Today, Purp (the founder of DegenDao) announced that he’ll be dropping a portion of his upcoming $purp tokens to FBI. Previously, Proxy (founder of Proxy Studio) dropped 2% of the supply of ProxySwap tokens to FBI. These are not one-off instances. Base and Jesse continue to support us in our efforts with Base Builder grants. Others have expressed similar interests.
Funnily enough, none of it we asked for. And, all of it came retroactively through our contributions to the Base, Farcaster, and the Superchain ecosystem.
All of it will go back to making FBI a force in bringing the world onchain.
More on this later, but first origin story.
After sunsetting Purple Pay in October, I decided to spend some time alone exploring the onchain economy. Beyond narratives and VC theorists, what were people truly doing here?
In 3 months of seclusion from everything else, and a deep focus on exploring ecosystems and product offerings, I came up with 2 theses for the cycle-
Bitcoin will scale
Consumer social will finally take off
To hedge bets, I spent some time with Bitcoin devs trying to explore a few ideas (Using BTC to secure PoS chains, Bridging between BTC L2s, etc) and some time getting active on Farcaster. I joined Cassie’s inaugural Hunger Games, made friends on FC, and had fantastic conversations. Channels had just come in and I found myself among the top casters on Meme, Founders, and Venture Capital.
Eventually, I was having so much fun here that I decided to bail on Bitcoin and take a more concentrated bet on Farcaster.
Coincidentally, soon after, frames launched and completely changed how the world saw decentralized social networks, albeit sufficiently decentralized.
I saw most frames coming out from the West, and not a single one from India. Despite personally knowing so many incredible builders here. I was surprised nobody was building on what felt like a completely new way to experience the onchain economy and participate in it.
So I dialed Bhadoriya and asked him if he wanted to host a hackathon on Frames. We created a telegram group called Farcaster Builders India, added a few folks we knew who were active on Farcaster, and joked about how FBI was such a cool acronym that it should be a thing.
From a fun hackathon, we pieced together in 3 days to now an organization with a vision to onramp the world on Base and the Superchain.
All in less than 4 months.
We are going so much higher.
