The Hub ep2 Tuesday November 5, 2024 with guest co-host @kevinoconnell

gm everyone and welcome to the second ever episode of the hub developer focused podcast right here on the gm forecaster network i'm your host dilstech dot e and i'm here today with my guest cohost kevin o'connell who i'm very excited to have on welcome kevin

yeah i guess before we start i would ask you two opening questions light opening questions one is if you wanna give sort of a a quick little background on yourself and then the second is what is exciting to you in varcaster or crypto right now you can take that as as vague or or detailed as you want to

yeah nice are there any games in particular that you're playing or keeping your eyes on or but i do think like i hear a lot of people especially in crypto say oh when a new kinda like tech or trend comes around gaming is the first to adopt it

nice nice yeah no for sure i think especially for that initial go to market i also think like for the the the social aspect of being able to pull in that like graph of your friends but but yeah there there there's so many different angles that that it can be taken and then there are other games like in the more maybe not as farcaster focused right now but that are using everything crypto has to offer in terms of tokens nfts to like take essentially what you do in web two in a database or with robux or whatever kinda system you're using and just cryptoify the the entire thing

yeah i think it's interesting because i i keep wrestling with this as well of there's so much interesting tech being built and there are so many use cases that people in crypto can have these conversations of i think it is a matter of meeting the user where they are so on one hand you can build something for the the farcaster crypto native user that fits their need but build that expecting that that's not really like scaling to millions of users especially if you're a % dependent on a farcaster account or maybe that's maybe you have that long tail but like i

if you are maybe from a non farcaster background and that's how you're building your product and you're building it just for farcaster people i would focus on it just for farcaster people same way if yeah you're building a product just for yourself it's great if that product scales but go into it with the mindset that you're literally building it for yourself and that sort of area is how you want it to scale there is the larger incentive of and this is i'm sure what everyone wants to do what is the non crypto application where you can sneak crypto under the hood maybe not even talk about it at all and then all of a sudden millions of users have some sort of crypto points or account or whatever the case may be the latter which i just described i think so many people want right and they want this sort of quote unquote rug pull moment where these tech behemoths in web two that you know use malpractice and everything to kind of hoard our data like they no longer have that advantage and yeah we could see something like that in the next couple of years but i'm not seeing as many of those products and i personally think if people in crypto wanna get to that point they should continue to build for farcaster or for themselves or yeah for these cozy corners because the more that they unlock for that tech and the more that community expands the more real that opportunity becomes maybe that's a a lazy answer but when we think about that ladder it's just it's so hard for anything like that to just happen overnight you know

yeah yeah i think on the other side of that though like something really so i i took a walk last week with like a a friend who's not in in crypto at all but just like has similar software interest and and i was explaining to him like this particular idea that thought was a cool intersection of you know ai and new tech and crypto in particular and the more that he kept questioning me about this idea the more i realized that even just to build like a v one or something of it that matters to me i really didn't need crypto at all and it was more of like a idealist thing where well if we had crypto look at all these other advantages but it really just wasn't necessary so i think there is also this other angle of there are many products where we want crypto we want this egalitarian state we wanna serve the people in these communities but there may just be other products where that isn't necessary right now or where we don't need to push the solution and everything even if that's where we want it in the future and there's obviously so much more in tech so with that to say it's like you know tinker with stuff on farcaster build it for yourself or for that farcaster audience yeah there could be other ideas that maybe just don't make sense with farcaster right now but will make sense in six months to a year i mean look at how fast everything moves we didn't have smart wallets a year or two ago gas was costing people like dozens if not hundreds of dollars

with that let's go into some of the top links for this week so i have a couple prepared but we are also mostly just going to riff and see kinda where this takes us i kinda think this

or can we do that one's a little bit bigger than i would have liked it i think we're just gonna have to go with this one okay perfect

so so this was the one that i wanted to bring up first shout out to to moe who's been building a lot of really cool stuff for butterfly but also with canvas which to me seems to be his way to make different like community engagement or frame mini app tools that are also cross compatible between farcaster and lens and then this one in particular the canvas quiz it's you know a little math quiz i also really like the design of it how when you start you have these little indicators to to tell you your state i'm not gonna do all this mental math right here

but i i really like this like using frames to their full ability making use of the frame spec doing certain small details that people making frames maybe aren't always paying attention to like when you see those little details like the moxie mini app or frame for example you can tell the the the the level of attention put into something and i think it is cool if i don't know if this is how moe is thinking about it i don't know if you wanna if you wanna come on and chat about it sometime it almost seems like he's making these like stock experiences that he can then put throughout his app which is really interesting i wonder if because i know in in in web two where there are certain environments where there are like mini app ecosystems the person making the platform often like puts out a lot of these apps or famously apple has these apps that you literally can't remove from your phone because they come stock with the phone so i wonder if warpcast would ever take that position of let's make some like stock or fun apps if anything just for an example and i i don't know i mean their their whole thing has been like developers are gonna do that but i wonder if any other clients or maybe if supercast would do something like that

yeah for sure it's cool to see it it's cool to see people exploring exciting frames because i think a lot of the time you can just see a lot of the similar frames and so to see that people are still coming up with these unique ideas trying to take advantage of the spec make it faster i mean we're gonna see that later when we go over the new like frame mini app spec stuff too but it's it's cool that people still still care about that stuff and are and are putting in

so yeah yeah this this would be cool to see another thing i wanted to bring up as well is dalichin.eth who i think also works on frog and or con collaborator at frog cofounder of beliefs he's been making this cool like f hub i think it's just a node package let's see we can even just go into the code here but it looks like it's a node package like for interacting with the hub yet library for interacting with farcaster hubs doesn't look like there's much here but maybe there's like a playground we can look at let's see

yeah i do i do under as well i mean the types look nice and everything actions.cast get cast so this looks cool like i i'm definitely all for more more more clients ways to make it easier to interact with the hub i was saying this to someone else the other day it's like this doesn't exist right now but what if there just random what if there existed like an open source package or even hooks where a developer in one file could add farcaster user registration super easily without a third party dependency just all the underlying libraries because at the end of the day all you're doing is calling the the chain like opt optimism chain

yeah exactly like i know that

if it was like a one click button like if they talk like thirty minutes to add into your repo and clients could just add it i wonder how many of them would i wonder how well that would do i think that's one of those thing where like going back to like what you build in crypto there's so many of these low hanging fruits that that i think about all the time where like if that existed i would use it i think other people would use it but with so many of those things it's just how much of that is really worth your time how much of that is pushing the needle it's different if your thing is like hey i'm gonna just build like the farcaster packages open source and get funding try and get funding from merkle or through github sponsors or whatever that's different but if you're trying to especially like build things that scale and and and add a larger value there's only so many of those like smaller utility things i actually think of all of them sign ups are probably one of the higher value ones just because like no one's done it like that in such a long time but mhmm yeah

i hear you yeah i i i think that makes sense i think but with the registration well first of all i think it's like a cool thing that supercast is leaning into crypto and also is like leaning into like oh now like isn't that the the the bio noise

yeah cool or i can't find it right now but like yeah i think the bio is something like that so i think i think that makes sense i do think as you said yeah we do want this place where there are not like more noncrypto users coming in there is part of me like you know when when people ask dan oh well what if webcast was open source i think there's this one side where it is really helpful to like see some of that stuff going on under the hood for like other people to be able to build it like for example nook is an open source client that i refer to i'm sure other people refer to a lot it does a lot of really interesting stuff but i think on the other hand how many of those breakout moments or things that come from that are gonna push the needle right now

so i think if it's like so on one hand it's it's really great it's great to have all that stuff out there but i think people should just be very intentional about

what their goal is like if if if if it's really easy to add sign ups people will add it to their client and that will be great but i think only a small number of the people adding it will be banking on something really big happening from that and i think that's the case with a lot of this stuff like if warpcast open source how they do passkey like great people adopt passkey then what you know what i mean it's just

i think to that side as well and like i don't even mean this in a bad way but like other than whatever is hot like like the hot thing like obviously like if frames are hot like people are are building it like people are building what they think can capture the most user attention because that is the most scarce commodity right now on farcaster so if everyone is rushing to agents and everyone wants to mint the ethernet nft and talk with it whatever yeah then they wanna capture that like for for that sort of person or builder in farcaster it doesn't matter as much about being the first person to a saturated market but it's about being the first person to like win or find some semblance of product market fit in a really small you know market

i think it's like definitely very relevant to to to bring up right now i think like there is this other side as well where everyone's like everyone wants to pump their token or do something like a okay for example i have this thing i went to this variant event last week like a crypto ai event and it was really cool like the a lot of people demoed it was like two straight hours of demos etcetera and i don't mean this in a bad way at all but like a majority of a lot of it was like hey ai go like create this token for me and then go make this nft and then and and that sort of infra is gonna be really important but and and and look i didn't get the sense at these demos that people were trying to create some token in front of us and then shell it or or do a you know do do that sort of thing

do think to the point you were just making a second ago a lot of people are focused on the financial aspect of this i do wonder like one of the first things that caught my eye with ethernet is oh it's doing tasks so i wonder what use cases people are gonna find for agents in a interface like outside of the feed or maybe in the feed where the use case is more personal and maybe hey something's showing up in a cast but like

i have to reveal it for myself personally in a frame you know

yeah i guess what i'm saying is like the feed is like the source of truth right now you know yeah

wouldn't do those things if you didn't do the

yeah yeah no me too it's only ethernet only was a week or two ago right it's

yeah yeah yeah

so yeah the that that's cool the the f hub thing is cool definitely keep my eye on that sure another thing i saw this is somewhat less barcaster but it does have barcaster implications so i thought i'd bring it up

there is this platform called fleek and the easiest way i could say is they wanna be like the web three vercel you know like you host your website on ipfs if i'm not mistaken vitalik might use this to to host his like vitalik.eth.limo website or like something similar similar to this but it's it's the whole thing has been about static content right so just like drop in a folder of your html or whatever which

if you know anything about vercel and next js it's not really how they work so one of the cool things i saw was that apparently they do support full stack next js deployment which to me would mean you can have server side rendering and static content and hopefully it does all this other stuff like middleware the image optimization that vercel is kinda like handling for you that doesn't really work well when you just run next js somewhere else i haven't tried it yet but i wonder if if this becomes so seamless if developers would use it if there are even monetization angles where like let's say farcaster folks were to get involved and they give out credits based on farcaster related tokens or something like that or or something where an ai agent can autonomously deploy because fleek uses ipfs right deploy a website to ipfs for you something like that but i do think folks should should look into this yeah it it could be cool i've had my eye on on fleek for a while and it's also one of those things where if you know that someone has been in crypto for a very long time past a certain time like to me it's almost guaranteed that they like are legit and have pretty good intentions it doesn't mean that folks don't like slip through the cracks but like crypto is one of those industries to me where i feel like if you stay along like around for a while like you're you're doing a pretty good job and you're pretty pretty reliable so

don't wanna put that out there too much i haven't really used fleek before but if you're a developer i would recommend checking this out their website is man i don't like how everyone does these short links it's like fleekfleek xyz let's see yeah fleek.xyz and

yeah i also wonder like this is because of like the vercel expensive thing you know you have all these frames and links that are kinda like links in general cost the internet are broken but i bet a lot of frame links right now are broken because if you made some frame back in february that was like running up your frame server bill i doubt that you kinda have it up and again i don't really i don't know enough about how this leak thing works but back in the day i thought it would have been a cool idea if we had some sort of like way back machine or internet archive but for like frames and stuff that's post and you could expand that out to like cast right like people have their cast archive but maybe this is a platform where hey you just you can deploy so much that the janky frame you made six to nine months ago is kinda just still living and that could be cool for for casting developers as well because i saw there are also some comments about like hey like deployment's getting so hard or farcaster's changing so much it's hard to like just like put something up and it stays up you know

alright yeah check out fleek i'm gonna check it out later as well and yeah the the next thing i wanted to to bring up to is a pretty big topic here of app frames so if i had to distill it down basically a frame can load them can you know load a mini app like it does right now except loads it even faster because when you get that frame like when you get the frame url you would load the content of the mini app with it instead of how it works right now where like it's the frame and then when you open up the mini app it's an iframe like a website so it has to like load it like an entire browser tab would so that can make things faster and then the second thing i think is interesting is when you do something with the frame you want it to to change so you know you interacted with it like on ios there's an open table widget and when i rsvp yes the widget changes from do you wanna see this to yes you've rsvp'd or before the the thing changes zora when you mint on their their frame which i really like when you mint the image of the frame changes to have a big text that says minted which is really clever so now with this the button like in this case you can actually have some local button state or whatever so that when you're done in the mini app the the frame state changes and whenever you go back and view the frame you'll know oh i'm actually going to this event and how they're doing it under the hood seems like they're they're doing a lot of like caching and stuff i also wanted to bring up they had some like fun other explorations that it it doesn't look like they're going with but like a full rich embed like this would be cool you know like instead of a frame or a mini app for ponder like telegram mini apps you get access to like a little ui kit of buttons and inputs and whatever that are telegram native in this scenario it'd be really cool if warpcast had a very very small set that you can put in this window so there's no frame there's no mini app right for ponder i'm literally just voting in this like embeddable here and then it changes or same here like for fermenting right you can have a little spinner that says collecting so it does seem like they're they're moving all in the right direction i mean i i remember for a while where they were even at at averse to using iframes at all for anything and now we're at this world where iframes are are powering all these experiences so i think it's really cool

gotta think about it a little bit as well because it's one of those things where when this came out i thought oh well what's something i could build on this and i think personally i would have said like nothing really stood out to me but i do think there are some cool optimizations like events dot x y z in the excalidraw wherever it went like that's a really good use case ponder is a good use case so like some of those

yeah ponder yep

yeah so if you wanna build on this i would definitely i would definitely reach out to the team you should go check out this appframe document as well i'll make sure to link it in the show notes it doesn't seem like it's super super crazy though and yeah check it out

and then here's here's more on the app frames as well seems like well i don't really know when they're launching it i know they've like had conversations with certain teams about it so i would expect something in the next couple of days they move pretty quick

and then the the next thing i wanna bring up which you alluded earlier i think this is really fun and it's like a cool use of the farcaster primitives and ai is wordle meets family feud feud with friends for matthew also fun like i can see some of the little designs that show up in events x y z like the font and everything it's like fun little like design system bonus point there but this is really cool so you get like these little questions you're typing in and then i think what's happening yeah every game is created from a single gpt prompt and then you have like alternative phrases so when you type in ai can see if your guess is like close enough to the actual answer which i know is pretty neat it's fun it's it's easy to use and i think like with the moe from canvas thing it's really cool when people are interested in fun and different things and and put aside time to to build in a good way i think it yeah encourages other people to build cool stuff like when i see stuff like that it's like wow people are putting attention into their fun side things so i think it's really cool to see it's fun to play

yeah no it's cool too it's so funny like if you were to tell me even a year or two ago that like farcaster has the ecosystem of crypto native apps that it does have today also the majority of them like serving niches within this community i wouldn't have believed it and so the point we're in today is great and i know that like a lot of people myself included complain about like oh how much forecast is growing or we wanna get to this large place but i think these are all positive signs that it will continue to grow and if anything this is really cool that there are just all these native native games i can continue to play with my friends for fun yeah

yeah for sure i also wonder in that instance like let's say you build something as a mini app but you have that idea that a non crypto person can use it what are the steps you're taking to to bridge that gap is it yeah you add nonfarcaster sign in you do distribution with like twitter or tiktok whatever i mean i guess other i guess like dracula tries to do stuff like that other other folks too

but

with this like feud for with with this feud for with friends game for example you know since you were saying all like non noncrypto people would like this too which like i i i agree you know

yeah no for sure

cool so shout out matt again this is a really cool game

the play cool and then yeah we went over this this is a this is a fun event saw some saw some cool people there yeah i think it is one of those things though where a lot of it was like this it was either like chat based of like let me create some sort of token or something mhmm or it was like let let let let the the agent run some of crypto related workflow on my behalf

i think personally i'm just like not the target user for that and it's not to say that other folks won't be like for example there was some tool that was like hey monitor for when i mint an nft or buy a token and then send me an email based on it and if you want that like zapier like workflow then that works great for you but i personally kinda just like don't need that or like buy this token if it's within x or y range like again if you're a pro trader or whatever that's really helpful but i just don't necessarily necessarily need that yeah

yeah sure but but no this this was a fun event again like two straight hours of demos people were really passionate about what they were building also one of the core things i saw was the the coinbase based agent i'll see if i can pull it up

yep so basically if you haven't seen the based agent i think this is it but yeah you're just like making making agents on chain you can use all of this stuff from the coinbase developer platform to to like mint the agent can have a wallet address it can have these like modes of like you can chat with it it can just do stuff automatically or it can be like agent to agent which like in one of the things in in ai right now has been that ai has these like tool calls where you know you can ask like what's the weather and then define a get get weather function and then when you ask what's the weather the ai will decide what tool is fit for the for the prompt and then it can make like an api or external call but there it can start to hallucinate when you have like over like 15 or 20 tools but now there's this new mode where like different agent or llm instances will like decide the tool together and then pass the function off between different agents you know still have like a tool deciding agent and then an executing agent and then the deciding one will like choose the function and move it over so i think this is a is a cool use of that as well but

it seems to be based off like the openai swarm swarm

yeah which is basically just like their like i

experiment yep so that that one was the coolest or like the coolest to me because i feel like i could see that framework being used by a lot of different people to yeah build stuff and it seems really well built out and it is cool like i would have never expected that coinbase could be a go to place for like a crypto agent but i think it makes sense with them just having so much crypto infrastructure overall

yep yeah for sure for sure and then keeping on with the same trend i happen to see this from n from the bev far farquest bev i i don't know the the proper name i'll just call it farfarquest far market this this far farnam tax which is pretty funny name but the what caught my eye was using the bot to interact with the frame which that is along the lines of something that's interesting to me of the bot doing something on your behalf yeah you could also imagine it being a more personal context where the bot is doing something just for you or in this case like what if the results in the frame or the mini app are just for your eyes and so it shows like your transaction receipt

something else like that so i think this is a cool line of thinking and i wonder again if people are gonna experiment with what this like what implications this has outside of the feed like like one of my hot take one of my hot takes here is that and for many good reasons right like warpcast and the feed style model has become predominant on farcaster but i think ai in particular has a chance to really throw a wrench in it whether it's mhmm the more tiktok style where you can always get content as you want or the agentic style where a bot is going and taking actions or doing things on your behalf and i think either of those could take a form factor that looks different or than a feed or more like an altered feed and not just like a standard boilerplate

and then another another related there's a lot of like you know a ai related stuff this one i think is one of the most interesting because i i mean i've i've like know july and and and know a lot of his interests but this one the roc camera the camera that can take verifiably real moments in the age of ai so if you have been following some of the work of july iraq and faust you would know that he is really into this like verification of the real world you know like crypto aspects as well but funny enough

you look at if you look at this rock dot camera there's no mention of crypto anywhere even though you see generating proof which may or may not be using crypto i actually don't fully have the answer to that but the idea here seems to be you have some sort of verifiability with this physical object that's verifying your image and that's been something interesting to me of like how how do you get this real world's data and verify that it's yours like different than online data but this stuff in real life and i think that's gonna be important for like security reasons but i also think for like personal and nostalgic reasons people are gonna want stuff that's more real more verifiable like even outside of crypto and tech i think over the next couple of years we're gonna see even more of a demand for like in real life events and experiences and things that actually bring people together in a age of you know ai and a digital world and and loneliness for people

all that aside this is a really cool product really interesting website as well i think there is some cool stuff that you could do with this you have great tech to be able to use there is a photo sdk to create a z k proof okay there you go there is a z k proof but yeah i just think this thing is really cool you can order it in beta for for $2.99 us dollars shipping late this year early next year mhmm and if you're interested in any of this stuff as well you should totally reach out to july he's just a nice person

yeah for sure and then following what you said like knowing knowing what is real matters more than knowing what's fake you know mhmm and this is so yeah

yeah awesome and then the last link we have here i don't really know what exactly this means but apparently varun showed what is the future and is beautiful and we'll have one tap transactions and share liquidity across apps and this is an amazing time to to be building so woj is well if you have any extra comments that you would like to add on to this please let us know but this really caught my eye and woj is just someone whose word i trust when it when it comes to this sort of stuff so watch out for a big boom farcaster it's all i'll say

yeah you're talking about evm bridging or bridging like from the evm to solana

i think the in wallet app thing can get a lot better warp cast i i i mean i know supercast is working on a wallet i have a theory warpcast will probably work on a wallet as well and if so they can do something like a keys.coinbase.com as a canonical firemaster resource and they can also issue session keys so that people can access the wallet and even more granular apis like right now for many apps you can access transactions and call the transaction in warp cast i'm sure they'll make it so that you can just do a bunch of other stuff like in an authenticated context right in the forecast or other clients and if so that'll actually make it more beneficial to have embedded wallets on a per app basis if they can talk to one another if not it does it wouldn't make sense right for me to just have these scattered embedded wallets that i'm doing nothing with but if they if i can actually do something across them then yeah then then that will matter so well

it'll get there hopefully it'll get to a point where you can move across the evm and not really not really think about it too much

but for sure and then i guess like an add on question there would be then but

i keep hearing from people well solana has this meme coin attitude that that like evm or base just doesn't have and i can't really speak to that because i'm not big in like i'm not the biggest meme coin meme coiner yeah but you i know you're more a little bit more into that sort of stuff

i mean i see some meme coins on base but if you pull the average person on the street i feel like that's what they know about solana you know

tools like bonkbot are are big

got it got it

well those are the main links that we have for this week but before we wrap things up i wanted to give you opportunity if there's anything that you wanted to maybe plug or shout out or if there are any last minute conversations i missed from this week that you wanted to to bring up but other than that really appreciate everyone joining and really appreciate you joining here for the second episode kevin

nice yeah i think it can be it can it can be hard to stay the course but past couple weeks in particular there's been some good excitement some more stuff on the feed so i'm i'm excited about where everything's trending

but thank you again everyone for joining really appreciate it for coming to the hub episode two we'll be back next week probably at 10am eastern standard time thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day