, I'm extremely bullish on.
