Farcaster is a hub of crypto experimentations. I have found myself trying something new every week. And more often than not I have found myself surprised. This is an attempt to log my experiences.

Good products are useful. The great ones delight. If you are like me, you probably saw the following in your feed last week.

Most frames, including the ones I’ve made, usually follow a simple, linear workflow. This one was different. As you scroll vertically, it guides you through what you can do with Farcade in a fun way. Watch the video below—or better yet, sign up here: https://warpcast.com/rch/0x82c08ccd

Shout out to @blackstock and @chuckstock

Thursday night right before I was going to call it a day a cast by anoncast caught my eye.

Cast Link: https://warpcast.com/anoncast/0x0babbc0f

I've a very basic understanding of cryptography. But that didn't stop me from going deep into the rabbit hole trying to solve this. The short version of the story. I couldn't solve it. While I spent hours trying to crack the code, Mirko did the smart thing and tried the simplest and fastest approach and it worked.

For the long version of the story, read on.

It was already close to midnight. But the cast really intrigued me. It was also the first anoncast with a bounty. My first hunch was that the number 128 and word "Base" had some significance and the string was hash of the username. So with some generous help from chatgpt and neynar API, I wrote a python script that pulled in the usernames of all power users, encoded it in Base128, and then tried to match the SHA-256 Hash with the hash shared on the cast. No match found.

Ok that was the first attempt. My next hunch was that maybe someone created a new account and posted this. So, I wrote up a dune query to get all user names and then used their API and credits to get all of them and ran the script again. No match found.

That was humbling and annoying. Next, I discarded the 128 and assumed maybe Base has some significance and tried Base64, Base58, and Base32 encoding of usernames but they didn't work too.By this point, I was ready to tear out what little hair I had left. Spent the next hour or so, trying different versions of encoding and hashing of usernames and display names. But nothing worked.

At 2:30 AM, I called it quits but fortunately Mirko got it right and I could sleep a little better than I would have. Shoutout to @ellied for setting this up. I never knew that something could be both incredibly fun and incredibly frustrating at the same time. The hash was of her name but not her username or display name 😭

Memecoins. You can love them or you can hate them. You can't ignore them. Clanker has captured the imagination of farcasters. I have done my fair bit of amateur clanking. But last week, I and @0xpuneet started spending time exploring the launches, new launchers, and apps built around clanker ecosystem.

The biggest learning had been that trading memecoins is like catching falling knives. 99% of clanker launches don't go anywhere. 1% show some potential and 0.1% have staying power. You don't want to get into a trade without setting stop sells and limit sells. We found defined.fi very useful in that regards. Although I do wish it was a bit faster.

Banyan and Interface are both well designed apps and helps you know what your friends are aping into. I loved the Banyan Frame V2 App. It shows you a feed of folks trades and gives you a simple way of aping in. Clank.fun by Nick as the name suggests takes inspiration from pump.fun to surface tokens launched on clanker in a very fun way.

Larrybot takes a different approach to token launch where for the first 69 minutes they check if a community forms around it and then launch the token. else the funds get refunded to the original participants. It is an interesting take.

Maybe a part of it is the bull market. But clanker in its way has brought back some of the magical energy we had seen earlier this year on farcaster. Hoping for the run to continue.

I’ve spent the past month trying out different experiments. Presently, I and Puneet are jamming on Clanker Live. As we were trading clanker tokens - we started building heuristics on what can take off and how you can get in and out at the right time. Clanker Live makes it simple to check out the trending tokens in a single glance. You can find it here: https://clanker-live.vercel.app/