If you go to Degen.tips and find airdrops 2, you’ll see how it works. Basically, every caster is awarded a daily allowance based on their cast/reaction ratio (quality of their casts.) This allowance is reset daily and can be used to award other casters $Degen tokens. We need to break down how incredible this mechanic is because the more layers you look at, the better it gets.
Alignment with Farcaster Goals
Farcaster is all about community. Ensuring the quality stays high as the users scale into the thousands, millions and eventually billions. The current community is full of artists and builders and thinkers who are optimistic about the future and care about each other. Easier when it's a small village but how do you maintain that at scale? That’s the challenge.
On the side of $Degen, the goal is to get the token into the hands of users that care about the network and won’t simply dump it for profit. You want to be able to reward meaningful interactions and encourage building, sharing, and connecting. Never mind what the initial reaction and gamification is. That’s what the beta is for.
It’s an offensive mindset. Rather than waiting for hypothetical problems with scaling you create the circumstances for them to come so you can address them head on now. Create the norms as you scale instead of waiting for the problem. Bring them to today and address them now. We can see on Twitter (X) how this part of crypto culture has made that platform much lower quality. It’s now being addressed here from the beginning.
Community Enforced Sybil Resistance
Speaking of which, once wash trading (tip me and I’ll tip you) is banned, we can see how the community can police behaviour purely from incentive alignment. I have a limited amount of tips, so there’s no reason for me to reward poor content. The vast majority will go to those who contribute meaningfully. So on the other side you’re now incentivized to build and share meaningful things. To earn your token, which then makes you even less incentivized to give to people who you feel aren’t working to earn the tokens.
So the incentives are structured to overtime contribute meaningfully as the most efficient way to farm. The better your contributions, the better reactions you get, the more you’re able to contribute the following day. So overtime quality users have more influence on how funds are distributed. The low quality airdrop farmers will have virtually nothing to give. Not to mention attempts to subvert will make it easier for the Warpcast team to identify and flag behaviour which makes the network stronger over the long run.
Psychological Framing of Giving
We would be remiss if we didn’t talk about the psychological impact at play. The subtle difference of having a daily allowance that is of no use to oneself is a masterstroke. There is no evaluating the cost benefit for yourself. So it becomes all about giving. When you give constantly and are met with gratitude it creates a framing for the token and for the community. It’s the hardest part and the part that was nailed the most beautifully. The more users that come in trying to farm the token, the more they realize the optimal strategy is to be a quality user. The more they do that, the more they are intrinsically rewarded and are extrinsically rewarding others. It’s an impossible balancing act. Intrinsic rewards are better for long term outcomes but you want to be able to reward extrinsically for people putting in hard work. But extrinsic rewards directly hurt intrinsic rewards. By diverting attention. This balancing act was struck perfectly with airdrop 2.
Many More
This is just the initial. The more angles you look at it the better it gets because it just works. It’s elegant in it’s simplicity. The future looks brighter by the second. I know I’ve been saying you’re not bullish enough. I thought I was bullish enough. I mean to be the bar was so sky high, it was in space. However as bullish as I was, one thing I’ve learned is that I’m simply not bullish enough.
For this to launch at the same time as Frames and as frames goes virally across the cryptoverse. That kind of universal alignment might easily be mistaken for destiny. Which by the way let’s take a moment to appreciate that the launch was done with a small amount of tokens to test behaviour and make sure it works. So now the tip wash trading can be blocked. Not to mention Frames allows a much better UX experience. Where you can have a bot able to be called to place a frame where people can give their tips instead of flooding a popular post with hundreds of comments. Which can be kept beyond the airdrop as the behaviour is ingrained. I mean that timing has to be destiny.
See you on Farcaster Anon, destiny awaits!
