Dear subscribers,
I offer up this smorgasborg of content for you all, covering many different little tidbits that caught my eyes recently. Tokens are mentioned, projects are too! I apologize for the tardiness, I've extended all of your subscriptions a month to make it up.
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Samuel Huber & Ted gave me LA fomo
Starting off this week on a positive note: samuelhuber.eth (nice ens dude) finally made it out to LA. Having driven with Sam 14 hours straight across much of Northern India, I'm not surprised that the Crusades was discussed over dinner with ted and dariustg. Will the mad German lad catch the Hollywood bug? Is acting his real dream, not running a Farcaster-native dev agency? Only time will tell.
FBI Based Games
The Farcaster Builders of India community has conspired once again to make me feel like I don't ship fast enough by launching a new, fun game. "Based Games" is a spin on "Crypto: The Game" (recently acquired by Uniswap Labs themselves), featuring 8 clans and 200 contestants battling it out daily in competition for a $DEGEN prize.
I'll be completely honest, I'm a bit lost. It's hard working here and trying to participate in games, but I'm a big fan of @kp and others involved in this project. Helping me get caught up are the clan chat groups on Wildcard.lol, tani's /intelligent dashboard to track who has been eliminated so far, and the FAQ on the basedgames.fun website, which told me exactly what I needed to do to win. Partners include: proxyswap.tips, /higher, base, build.top, wildcard.lol, and /clubted
BasedEvo's $BASED token launches @ 4:20pm EDT
BasedEvo is the project that coordinated holders of the "Introducing: Base" Open Edition to 'redeem' or 'evolve' their NFTs over the past month. And boy did holders get to evolving: over 46k unique wallets redeemed "Introducing: Base" NFTs in order to receive the $BASED token.
$BASED is a pure meme token, with a well-executed distribution mechanism that makes use of a large, existing token-holder network. The project deployer, Garrett, is a Proxy Studio subscriber and I know him from Roast Capital's recent consumer crypto panel, where we got to bully several founders earnestly building in the space. Garrett has done a great job of executing on a simple, strong concept and recently finalized a Party crowdfund at 50 (!) ETH to seed the $BASED/WETH Liquidity Pool.
Launch is today, at 4:20pm EDT, and I strongly advise you keep an eye on the project. It's not often that a well-intentioned community member takes their talents to deploy a meme token with a banger ticker, deep liquidity, and wide distribution. We should be thankful for this opportunity at generational wealth, NFA.
Swaye
User-generated prediction market platform Swaye continues to attract trading volume during it's open beta. While I lost my China > America Olympic's gold medal bet, I managed to break even by reducing my position size while the superpowers were neck-to-neck in the medal standings.
Current markets include: speculation around crypto prices (ETH, BTC, other more random assets), a market for whether dwr will ship a reverse-chronological feed before August 14th, 2024, and another gauging if Polychain Capital was one of several VC firms subpoenaed by the SEC this past week. Volume on some of these markets is quite low, but the Olympics market saw >1 ETH in trades, which made the stakes feel meaningful if manageable at the same time.
Swaye just announced Trading Rewards, with >$1k in prizes to the top traders on the platform distributed weekly. You can't withdraw your ETH from Swaye's beta yet, but maybe we'll win some rewards while you're over there?
PROXY token migration
If you're reading this newsletter, you may also be a $PROXY token holder, and this week we announced the Token Migration process as we finally bring our token to Base, and gear up for the social dex launch. Details here, and if you have any questions whatsoever about the migration process please dm or reply to a cast!
FBI x Base: Boston Meetup
Over the weekend, I met up with a small crew of Farcaster users in Boston, MA courtesy of Base x FBI, who are sponsoring a series of meetups among builder communities around Farcaster, Base, and the United States of America. Jesse, or maybe it's Brian Armstrong, were generous enough to buy us lunch, and we talked shop sitting next to the Charles River.
Turns out spending time with my broader community, especially when that community is so niche, nerdy, and emergent, feels really good. Made me miss the whole Dharmashala, Based Hackathon gang as well. I even had a follow up lunch with Cameron this week, and got to hear more about Seemore, he's sort of a legend. Go check out Cameron & Christin's new podcast "Ok, Banger" while you're here. Moral of the story? Be more like Ted, and less like anti-social, anonymous Proxy. Hang around with your internet friends in the real world.
Zora: 'your NFTs are just Meme tokens now'
Last Friday, Base turned one and I had some fun collaborating with Flood & Antimo, two of Proxy Studio's resident designers, to produce a simple commemorative NFT: "O-to-1." My ulterior motive was to mint an open edition on Zora to try out their new Open-Edition-to-ERC20-tradeable-on-Uniswap launch flow, announced last week. Pitched as "bringing secondary markets onchain" the new feature turns any time-bound open edition mint into what is, in practice, a memetoken with liquidity on Uniswap v3. This transformation happens after the mint period closes, and a portion of the "free mint" fee is redirected to provide initial liquidity for the Edition-WETH token pair on the dex.
Technically, Zora introduced an 'extension' to the ERC1155 token standard, enabling the creation of a deterministic ERC20 on deployment of a new Zora Open Edition contract.
While 53 users minted a total of 5,600 editions of our commemorative NFT, which would have been an excellent showing for a regular open edition, I found the addition of the erc20 trading element a bit disappointing. For a mint of that size, the amount of WETH directed to the LP is not sufficient to make a minter feel like they can exit their 'position', and so unless there is significant post-mint buy pressure you've just transformed minters into bag holders who aren't able to dump.
I also wasn't able to claim the creator fees (.35) generated by the mint for an unknown reason, so wasn't able to add that to the Uniswap pool.
My own fun failure aside, I'd suggest that anyone who can drive a serious amount of mint fomo or viral attention via an Open Edition look deeper into Zora's new contracts. For someone more popular than me, or for a mint with more viral potential (ahem, see the official Base commemorative NFT that launched after ours) this mint-to-tradeable token could benefit from network effects and increased secondary market liquidity which NFTs are so starved of at this time.
JP is kind of a savage
Frens founder and Proxy Studio subscriber jpren.eth dragged a bunch of us with their new meme taxonomy for Farcaster users of varying quality. I found it pretty accurate, and funny, even if I'm in the "Farmer DAU" picture and I don't like it.
And your humble newsletter scribe is mentioned. re7 founder Evgeny has been showing up to Farcaster a bunch over the last few months, contributing in small and (recently) bigger ways. re7 worked with the Habs & Samuel Huber to build out a Morpho deposit frame for their new $DEGEN vault. I agree with much of their article on attention economies emerging on Farcaster & Lens, and would like to dig deeper into one particular point.
re7 notes that "as users can leverage their social graph across applications, exit costs become minimal. Applications must therefore compete to provide the best experience for their users."Where are we already seeing these trends on Farcaster? Has anyone surfaced retention data for Scoop, Wildcard, Moshi, Jam, Uncuts, Roam, FarTerminal and etc?
Will portable social graphs make users more quick to move on, less prone to put time into learning & playing with a new app or protocol that fails to immediately hook them? Moxie has presented us with a different kind of protocol recently, which eschews a client altogether in favor of embedding directly on the feed via cast actions & frames. Is this sustainable?
GetSupa launched an interesting trading client
GetSupa is an alt client for Farcaster traders, and it explores a similar design space as the one Proxyswap is focused on with our social dex.
It's mobile only, but worth checking out. We'll see more trading infrastructure within alt-client or proto-client contexts, Supa & FarTerminal both come to mind.
The more I look at social graphs & onchain activity, the more I'm convinced that feeds are not meant to be entirely composed of trades, posts, or any singular kind of content.
I'm still building towards the high-signal mixed feed of my dreams. I imagine a perfect blend of token transactions and casts, replies, and data analytics. Its not a Bloomberg terminal, its not an alpha chat, its a feed that aggregates a fragmented social process of token discovery. This process is an everyday part of trading for many crypto users, but hasn't found the right expression in new app designs yet.
POIDH is great, we stan Kenny
POIDH turned one, and I loved Kenny's retrospective on what he's built in that time. Good reminder of how young Farcaster is, and how putting your attention towards a single, interesting problem can be extremely generative. Worthy of note also is how much of /poidh's volume comes from Degen Layer 3, an outlier on a chain that has struggled to retain users across the board.
Moxie
Moxie is into it's second week, and scheduled Fan Token Auctions will soon be replaced with open auctions. Headlines for me are: Moxie remains a Farcaster protocol, with little attention or speculative bid coming from outside the network. This makes sense, and I'd prefer the Fan Token's see broader adoption & increased activity from within Farcaster's DAU base before Crypto Twitter comes and buys a ton of $MOXIE only to dump a month later.
Fan Tokens are a bit complicated, and many users haven't introduced reasons to hold a fan token beyond their potential to accumulate $MOXIE engagement rewards. Rather than bid on a ton of different auctions looking for short, quick wins I suggest checking out some of the great public resources on Dune or Warpcast, like this query, which shows the 'projected' daily & weekly yield on Fan Tokens.
Proxyswap team is exploring building out Fan Token bundles based on projected yield, providing users with a one-click alternative to making individual purchases. We've discussed offering indexes of top fan tokens by yield, and also bundles of fan tokens based on different user segments ("frames dev," "KOL," "founder").
In the meantime, check out Geoff's jeremiad against the injustice that is Airstack's overly-top heavy FarRank metric. Will we never see the end of Autofollow's pernicious effects?
RIP anyone who wasn't on Farcaster two years ago.
Or maybe not? Bleu.eth has been crushing the "Moxie Farming Frame" game, and has produced some great frames that are actually quite useful in the process. Here's a question, though: if a quote cast is worth $0.50 USD, how much is a direct message worth? Are we on the cusp of quantifying the value of a random guy sliding into your dms?
Warpcast Explore Page
Last but not least...
dwr launching the Warpcast Explore page, an in-client app store for Farcaster ecosystem projects, made me incredibly excited.
Crypto has a killer consumer product, it's called Warpcast...and Supercast, Wildcard, Nook & Bouy.
The killer consumer product in crypto is this entire network of apps, and the best experiences the network provides all come out of Farcaster's open social graph.
The Explore Page is the combination of many things happening all at once, many people building tirelessly on Dan & V's lil ol' sufficiently decentralized network.
Here's to many more apps, many more builders!
(one day may they both bring us some more users 🤣)
Best,
Proxy
