Over the past year, one area of web3 that has continued to interest me has been SocialFi. How can apps leverage the cross-section of social platforms and unique onchain mechanics to create new ways to interact, socialize, and play sustainably (wishful thinking, I know).

We’re still in the early innings for what works and doesn’t. For now, builders will keep doing their thing experimenting with new mechanics and features, and a couple of them caught my eye.

Fantasy Top launches Tactics

Fantasy Top, the app that combines fantasy sports and Twitter engagement metrics, launched Tactics earlier today. If you haven’t heard of Fantasy Top, check out my overview of the app and concept here and here.

How does Tactics work?

• Draftkings inspired Tactics with their daily betting concept

• Tactic tickets cost $19.99 and players can enter multiple times

• Once purchased, players select their 5-Hero lineup from a randomly chosen list. The lineup must be created within 5 minutes and within the maximum star cap (Heroes with more stars = stronger Twitter engagement performance, resulting in more points on the leaderboard).

• You do not need to hold any Hero cards to play

• The first Tactics game launched with 3,432 slots and a $60,085 prize pool. Additional rewards include Blast Gold (Blast Layer 2 network incentive for users) and FAN points (possible token launch) based on ranking

• Tactics will have a rake (platform commission) shared between the Heroes and Fantasy Treasury. Heroes will receive 20% of Tactic revenues based on their Twitter performance during the competition

Although I didn’t get to participate in time WarDaddy shared a recording of how Tactics works.

Why is this interesting?

We’re now seeing Fantasy Top expand the types of games available. If we compare this with the flagship Classic Mode:

The Tactics expansion immediately does a few things:

• New budget-friendly way to play Fantasy Top - It now costs $20 to play a Fantasy Top game instead of hundreds to tens of thousands

• Creates a constant engagement - In addition to the daily streak incentive (effectively a daily check-in), Fantasy Top players now have a reason to come back to the app every day to play

• Leans into skill-based play - Tactics leans more into skill-based play instead of just having the largest budget. That said, skilled players will have multiple entries to maximize the chance they rank, just like in Draftkings

If you want to check out Fantasy Top, use my referral code “tpan_web3” (you need one to onboard).

Do you think SocialFi can be sustainable? If so, share this. If not, share this.

Scoop launches on Farcaster

Taking inspiration from Fantasy Top, Scoop launched last week.

What is it?

• Scoop is a SocialFi game available on iOS (sorry Android folks )

• Every Farcaster profile is turned into a card and pricing is determined by a bonding curve (more demand = higher price). This differs from Fantasy Top, where Heroes are a pre-selected group

• There is a 4% transaction fee every time a card is bought or sold, and that fee is added to a community pool. A portion of this fee is split between the Creators.

• At the end of every day, Farcaster creators are ranked by an engagement score. Owners of the top-ranked cards receive rewards from the community pool

• The game will start Wednesday, June 26

The Scoop onboarding experience

Although Scoop hasn’t started yet, I downloaded the app to check it out and I found the onboarding experience particularly enjoyable. Some observations:

The initial onboarding experience is scroll-based on one screen instead of across multiple screens. Personally, it was refreshing to scroll through the tutorial instead of clicking a ‘next’ button multiple times.

Scoop connects to your Farcaster account to track Creator engagement, similar to how you need to connect your Twitter account on Fantasy Top.

One immediate example of Scoop leveraging the Farcaster connection is with the invite and referral mechanic. In order to get on Scoop, you need an invite code. Don’t have one? Scoop identifies accounts you follow that have invites to spare with fun templated casts tagging those users. This is a great example of how Farcaster enables richer interactions for apps on top of the protocol and its social graph.

Scoop also has a sticker feature. In one of the images, the app showcases stickers for recent buyers. This feature could turn into a separate marketplace or become a perk for specific milestones and Creators. I’m curious to see how it evolves 🤔

No one knows when or how SocialFi will break the mainstream barrier meaningfully. However, the shots on goal are getting more frequent and accurate 🥅

Other interesting things

• Last week I wrote about the Wu-Tang’s creative album sale activation. Today I learned about a fantasy football punishment that went viral and incorporated similar mechanics. That article then reminded me of another variation of the mechanic from Mr. Beast. And of course, there’s a Dune dashboard tracking Wu-Tang album stats.

• Jason Yanowitz shared notes from Coinbase’s State of Crypto summit last week. Coinbase also shared some stats on the Fortune 500 moving onchain.

See you Thursday!