Farcaster Memecoins
Aired Date
November 13, 2024
Hosts
Series
Farcaster 101
Episode
Module 8
Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/r8ZhnmQVwvcfarcaster 101 is an educational series brought to you by gm farcaster in partnership with snickerdoodle building off of their state of farcaster report which you can access at snickerdoodle.com this 12 part series introduces all aspects of the farcaster ecosystem and helps you get started building your social graph and brand on farcaster
gm farcaster and we are back with another farcaster 101 module 8 and we're continuing on with our chat about meme coins so we're going to jump right in to our discussion today we're going to be talking about how sort of meme coins came about on farcaster what makes them a little different than other platforms some of those specific meme coins that have taken off on the platform like dgen ham higher moxie and others and we're going to also talk a little bit about some of the integrations and things that have been built on top of these coins or incorporating the different tokens and then tipping culture which has really taken off on farcaster and has become a big part of our ecosystem so we're going to start here so adrienne do you wanna do a little review of what we chatted about in the last module
yeah so in module 7 we just were introducing kind of cryptocurrencies on farcaster and we just did a review because farcaster being a blockchain based social network it's built on optimism that gives all sorts of benefits you get from a social network perspective so because farcaster is a blockchain network users own our identities our accounts no one can take them away it's full self sovereignty everybody has their own wallet attached we get censorship resistance it's permissionless building so that's all great from a social network perspective but because it is built on crypto rails you also get just all sorts of financialization just inherently built in because everybody has a wallet when you sign up for farcaster even if you're not crypto native even if you've never had a wallet before everybody gets an ethereum wallet you can attach you can bring your own wallets and attach your own wallet so every user on farcaster has an ethereum wallet attached to their account which means just if you wanna do any sort of payments rewards send value send currencies send tokens it's just built in and not just to warp cast the the client but at the protocol level so tons of potential for kind of integrating any sort of any sort of like financial transactions directly in the social feed
exactly so meme coins sort of took off around this time last year and i just realized i spelled meme coins wrong but we're just gonna leave that there and we're gonna pretend that that's meme instead of mem but i remember the coins when they launched and the first one was points and that was launched on main net and it was a play on there was a there was a moment there was a there was a meta about points and it was kind of around the time that rainbow launched points but didn't really say what the points were for or anything like that as well as some other you know points meta that was happening at that moment and so a dev on farcaster launched points and one of the things they did was airdrop it to a lot of og holders so literally those who were holding the og nft and it kind of went from there and although that didn't see a lot of success for many reasons it got a little overwhelming for the dev who created it because of the attention that he wasn't expecting and that sort of went by the wayside and then farts launched and bill we love bill z but really wish he had picked a different term but it was fun at the time so farts was a little different because it was created to benefit directly purpledao and purple is the dao that was created to support farcaster builders so all the sort of benefit from this particular coin went into the dao's treasury and was able to fund some really cool things for them so that was also on mainnet and the dao at that time was on mainnet and then we had wow wow now this was a play on another meme we talked about it in our discussion on culture you'll see the wow wow reaction if you ever type wow wow into a cast it will change the heart into a wow wow so it had a little moment as well and then a token was created based on that meme that was already living on farcaster so it was taking a meme that already existed on farcaster and turning it into a token rather than the other way around with some of these other ones so wow wow again had just a little bit of a blip it didn't really have a lot of staying power but it was sort of that first sort of moment on base as a meme coin where folks started to see like this could be a whole different
experience and then came degen so adrienne tell us a little bit about degen what it is and why is it special and different from some of the other coins
yeah so dgen was a token that launched in forecaster yes at the very beginning of 2024 so january 2024
just another meme coin there was a degen channel in farcaster where was building a community of of crypto degens and with out of the you know as we started seeing more and more meme coins launched not just in farcaster but kind of in other areas as well degen was created as a token what was different i think about degen 1 there was an initial airdrop what's interesting also similar i guess to points is because social graph data is open the the airdrop was using different data from the farcaster graph so some of it went to people who were active on farcaster
i don't remember if it was ogs specifically or just
people who were active
yeah and then it also
it was ogs it was power users it was those who were interacting in the dgen channel so and again dgen was the dgen channel itself was created before the token but it did use some of that as well to increase the
error and like all good meme tokens typically the token should come after the meme and not the other way around so so dgen launched and what was new about it was the mechanism for distributing the token not everything was available upfront it was being released in different phases and the mechanism was going to be through something that was eventually was called tipping which just meant that people on the feed could distribute out just through comments in a feed so if nanaesh praf casted something and i liked what she said i could just add a comment in a reply and just say you know a 100 dgen with the symbol for dgen and then that would be me kind of distributing some dgen token to nanish professor it didn't necessarily come from my allocation of dgen everyone had like an allocation of tips that they could give out so it was a novel mechanism and it really exploded it was coincidentally launching around the same time as frames which we've covered before but frames being a new primitive that let developers build very small interactive
experiences but directly in the feed so what we saw was just a massive influx of users coming to farcaster in kind of late january february at as as dgen was taking off and and for and frames was was available
so much so that when the frames launched as we mentioned there was a frame you could purchase girl scout cookies in and you could do that with dgen so i famously paid 90,000 dgen for 6 boxes of grass cut cookies purposefully intentionally yes i wanted my bitcoin pizza moment so it's it kinda took on its life of its own the ecosystem took to it the tipping mechanic was is really different because instead of allotting the whole airdrop at once to certain people it then sort of distributed trickled it out over time where you have this up to 10,000 dgen allowance that you can still do there's some certain requirements on that you can find all that at dgen tips and but it allows you to distribute on behalf of the protocol you're not like adrianne said you're not taking it out of your own wallet it's something that the dgen project is giving to you to distribute and then you're able to claim those that are distributed to you at certain like at the month each month so very different mechanic and the other thing with the sort of meme development and how it developed over time was this sort of memeification of de gentlemen and we kind of you know there was a little pushback by the ladies we're like what about de ladies so it's de gentleman and de ladies but it became this top hat this sort of top hat vibe i think oxen was involved in some of that discussion 1 of the sort of our caster artists og artists is top hat sort of became the symbol for dgen it was worked into the logo and it's one of the other reacts that you'll see on farcaster so if you use the top hat symbol or no if you type in dgen if you type in dgn or use the top hat i can't remember which the little symbol becomes a top hat so i think it's if you type in the word dgn so just a fun little mechanical quirk of the platform that makes it just a little bit more enjoyable little moments of joy that i love it also they also launched an l3 so there's been a lot of building on top of it as well as a lot of permissionless apps and you can find all these in the apps section of dgen tips and some of those apps are games there's a really fun one where you can tip to people but you do it via a game and it's just really fun so there's all these different the builder energy just sort of dropped on top of this token and it it's what's kept it sustaining for this whole time so it's been about 10 months that is a very long life for a meme coin and so i think that the difference is the thoughtful dev at the core of it as well as the builder energy around farcaster that's helped to keep it going beyond just speculative the speculative nature of coins in general anything else on that adrienne that i may have forgotten
just the dev the dev behind dgn is doxxed we know who that is it's jacek he was on our show we we did a gm barcaster interview early on when dgn launched and then a follow-up a few months later so we'll drop those links as well if you wanna learn more about dgen those are good episodes to catch up on
yes great and then we have other coins that have launched since then and many have a similar tipping mechanic one of those is ham and ham has a lot of similarities to dgen in terms of how it's distributed except i believe that the ham tipping is actually coming from your own personal allocation i'm not positive but i believe that's how it works there's a lot more information that you can find on ham fun and this has its own community that's very active on farcaster they also have an l3 so they've been doing a lot in terms of building on top of that token and then there's moxie and adrienne can you share a little oh sorry go ahead
well i'll just say one thing on ham they also have their own emoji
they do have their own emoji
yes whereas dgen has the the purple top hat ham has a ham bone yeah it's a ham bone emoji
and and that's what's used for tipping it's the ham bone and then whatever the amount is yeah so that is it's a little fun yeah
yeah so feedback we've gotten from new people to forecasters they come in and they see things like top hats and hand bones and ham and d gen and it can feel overwhelming they don't know where to begin it's just that's their meme coins and they have communities around them a one of our favorite farcaster users named naomi whose handle is at afrochicks created a great like minute video kinda tiktok style of what it feels like in real life to walk through the farcaster feed of people throwing hams in your face so we can link that as well if you wanna get it
we'll put that in the notes it is quite funny yeah
so yeah and and ham was similar like again similar to in terms of mechanics i think slightly different and then moxie had a big launch this summer moxie was built by the team at airstack airstack was was previously doing a lot of farcaster infrastructure and farcaster apis the vision for moxie is similar i think to dgen and ham which is the idea that people should be paid for their content and that financialization in a social network is not a bad thing that it can be good that in the web 2 worlds there's a lot of money in social but it's accruing really to the network not to the network participants so it goes to the corporate networks so you know the the metas of the world and the twitters take most of the monetary and the users who are generating all the value does not so the vision always has been where where users are generating the value of a of a social network users should participate or in the upside so the vision for moxie was another token where the the distribution of moxie happens not through tipping mechanisms which which you can see on the on your feed for people actually doing it but it just happens automatically based on likes recasts and replies so it is kind of algorithmically determined based on organic engagement in the feed
and yep and you can learn more in the airstack channel or airstack.xyz i believe is the link and we'll have these links for you in the notes as well and just a note on all of this every single token that we've mentioned nfa like not financial advice please do your own research because we're not there is a lot of risk of loss involved with playing around with cryptocurrencies especially meme coins they are a very volatile asset so if you are playing around with these just be very careful and know that you should treat it like a casino and only risk what you're willing to lose so just a a safety note there and this is this is in regards to any meme coin of any kind anywhere
yeah i mean i go so far as to say say they're volatile assets i always go far to say they're not even all assets they're
yeah they're not yeah
they're yeah
i think that's so accurate yeah accurate definitely accurate i think what moxie brought what what moxie brought that was different and each one of these has had a different innovation the ones that we're highlighting and they had a different approach and i think with moxie like sort of stripping away the overt tipping and making it a little bit more seamless was trying to solve the problem of having a feed that was full of you know 616 degen everywhere and this those kind of commenting things that might be ruining or disrupting i would say maybe not ruining but disrupting your normal feed so yeah sorry and i cut you off what were you gonna say
no i was just gonna add that like our goal for these modules is to give you a history of meme coins on farcaster it's not how do you invest in meme coins on farcaster and that is definitely not so there's in our in our cultures on module and stuff we've talked about i'm sorry in our modules on culture and things we've talked about in previous farcaster 101 modules we keep saying farcasters for builders so it is a new emerging space there is a ton of novel behavior happening great for building
we there if if you wanna come and speculate that's people do that but that's not really our stance here is just kind of being the yeah giving you the history of farcaster and and meme coins have have definitely been you can't talk about farcaster without talking about meme coins
exactly and speaking of another innovation and culture meme coins and culture with hire so hire was launched within the farcaster ecosystem so so those are sort of the early holders and the founders met each other through that ecosystem as well as the noun's ecosystem so it's sort of bringing those two things together and they launched higher with a fair launch anyone who was in the hire channel at that time i believe received an airdrop and that but the team itself doesn't hold anything extra beyond that so a little different but the idea behind hire is really to focus on the memes of hire and the concept of always trying to strive for higher ideals higher values etcetera so a little different vibe than other coins you might see but it's found a lot of success within that sort of builder energy as well and has inspired a lot of different folks to go out there and build all different things whether that's podcasts or skateboards or you know other kinds of merch hats and things like that as well as athletics yeah higher athletics higher run club so there's a lot of different
different sub communities that are starting to form around higher as well as it does have a strong art focus and there it was launched by a couple of artists that were involved in the launch and light is one of them l g h t on barcaster and has a certain aesthetic that a lot of people vibe with and really enjoy so that's been part of that success as well anything else about hire that we should mention go check high hire fm as well with our friend she bangs who does a radio program where she does interviews and music which is really cool as well and that's a great place to learn more yeah
and i think higher is just a great example of a token that it kinda goes alongside a community
mhmm
but the community exists with or without the token
yep
it's like the community does feel substantial and you know it's there with or without the token so that's as opposed to kind of a token driven community
i think that's a that's a great way to put that and there's a there's you know the whole sort of other part of this was the experiment around a headless headless brand and that's the connection to nouns as well which is a dow which is also a headless brand so the idea is can you grow this without there being a centralized team that's always the one who has to push everything and that's what you see happening here is the community launching their own pieces of this culture
and a few other apps and integrations a lot of the meme coins that we've talked about are also integrated in other apps and frames that you'll find on farcaster that have been built on farcaster like bounty caster you can launch bounties in different token denominations like higher like dgen i think wow wow was the first one that was a meme coin that was integrated and then pay bot same thing so if you want to pay somebody in a different token amount you can do that using pay bot and you may even see an ai agent paying people with higher it does happen using pay bot also cast actions same thing you can do a lot of things like paying and different interactions there are some games that involve different tokens like degen tipping which we mentioned earlier and there are a lot of frames either informational frames that will give you information about here's what you have left for a tipping allowance things like that or other statistics or other fun ways to integrate into frames like if you launch a pondir survey you might win some dgen or op or moxie if you play the game with the perks team where you're trying to guess which movie it is based on a blurry image you might earn some moxie there so there's different integrations into different frames and apps that are on barcaster anything else there that i may have forgotten adrienne
the the snickerdoodle share to earn frames another great example for how you can integrate tokens within experiences and i think it just goes to show i mean this is composability in action so
yeah
different communities are launching different tokens but the tokens exist on the blockchain which means anyone has access to that information and can build on top of it and build so it's we're seeing just the very very early days of experimentation and creativity with various composable legos and we're already it's exciting already and it still just feels very very early
very early so yeah very early and speaking of early ai and meme coins so it's happened in the past week or so i think it's only been a little over a week seems much longer is the launch of the ai token bot called clankr and we just interviewed proxy studio who is the creator of the ai bot clankr and so you can go check that out that was from episode 181 and we'll link that in the notes as well and that will give you a lot more detail on what exactly is happening but in a quick summary this bot if you if it is up on online if you tag it in a post it will help you create a meme coin and launch it right there it will give you a full token page including the dex screener and a embedded uniswap
uniswap thing where you can swap right there so it's it's got everything built in it's quite impressive because you're just essentially typing a cast hitting send and the bots taking it over from there it's so easy that a bot launched launched a token with glinker so one bot talked to another bot and they launched a token together and that is currently up and running everywhere so it's been a really fun innovation and it's something to definitely keep an eye on and and watch what happens next because there's gonna be more built on top of that as well anything else you wanna mention about that adrienne
i'll just comment it's so fascinating because we started this module on the history of meme coins and farcaster with the points and the wow wow tokens which were human generated on main net yeah and not integrated into your feed and they still took off and were popular so you went from kind of human generated mainnet tokens to less like just about little like less than 12 months later yep to ai generated tokens using a bot on the feed there was a time when we could actually tell you here are the 4 or 5 tokens that are exist it's like infinite now so
yeah we i couldn't even begin
imagine there it it is at least at this moment that we are recording is farcaster's kind of obscene ai memecoin moment
yep
but yes it's it is it's early and we'll see where where this goes and how this develops and it's i think from a developer standpoint there's a lot of interesting primitives being built and
that's the exciting part to me
exciting exciting place to be building yeah
very exciting to just see the different innovations different approaches different experimentation but clanker we kind of agree i am growing weary of the pace of your speculative mania that was from the bot it needed a break but anyway it's been a lot of fun though so we hope you come and check that out if you're not already familiar and in our next module we're going to talk about content creation and best practices and we'll share some of our favorite content creators on farecaster and give you some tips for creating different content and adrienne anything else you wanna talk say about meme coins before we sign off this module or anything else that i may have missed
i think we covered it if current if cryptocurrency is not your thing if meme coins isn't your thing if trading it's totally okay there are tons of people in farcaster who don't touch a meme coin at all and have great experiences if it is your thing there's also many more rabbit holes you can dig into and go deeper in and deeper into it so hope this hope these modules were helpful in just kind of understanding the the lay of the land and the history and you know wherever you stand have fun and be
safe have fun and be safe and again yeah be be safe out there meme coins are do have a risk of loss so be careful with any investing that you may do and with that we will see you again next time where we talk about content we'll also be available in office hours to answer any questions about this or anything else you may have learned in our forecaster 1 on 1 series and with that everybody bye bye