GM Farcaster Live at ETH Denver with Justin Hunter of @pinatacloud
Aired Date
March 1, 2024
Series
Special Event
Episode
ETH Denver 2024 Pinata
Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/iv522YWG-TEwelcome to part four of our live recording of gm broadcaster in the podcast studio at east denver thank you to the podcast crew at east denver especially dan and aaron we rolled for two hours and rotated guests in and out this episode is with justin hunter from canada cloud also known as ruler of minds on farcaster thanks so much for sitting down with gm farcaster to chat about all things pinata ipfs and frames
glitter of minds justin come on in alright we're having so much energy whichever one whichever one you want
is it got the
blue or purple we don't know why here we go we can't figure out how to change the colors so welcome lean into the mic so we hear you well
alright can you hear me well
we can hear you well but lean in because we pick up a little bit of alright
yeah alright we'll get
close as possible
close kiss kiss the mic
kiss the mic
welcome we are so excited to have you here
thank you for having me this is great it's finally nice to
it's great to meet you it is so great to meet you because i was like i don't know if he's here but i don't know what he looks like
i was that is so looking for
a llama i was looking for like a llama pinata thing
so i
know what you look like yeah
you do because i posted pictures that you've seen
yes you have
i do
my my pfp kind of looks like me i made it to look like me
oh yeah
i know i've made that
it does you're right and now that you say that i'm like oh yeah
it's a it's a custom companion in a box
i love that i love that so you are here so do you all have a booth or any space or anything that you're doing here at you're just kind of
like no every every east denver we come and we hack oh amazing okay
because that's we build we build
how many
how many east denbours has pinata been at
pinata's been at five or six oh wow yeah
and how about you three fantastic yep how does this stack up to the other two how you
feeling i didn't come last year so this is my first year here at the
at the newspace right so you were at the the sportscastle yes sportscastle sportcastle
yeah yeah so i actually like the sportscastle more obviously could not accommodate this many people but the vibe is very different with the sports castle you guys have been right
i was just there for the first time i didn't this is my first december but i was at the sports castle which we renamed pizza castle
yeah
the other night for pizzadao because we had lil nouns and nouns was sponsoring so i was there
so you can imagine trying to cram all of these people in there it is what made it kinda charming it wasn't this many people
but still cozy
cozy bathrooms never never worked yeah cozy cozy yeah
but this is this is pretty amazing to see they've really done an incredible job yeah it's huge so what is what is pinata hacking on right now like what is your focus and and then we have to talk about frames because
yeah
frames here but let's thing is that is that what most people are hacking on right now or you or they're doing a little bit of everything
a little bit of everything so normally we come into e denver with an actual idea to hack on okay this year we had a million ideas and we just kinda ran with everything so we did a frame you were part of you were part of the frame i she killed crushed yeah i love
am i allowed to curse yeah go ahead i fucking love that frame
it was awesome right and your team dominated dominated your team absolutely dominated
that's not why i loved it but
yes it was
it was fun but also it was fun to win so fun so we we built the frame but then the frog announcement happened while we were at npc day which was the first day that we were all here and so the frog frame framework came out and
tell us what that tell us what that is
yeah so we had our own frame framework but frog is way better and it just makes it super easy to build frames and to test them right they have a a debugger built in but the way they what's that
who built the frog frog
the the team behind vm if you're familiar with vm for the smart contract tooling they built frog
okay
and when i was listening to the twitter space while at npc day they mentioned it's gonna support middleware and we're like well we need to build middleware for this immediately because we have frame analytics we've been able to build that and so as as soon as that twitter space ended we started building frame analytics wow or the
did you just say you have frame analytics
yes
did someone just posted someone just posted on someone build this frame analytics yeah i did you respond to it
i didn't see it
oh alright okay so someone built it already built i guess
it's yeah it's out there that's cool it's free the game the basketball game is built using that so you can build leaderboards with it or just track interactions
that's really cool
yeah so but really cool i think your original question is what we're hacking on it's everything today we're gonna build a a native swift client for farcaster because there's really no reference for swift it's all react native or expo so we're gonna try to do that we're gonna speed run it today and see if we can pull it off amazing that's
really cool and i'm really excited like talk about the game and the frame and like what you're like how did that work and then what kind of analytics do you get from that like what are the different types of analytics you get
you should talk about the the game i'm about the game dominate
we talked about it this morning we talked about the game
just nonstop because i i don't i actually don't win anything she says anything don't win anything
she won a basketball game let let's talk about that she's five feet tall
the adoration of all of that farcaster that's right
that's right yeah
aw it's the love it's the love
but yeah sometimes we meet along the way so talk
about how the frame worked and what you had to do
so the frame is a simple game and and like all frames image with buttons so you kinda click through start your game you pick your team one of four people it was me and three people three people who lost yeah
the losers
and the and the losers
sorry sorry dear
he's going to be next i don't know
we'll we'll see if he shows up he might he may not show me
i trolled him this morning too about it and then he sent me a ghost so yeah i was
gonna ghost us okay so you choose
your team and then it say okay tells you the rules of the game on the next screen try to click as close as possible to three seconds and the closer you get the higher chance of shooting your basket by the way it's march madness tournament's gonna begin very thematic liked it so and then you click and then it does a little random and it tells you whether you even got your shot or you didn't and then it adds up your points i think every hour it resets the game resets every game is an hour okay and anyone can play so i i
totally missed it because i was here and busy and i missed it completely
it's still out there you can play okay oh you can still hope i can still i yours
oh it's not over now every hour is
a new it never ends it's every hour
never ends we gotta keep going never
ends like it's infinite
would have to turn it off it's infinite
i think we need an end time she wants a trophy
yeah i don't think any of
this touches my infinite games okay infinite games some infinite games
so
it was super fun but i was on a plane when i was doing it so like the frame clicking like the latency between when i clicked start and then when the next image showed up was
and then also trying to click the three seconds yeah so i
was like one two three click and then i went to the next frame and it said you clicked at fourteen seconds i'm like yeah
that's that's the challenge of frames but the analytics part is what powers all of the all of the data right so we showed how long you click or how long the click was that's part of analytics but also that reset function where it resets every hour the analytics that we track for frames is time series and so we just look at that hour period and then it goes back because we have the time soon
and you're tracking i guess either fid or wallet of whoever's doing the click what the actions are
yeah exactly
exactly as a develop like this is a simple prototype of a game but you can imagine any action do like click click a button make a choice and you've got that data yep and so so i get that data in pinata
like yeah we have a we have a dashboard in pinata but we also have apis because you know our casters a lot of developers
so yeah
yeah so you you don't have to use the dashboard in pinata you can use the apis and build your own dashboard build your own game outside of frames whatever you want
oh that's really cool
yeah
we gotta we gotta think of some things i think we gotta we gotta think about this
apparently that's what we've we've learned that we're very good at building mini games in pinata because that's all we think about i guess
that's right
well it's
pinata there
you go
pinata's again yeah and i was gonna say what for those who may not know what pinata is just in case i don't know how they wouldn't but let's say they're they're new to crypto or they're just new to the ecosystem can you just give a quick like what is pinata what are they what do you what's your focus and and then talk about like how you guys have now sort of moved towards farcaster and looking at that yeah
absolutely pinata is at its core a pinning service for ipfs we launched in 2018
oh wow i didn't realize it was that around
that long
i think the first time i used it was 2022 for for a project i did
for nfts probably yeah yep yep that was that was obviously pinata's big break is like 2020 '20 '20 '1 nfts but we've been around since 2018 we were the second ipfs pinning service after infura and infura was focused on ethereum nodes and then also had the pinning service so we did that and then farcaster has been on our radar for a year and a half now and it's funny going back to old emails or old slack messages when it was still test net farcaster i was talking with kyle our ceo about running a hub because it's so aligned with what we do with ipfs it just wasn't the right time it was still testnet there was like couple thousand people on the network but we kept an eye on it and now that things have picked up makes sense to run a hub so we are in addition to ipfs we're running a free forecaster hub we're building apis around the hub as well to make it easy for developers to build clients to build bots to build frames and then of course we talked about analytics so we've frame analytics we're that's huge friends of big big fans of that but yeah it all it all works together though if if you're building on farcaster you need media that's ipfs amazing
that's really really that was a great perfect summary i love that
thank you
what else it's perfect you're you've got it down you've got it down we are really bad with with elevator speeches pitches completely that was perfect because i usually just wander off onto other things and i'm like oh wait a minute let me go back to what this is so what do you have so what are you excited about like when you look at farcaster and you think about i you think about pinata together like what excites you like what do you see as sort of how do these work together in yeah in the future
i mean i think they align perfectly for the reason i mentioned before farcaster's all open data right yes but it's no there's no media it's all just json right it's all text what you're missing is media and right now that's links what it actually reminds me of and why we're so excited about it is when nfts first started taking off in about 2020 like everybody's locked up because of the pandemic and they're trading nfts a lot of those nfts had images and then eventually videos that pointed to like dropbox right and the same thing is happening with farcaster so we already know like dan's talked a lot about why they use imgur or imgur however you say it for for images but everybody else is also using these very centralized but also closed
have just before we move have there been any kind of like high profile centralized nfts that have disappeared
oh yeah tiles yeah
i was like i know in theory it could
yeah yeah
but they have yeah there there were on yes so you own your nft which is
a pointer
right that is immutable that never goes away but the actual art behind it
yeah and you try to load it which you know it was a problem that people recognized pretty quickly with nfts and i think that's gonna happen with farcaster and why we're so committed to it because you're going to need media and so if we if we provide all these tools to build the apps on farcaster and then we already have our core business of ipfs it just aligns perfectly love that yeah i i
mean it makes a lot of sense to me and i had loved the the one of the early frames was just it was like a click through of like different images but pointing back to ip to pinata
yes
like it was just very simple but i was like oh this is really cool this is a great way because you can only because of the limitations of our caster because the limitations of how many images you can see at one time and upload at one time i think it's now two but i still only get one and that doesn't ever seem to work with more than one so that makes it very easy to like if i wanna share all the pictures from east denver that i've been taking i can just upload them to minyatta pop them in a frame and that's you know here we go and that makes it so simple
we learned very early that warpcast the main client actually supported ipfs images if you just pasted the link and you had a query parameter on there you know nobody was gonna do that but it supported it and then we we were very fortunate that woje supercast chose to use pinata so whenever somebody uses supercast videos images those all run through i didn't
know this that's really good to know i did not know that
alone i mean as if i needed more reasons so that alone is is a reason to use supercast
so if
i'm on supercast upload a picture it doesn't go to imgur or wherever it goes to ipfs yep
i didn't know that either
same same with video
using pinata yeah that's interesting and i just got the supercast account when there was like that rush of activity and then and it started warpedcast started going down i'm like okay this might be a good time for me
to have it back yeah every time warpedcast goes down everybody's on supercast
there's a supercast yes and also because they're eventually going to have teams which is really going to be helpful for us to be able to manage the same account and things like that but this is another really great reason and i did not i was unaware of that so that's very cool so that was really we learned some things today justin what else do you we're we're wrapping up where these are rapid fire little mini interviews we definitely have to find time for something a little bit longer more deep but what should people know about pinata where do you wanna point them to any kind of call to action that you wanna leave them with
yeah i mean i think the people that are gonna be listening to this are largely farcaster developers
so i
want people to know a apparently people don't know we have frame analytics so they should know this that's amazing yeah frame analytics it's free but also the hub that's where everything starts if you're building in farcaster you need a hub when you're ready for images pinata's there when you're ready for videos but just start with the stuff that we put out there for builders in farcaster the hub frame analytics apis all of that
and you're a polluter of minds
yes
on far on warfcast and i have one last question about that what is that where did that come from
it came from i have
to ask this question
it came from so i got my mfa in creative writing
in oh wow
2017 and i just think of writing as
like an mfa today that's kinda crazy like we had a photographer earlier
like that
was kinda crazy
oh wow matthew b
matthew b yeah oh cool and just
fox yeah
but yeah so the the thought is that when you're writing you're actually like influencing the way that people think right that's that's the power of writing and then i spun it to i think it was like an old captain planet anti drug commercial that was like mind pollution was people
oh that's funny
it smells like i'm i'm just gonna send off of that
i love that i love that well thank you so much for for being here are you gonna be at the farcaster meetup tomorrow
no i fly out on saturday so but i was at the unofficial one last night which was awesome
we weren't invited everybody was invited
i know we're just we're joking we're joking we're this
is a this is now now a bit that we're continuing we weren't invited and we're blaming cameron just for reasons for no reason
oh that sounds fair i like that
that's okay and that's what everyone keeps saying and that sounds how was that meetup
it was great it was way more people than i thought we're gonna be
how many people were
there probably 60 what the whole bar got taken over
really yeah oh that's wild i love our disaster
yeah it was so great
just the best people yep in the world honestly like it's my favorite thing to do is just is just hang
so where else are you hanging out then today
we'll be around here but then also at the across the way the the the arena
the builder hubs
yeah the hacker area yeah
the hacker area
yep we'll be over there hacking away
cool well i'll be there with toady who's back there who's gonna slide over here for the nouns funds community later today so we'll be sponsoring some food alright around like i think six or seven ish so if you need some food we'll be there sponsoring some food for the hacker for the people who are hacking away down there very cool it's pretty cool well thank you so much for being here we hope to thank
you guys both this is great
thank you