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The Farcaster Index: Memes + Money
Memcoins, friend.tech's return, Lens goes permissionless, and more...
Forefront
March 04, 2024
Happy Monday!
Welcome to the 182nd edition of the Forefront Newsletter, now more dynamic than ever. If you’re new here, we give you a weekly roundup of the best news and insights at the intersection of crypto, culture, and community.
We’re always looking to improve the Forefront Newsletter. Drop any feedback on the Farcaster /forefront channel.
This week we’re covering:
Let’s get into it…
Week’s Highlight
Farcaster has not only built a social protocol, but a network of crypto-native users with its own culture, customs, and now… money.
While $POINTS was the first memecoin that took Farcaster by storm, $DEGEN claimed the throne as the top FC-native token, being used for tipping across Warpcast and skyrocketing in price. Before ERC20s really took hold in the ecosystem, though, the community was already rallying around NFT collections like Farcats, Farcaster OG, and more recently Outcasts.
Moonlight – an experimental onchain product studio – launched a Farcaster Index this week that curates the top tokens and collections from the Farcaster ecosystem, highlighting prices, community engagement, and more.
While some folks think that memecoins are largely a wasteful economic activity, some – like Josh from Seed Club – are encouraging us to take them seriously. He views memecoins as “cultural prediction markets,” social products with clear PMF.
Regardless of your take, there’s clearly something brewing here that is worth paying attention to.
What’s Poppin’
As of last week, Lens – the decentralized social protocol by Avara – is permissionless. Anyone can make a profile. From Avara CEO: “In our first few years, we chose to remain in beta while we enhanced security and scalability and nurtured a vibrant developer ecosystem. We took a protocol-first approach and supported over 400 community-built applications. Some of these were fully open source with as many as 100 contributors.” Just six months after launching in beta, over 100,000 users were engaging with apps across Lens. The community created over 37M onchain social transactions, including 5M posts, 4.5M mirrors, 2.2M comments, and 11M follows. to the Lens team! We’re excited to see how the future of web3 social plays out, with competition from Farcaster and others.
Meme.market is a new platform that allows you to create and use Markets, which consist of 1155 NFT media, a liquidity pool, and tokens. You can mint NFT media to buy tokens in a Market. You can also sell your tokens anytime and keep the meme. Liquidity is backed by a linear bonding curve. While the platform is not in open beta, about a dozen creators have already created meme Markets. This platform takes “create to earn” to a new level, and the experimentation will be fun to watch.
This piece from Katie Chiou at Archetype examines the transformation of digital communities and cultures in the age of the internet. It highlights the dominance of platforms and algorithms in shaping context and individual expression, leading to a homogenization of culture and a reliance on mass-scale trends. Chiou suggests that the next generation of consumer platforms should prioritize fluidity between online and offline experiences, decentralized curation, and resilience to trend cycles. Potential solutions include token models and protocol-based ecosystems to foster genuine social connections and support cultural diversity. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the need for innovative tools to navigate the rapid evolution of digital culture.
The article from Coinbase Ventures discusses the evolution of wallet technologies in the crypto/Web3 ecosystem. It highlights the shift from traditional self-custody wallets to the emergence of embedded wallets (Wallet As A Service) and Smart Accounts, focusing on the technological advancements and their implications for user interaction, application adoption, and the positioning of wallet providers. The piece outlines the era of self-custody, the rise of embedded wallets and Wallet-As-A-Service, and introduces Smart Accounts, emphasizing the potential for these technologies to significantly lower the onboarding friction for new users and enhance the overall user experience. This is especially relevant with the launch of Coinbase’s own wallet developments from this week.
On March 14 (pi day), gas fees on the OP Superchain (i.e. OP Mainnet, Base, Zora, Mode) and other L2s are anticipated to fall dramatically. With the Superchain specifically, the team estimates a drop to about $0.01 or less per transaction. These savings have historically been difficult to estimate, leading to vague projections such as “10-100x cheaper.” This is because we can’t predict what happens to transaction demand when 1) Fees drop to the lowest they’ve ever been, and 2) We enter a new “blobgas” market, which influences transactions’ gas fees. This frame and webapp helps estimate gas savings from the coming upgrade.
Multichain Pill
Blast mainnet is live. More than $2.3 billion had been staked into the bridge from the Ethereum mainnet to Blast, according to the Blast website just before the scaling network went online.
Uniswap is now available on Zora. The client is live and easy to use.
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