and guess what you know what adrienne we're live
so now you can test your app and make sure that people are seeing us live gm and we're really excited since today we have an incredible crew of builders including linda which i'm very excited to chat with all of them and this is gonna be really fun we're gonna focus on solana which we've done once or twice before where we've actually put a focus on it but now it's i think more important now that you can actually we have mini apps we have transactions happening all the things are happening so we're gonna dive into all the solana things in just a minute but before that we're gonna we're gonna be back in just forty seconds as we do our our little intro and thank you to our premier partner octant and we'll be back in sorry fifty five seconds
vibrant digital community more than just a show gm farcaster is your digital third space where the community connects stories unfold and the culture thrives whether you're a daily caster or just dropping by we've the got latest buzz to keep you plugged in so grab your coffee and let's dive in with your hosts nounish prof and adrienne for another episode of g m forecast
and thank you to our premier partner octant be sure to check out all the latest at octant dot app and mint your degens and dragons cards at highlight.xyz
gm farcaster it is wednesday june 4 i had to look and you are here with adrienne and nounish prof for about five minutes of farcaster news followed by an amazing chat with all the solana builders who have been making waves on farcaster this is gonna be really fun quick before we start quick shout out to tony hawk the fact that i'm not using a virtual background is not about you just letting you know i'm not using a virtual background today
because he called out using virtual backgrounds and he's like prof's not gonna now he's probably just gonna be mad at me and we got a little we had a little chat we'll dive more into that on friday but i just wanted i'm like you know the irony is today i'm probably not using a virtual background because i am not at home i am traveling but yeah so that so that's why i just wanted to make sure he knew it wasn't about him it's not about you tony although i love you my brother alright let's dive in we are gonna dive into all the things that have been happening on farcaster really quick and then we're gonna dive into solana we just had our first june fc trivia game so just want to shout out everyone who showed up it was so fun we had a couple little buggy things happen but we do have some sponsorship opportunities for that starting next week and we're really excited to be doing this so we can keep this going consistently it's really fun great way to interact with folks on the timeline and jump in and and have some fun and maybe win some cash so the winners want split a 100 usdc and hopefully we'll have an even larger prize pool next week so make sure you look for that this from deodad we increased the developer rewards weekly payout from 3 to five k algo also got tweaked with a focus on daily and transacting users and a boost for higher signal users e g farcaster pro that interact with your mini app instead of strictly how many interactions transactions so that's exciting news i'm seeing a lot of we're seeing a lot of changes to different rewards programs oops i wanted to do the caster reward first the caster rewards are going up starting this week june 3 to june 10 increased the recipient pool by 18% from twenty five thirty to 3,000 so now 3,000 different casters will be winning some rewards increase the prize pool by 45% from 20,000 to twenty nine ten i don't know who's getting that bonus $10 but okay and changes that that nonround number really bothers me and i don't know why we need to do something with that changes to tiers top tier is now 600 so that's crazy the top three are now gonna get 600 new middle tier between one twenty five and thirty so that's a big change and we also saw a change to the algo that is starting this week where this is from dwr also rewards algo update we're also updating the rewards algo this week we're no longer going to count deleted cast reactions recasts or replies so no using amps anymore to try and get yourself to the top of the leaderboard this means in some cases people will see scores go down midweek we're also making a few other tweaks change will roll out later today the algo is never going to be perfect but the goal is to reward high signal top level content on the network from anyone so look for more forecasting less recasting and replies show me the incentive i'll show you the outcome there you go adrienne any any thoughts on that before i move on to one last thing and we bring up our guests or two last things
and you can spend your entire life trying to chase it but i wanna encourage you not to do that just cast for yourself it's the
there you go
for yourself told you before just be interesting what is the
just be interesting yeah just just be the cast you wanna see in the world there you go this from daniel new mini app release haptics api is live we just shipped support for haptic feedback in frames this lets you add tactile interactions like subtle taps or success pulses when users take action in your mini app why this matters haptics boost engagement by creating a more responsive experience they're especially useful for button taps errors and task completion confirmations so this is cool and there was also a oops not that there was also a you could try it out there was a little demo thing which was pretty cool i personally really like haptics for me it does change the experience like even the tipping like that feeling when you click the the weekly tipping i like that feel i don't know it's just fun so this is just a fun little nice and
because we're monkeys it's true and we like things that feel good and then this one last thing new on mobile improved wallet screen so they move some things around what we changed there was a whole bunch of different movements that happened in terms of where things are so it might take a second just to get reoriented but this is because of some other things that are gonna be added so they are making some changes to some to the wallet screen so that is it for news today because we have a lot of guests and we wanna make sure we have a lot of time for them anything else that you wanna say really quick adrienne before we switch over that i may have missed
alright i pushed a lot of things to friday so if it was really funny or crazy or oh i did have some shlumps things any of that we'll get into on friday we might ask linda a little bit about the shlumps just because just because but let's bring up all of our guests we have was that
that was like yesterday i think or maybe it was the day before
linda and promptrotator and do we have anybody else joining did we have one more or am i
entropybender oh i didn't see him he was hiding on me he was hiding alright we're not used to having this many people it's it's brady bunch today three more for a full brady bunch and then i would like to be in the middle and be alice thank you
it is it's a little bit it's a little bit that okay so where do you wanna start let's start with some quick intros i think that would be helpful and then we'll dive into everything that's been happening so let's start with nikki who are you
who am i who am i today yeah nikki sapp i'm a software engineer that built the circus mini app for farcaster which is a token launcher for solana that is tied into social graph obviously it's like farcaster it ties into twitters as well but it's primarily focused as a mini app so it's good to be here thanks
amazing interview vendor kevin give us a little bit of who you are
is my mic on also
it is
we hear you before
hey i'm kevin entropybender on farcaster promptrotator is my cofounder we both work on operator we're working on various different kinda like apps right now mostly on solana
awesome and promptrotator you're
working on
yeah go ahead
yeah we we didn't intend for this virtual background
by the way i was just gonna say you guys are in the same house obviously working together
no we yeah i think i think it's just a convergence decision making but but yeah so so i'm david i work with kevin and yeah just i i would say our a lot of our interests are kind of agents as the like how can we build products agents whatever that like fully leverage this new both like the power of ai power of like llms as they you know expand into the next level of consciousness and yeah consumer social decentralized social is like a very interesting playground as well so kind of building building both these spaces and solana is a really nice like i would say like on chain like marketplace for for apps for agents all these sorts of things
interesting okay and linda back again it's been a while since we've had you on so it's really nice to have you back and in a very new different role than last time so give a quick little intro to everybody who may not be familiar with you
yeah i'm linda i'm working on the developer ecosystem at farcaster joined like three months ago before that when i was on the show was working on bountycaster with daniel we're still maintaining on the side so i guess still working on bountycaster yeah excited to be here
i have a very important question for you how do you pronounce daniel's handle
okay
pyrosb3 okay i every time i look at that my brain just freezes and i call him daniel yeah and i just always i just go and daniel like did this this because i'm like i can't i just i don't know i'm breaking down so i wanna start with linda talking about bringing solana like we've always had a for a long time not always but we've had a solana wallet option mhmm but there was really nothing you could do with it so what prompted merkel to sort of move in this direction and start to work with builders to bring more to from solana to farcaster
yeah i mean i think it's obvious where solana is such a large community and filled with really high quality builders so it felt like a missed opportunity if we weren't having a tighter integration yes you can add an external address but that's not necessarily like a big driver to come have builders like start building mini apps so we yeah we decided to add solana support that's also on kind of like part of the trend where we added monad testnet solo there's another one we're launching hopefully today so the idea is that if you're building an interesting consumer app or just app in general that we want to be able to support you on farcaster and getting user distribution and solana was like a complete no brainer it was our first non evm that we added so we just had to like clean up all the references to evm and the team's really great it was kartik ashot and daniel who worked on the edge side pearl slash blockheim on the design side and i got powered out in about two weeks so that was pretty wild to see wow and then from there it was just like now we gotta start getting people to build day one mini apps so when we launch there's things people do and the crew here were so kind to work on a very tight timeline of hey can you build something in a week or even a few days so they were really awesome to work with
that's amazing
i think yeah can we just shout out how good and seamless the experience is i think we had i guess we had stoic on who works for the solana foundation probably like six months ago which feels like forever ago and then that was like the impetus i think for me to get a phantom wallet attach a solana address which feels like years ago but
i know
and yeah but from a farcaster perspective linda like the in the warplet like there's no we have no concept as a user of like what chain anything is on right it's just you see sol the same way i also didn't even realize like i i think people when they were first starting to download some of the solana mini apps you can convert like i think the warplet lets you convert from like tokens on base to solana in the warplit had no idea about that i was going through like a cex to convert and and bring solana in like didn't even realize there was that like integration so i thought that was awesome and and i just love the idea of like when you're in farcon it really doesn't matter what chain like the the apps like the the claiming process was the same the same experience so you guys did such a good job
i did see this note here that i just wanted to call out that you had mentioned because i thought this was interesting so this just shows you it took some work to really make this that experience for us on this end just be seamless it's pretty expensive for teams to airdrop solana tokens to users that don't already have that token you need to create a token account for each user per unique token so you can use zk compression built by helios and lite protocol to airdrop a ton of them for cheaper this makes solana air airdrops cost efficient and this was in relation to this the new feature for solana assets decompression if you receive a compressed solana token or nft you can now decompress them on the assets page so that was really cool to see as well so from the like infra side from that sort of what's happening behind the scenes there's just been a lot of work that kinda went in from the merkel team to sort of make this a more user friendly experience for sure so
yeah and shout out to nikki and circus for working with us on the first one so i'm excited to run a few more of these as well
i mean and let's let's jump into that actually right now so circus launched just was it just two days ago when did it launch feels like forever ago i think it just happened
oh that's right okay
it does it really does so dropped the circus app and the the mini app and the token so can you talk about what is circus what does it do and then sort of your approach to working with the merkel team to sort of bring this whole experience to farcaster
yeah so a lot of people came to to circus through our original application which was a in feed launcher called jester and so we initially launched that on x and then later on farcaster and we built a small community around that and it got a lot of traction initially and it was really fun and successful and we had all the ais deploying tokens and stuff like that so we wanted to after we saw the success of that we were like let's expand this to a real application and that's kind of where circus was born so to speak so similarly it it it allows you to launch a token but the key here is it ties directly into the social context so one of the biggest issues with token launches especially on solana is that you don't know who is launching it and a lot of them are extremely extractive we've seen you know yeah the likes of pump phone and and some of the other platforms as well create a situation where your users have no longevity and there's no sustainability because ultimately the tokens are launched to do one thing pump and dump and take the money from the person who buys it so we wanted to try to build a platform that hopefully will shift that a little bit even one degree in the right direction would be a success for us and so farcaster is obviously the perfect test bed for that perfect launching ground whatever you wanna call it because obviously the the social graph is open the apis are extremely affordable if you use neynar you can have your own you know node running as well but linda reached out i think you reached out to us we had been talking to ted and some of the other people from the solana foundation for a while about how we wanted to integrate into farcaster they were planning on doing a big push with farcaster so the timing was pretty kismet and linda was like do you wanna do a an airdrop you'd be the first one and i was like of course we wanna be the first one to do anything so but no honestly the the process was incredibly seamless you know the team is is cracked truly and linda coordinating the whole thing from start to finish was extremely professional i really have no criticism of the whole process people definitely have criticism of the parameters that we chose
that caused
talk a little bit about that if you wouldn't mind like sure when you're thinking about this i'm assuming that you have a set budget like here's how much we can put towards this because you've got a lot going on and then how do you decide like making your choices and linda if you have any comments from other devs as well i'd love to hear about that so yeah like what are your how do you make your decision in terms of who to airdrop
well there was a lot of considerations made and we looked at some of the other airdrops that had taken place there was a lot of you know there's a lot of success in a lot of the airdrops and it just really depends on what outcome you want the thing is with us you know we're dropping $10,000 worth of the token to a increase the number of people holding the token that was one big outcome and two get people who potentially would actually use the product to install the mini app or add the mini app on farcaster and perhaps launch token trade do something you know explore at least and create an account so for that reason we picked people who didn't sell their last couple of airdrops we picked people who have used mini apps in the past and who at least had some solana in their wallet this stirred the pot a bit it ruffled some feathers whatever metaphor you wanna choose for it but at the end of the day you have $10,000 to work with and there's like 60,000 daily active users on the platform somebody's gonna get left out it just is what it is yeah and we tried to use the best case studies that we had available in order to make that decision and i think it really went well people forget quickly anyway and i think it's all good now
yeah that's the biggest thing is if you're getting a lot of criticism just remember they'll be criticizing somebody else tomorrow so it's okay just ride it for twenty four hours and you know something else will piss piss them off tomorrow i i mean it makes to me it's a very logical approach if you have it's like if you have unlimited funds great you can give an airdrop to everybody but if you don't you have to make choices and it it makes a lot of sense and i think you know what's interesting is watching people play with noise in their own funds to tip people they start to have those same thoughts right because of like how much i wanna spend on a reply versus a like verse and then so i think the more people are sort of in those shoes of deciding what to do i think it'll help to stem the the criticism of teams linda what are you finding as well in terms of that while we're just sort of touching on this are there i mean is everyone making different choices
how people been happy with the way the airdrops have turned out in terms of their goals and what kind of like adjustments might you be making
yeah i i mean so we work with every team on what they're optimizing for so most of the teams have been we wanna guide users into the mini app and generally you want users that are doing on chain transactions and are using mini apps so that is like a pretty common filter for a lot of the teams we work with the another really common attribute has been like number of followers like filtering out for spam just because they want people talking about it too sole balance makes a lot of sense especially for solana tokens if you're guiding users into a mini app you want them to have fun so i think that like yeah each team has been like very thoughtful about the experience and it it's inevitable that people are going to feel left out on if they didn't receive the funds the goal is that we're gonna be doing a lot of these because there's there's a lot of demand from teams like i i actually can't even fulfill the demand right now because like this is kind of like my side work of doing these airdrops
right
and so there's a lot of teams and they're it's bringing that new money into the ecosystem and the teams we work with have been happy because they're getting in front of users that they're trying to optimize for so i know there's like always gonna be a lot of talk about this but we view it as just another marketing tool people are welcome to use all kinds of different ways to distribute and i i think that's like really healthy ours is specifically around guiding users into some flow and so yeah gonna keep running these i think like the things we've been thinking about is like well something very top of mind is like oh maybe it's not called an airdrop maybe it's called i've i've been yeah littletreat airdrop minidrop littletreat i've been using littletreat and i think that just makes it easier but anyways so the the idea is that like you have a limited budget limited users that you could drop to however the there's gonna be so many that hopefully over time you will be receiving portion of them
right but eventually if you're still if you're active on the platform one of these is gonna find you because you'll fit the criteria of that particular user and that makes a lot of sense to me as well i think it's been i i have to just say again like talked about this before when we're talking about the what merkel's been doing but i think from a also from a perspective of the builders who are putting these airdrops out and mini apps out in terms of the flow has been fantastic like the circus airdrop you claim it it drops you right into the mini app and here's where you can do things it's like that's kind of what i want like direct me and make it easy for me to use your token or at least to understand what the use cases are you know what i mean in this case it's like okay and here's a place where you can launch your own oh cool so that like or you can swap for more or whatever you know like all these different things and i think that's super helpful and if you're a person who's creating an airdrop and creating an experience like this making it super easy for people to use your token or to stake your token or whatever your goal is like just make it simple if i'm clicking a couple times and i can do whatever the thing is you want me to do i'm gonna do it and i'm not gonna sell the token as long as it's easy for me to do that so like that's you know to me a win a win win there switch over real quick oh go ahead
but just if if there's if there's builders in the forecaster role that wants to do an airdrop yeah they they slide into your dms
yeah i know my dms and we're not taking a cut of this like it's not like something where i'm just trying to extract a bunch of value from
anyways yeah just coordinate
it's sort of but it's it's a way to get more people using mini apps though too so it makes a lot of sense for merkle to be invested in making the experience a great experience for the builders a great experience for the users it's clearly working also i you can see the activity on the timeline and that it's not in in small part due to these things because when you see something like okay solana's now here that's a whole new market of people who maybe had no interest in base or other chains that were you know things were happening now you've got this whole world of solana users and builders who now are like oh they're doing that they're doing that looks really cool i'm gonna go check this out oh and they're dropping oh they're air dropping wait you're earning how much wait you're getting more money today it's like yes that's lot yeah a of farcaster it might be $7 of at a time but you know what it adds up
yeah and a lot of the ones are like net new like they like the ones that are in conversation like they weren't on farcaster previously so yeah in the works but yeah i definitely wanna hear from from the others too
yeah let's so interview vendor prompt let's talk about operator and can you tell us a little bit about what that is why you brought it to farcaster like what your experience has been as well with launching a mini app on solana on farcaster so wherever you wanna start on that let's start with just like sort of an an overview of what is operator and what is mint.trench.surf
yeah i mean i can i can start so like we joined farcaster like i think actually almost exactly two years now at least for me i joined later i think i joined like right before that game five like nft for the nba finals
oh okay
yeah so like we're around that time now so i think two years
channel launches yeah
yeah yeah which is great
we were we basically like joined and we're really interested in this intersection of like ai and crypto so that's kinda like what we've been exploring and tracking over the past like couple years farcaster was just really great because it i think like twitter was like mostly like just ai people and there wasn't like a whole lot of like interesting crypto things going on there so when i joined here and saw that like a lot of people were very very interested in like extending crypto principles and like technology to ai i was like okay this could be like a good place for us to kinda like hang out operator is kind of like like operator lab so like we're like i said before we're working on various things but all within that kind of like intersection in terms of like the solana rollout like linda reached out to us and then we were like let's just like full send it i haven't built a frame since like literally when frames launched and i was kinda scared because i was like okay like it took me forever to build a frame back then okay a mini app back then so was like okay i don't know how long this is gonna take but yeah the experience like really it was like pretty nice and the greatest thing about this i
that it surpassed our expectations in terms of like how many people were really interested in like minting their early access pass like that was what the mini app was like it was literally just like oh here's an early access pass like we got like 1,500 mints or something
and that actually kinda shocked me right because like that's like several multiples of 37 right it's like a a lot more than than you would expect and yeah i mean like the thing we're building is trench.surf and the goal is to basically make it really really easy for people inside like if you're hanging out on on farcaster and you wanna like check-in on your coins or like you kinda wanna like get like a notification of someone else to trade like whatever there's a lot of like interesting things that you can make happen so like the goal of trench.surf is to kinda like make that really easy and i think solana is like not the only place where people like do these kinds of like trenching behaviors but considering that like a lot of like farcasters signed up i think a lot of people are open to kinda like funding a solana wallet in their forecaster like account and then like participating so
so what this is the early access pass that you've already that mint's now closed so what is sort of what's the what are you getting access to like when is that all launching and and what can we expect in terms of is there an impact from the social graph on on what you're building
yeah so so originally we we weren't even like we weren't kind of planning on building a more substantial mini app but just seeing that people actually you know took the time to to to get solana to their wallets i i know that i think ssc or the tapestry team like sponsored gas so i think that was like a big
yeah
big activator as well and the fact that yeah like people actually interacted with their wallets in the product i think was like okay like this might be something that as a behavior continues right like there are you know yeah there there's essentially actions that people will take in feed and it's it's pretty new like the this hasn't really been done before i think i i think farcast or mini apps are the first like yeah like on chain interaction in a feed type of product haven't seen anything like it so to answer your original question we're we're actually building a mini app right now it should be you know public public deadline announcements are are always a little bit tough but should be ready by the end of the week and it's essentially a mini app that lets you it's just like kind of the the base mvp of what we're building it lets you see who's kind of you know maybe it could be like a circus coin in the future but it could be like to start it'd be like pump dot fund tokens you can see who kind of in the social graph is actually kinda in in in the degenning with you in the opportunity with you whatever you wanna call it so i i think that's kind of the the the base level it's like can we can we take something take some aspects of what other trading products have have done and and kind of make it farcaster right
i think that's been huge with first interface with being able to see who you follow on farcaster what they're trading there and then directly in the farcaster app where it'll show this you know this particular token has been bought by x number of farcasters in this past hour that and there's controversy around whether that's a good thing i think it's a good thing i i find it interesting you know then it's on the person to d y o r but i think it's interesting to see oh why is everyone interested in this particular token what's going on let me go check it out and and see what's happening and what this what this is all about there is that danger of of people aping in without knowing what they're doing but you know that's that danger anyway
yeah i think on that note right it's like the controversy parts are like really interesting to me because i think it has to do with like just a lack of clear definition i think it's as like cringe as it may be to say like we are actually somehow still early even after like ten years or whatever because the definition of a token is like relatively unclear right so you know if you go to like one of those like ecommerce websites where it's like 700 people bought this item in the past hour or like maybe like even there's like somehow social context attached and it's like oh like i i don't know any celebrity some famous person like bought this item and then you're like oh i'm gonna like copy buy this item before it like sells out like you're not like an item comes maybe like disappoints you but you're not gonna be like oh my god this person like just like wasted all my money but the same dollar amount and it's like a total
damn you hailey biber roast you
right they'll just like roast you so i think it's interesting but i don't i kind of like have this view that like it's an it's an an awkward phase but it's not going away because just like verse chronically online like the social interactions take digital social interactions take over like so much of your life that if like if you're gonna be trading coins at all i don't see why you would be doing it without social context i think like the vast majority of people don't like that funnily enough i think the people that get copy traded are the ones who actually don't want to trade with the social context because like you don't wanna get like flamed on the timeline or something
yeah i've i've told many people please do not copy trade me because you'll and also look at my wallet and you'll understand why you should not copy trade me occasionally it goes the other direction but most of the time it's not gonna go well so don't do it sorry what were you gonna say prompt
yeah no i i just had had once one thing to add which is i i think dan casted this like a week ago but he was like i i forget again i forget the exact words but it's like the feed is coming to the wallet and the wallet cut is coming to the feed something like that and yeah i like fantom is adding a social feed right so it's an it's a it's interesting that they're trying to also bootstrap it but i mean definitely bullish on farcaster on on that on that front because this is actually a social experience right like phantom it's like i don't know how many like phantom wallets i have like like it's it's just like they're they're ephemeral right like there's no actual like persistent social identity
i think that's i'm maybe not surprised but it would be interesting to see fantom integrate farcaster into the wallet like the way that coinbase is doing and it would be you know so it would be interesting to see that happen in in zapper right zapper i think too yep interesting to see different wallets and the different audiences that brings but having those overlaps all being farcaster could be a very interesting sort of moment and pulling that altogether go ahead
linda what do you think what do you think is the likelihood that fantom adds a farcaster feed to their wallet
i mean it's hard for me to say like anytime soon but long run i'm really optimistic that these wallets will be pulling in some farcaster social feed it's so hard to build a social network i mean dan and varun and the team early on like spends five years grinding to get the early user base and so if you can leverage someone else's work to now bootstrap your own social feed like that's to me a no brainer so i think it's only a matter of time personally
she she knows i can
we we we say things sometimes we just make things up so going back actually you just mentioned i know you were just at accelerate and so that made me think like did you have any conversations with different wallets like phantom or anyone whose you know other solana wallets or anything like that
not not at that one i think i was more focused just on like the mini apps and okay our wallet experience but long run like definitely wanna be having those conversations i mean have like casually pings people in the past but we didn't even have solana integration back then so i think now is a different story but we we wanna like i mean my thought is just like really like foster the solana ecosystem first and really like showcase what we have before like really approaching some of these teams
awesome adrienne what have i missed in terms of what you wanted to ask our guests and sort of what's been happening around solana
you know my i always love like just the dev questions so i was just curious did you guys have had you been building on kind of evm or ethereum before i'm curious did you what the dev experience is like building solana like on solana versus ethereum
we started like i guess we've like tried on on base we haven't built like too many like on chain things before so like we pretty much joined farcast and then people are like oh look at all these things we built on base they're like okay like i guess we'll build something on base and then and then we even built like a thing on the degen l three where like every question you ask to like a model that like is like put on chain for verifiability or like whatever i should probably like do some i should find that wrap degen it's like somewhere but yeah after that and then like we just like moved to solana but in terms of like the low level stuff i think it's like we kinda live in this like incredible time right now because i think it's probably the first time in a long time where you really can just like build apps you can like focus on just building the app
just is what you're saying is you can just build things
yeah basically right we got claude four we got claude four opus but yeah like i it was like really easy for me to just kinda like take the docs throw it into cursor learn about how some of our programs and stuff is structured and then just pretty much get started right so like was like a not a huge it was really not like a big psychological shift from one to the other i think like nikki is probably like the someone who like actually knows like all of the details i would consider myself more of a an expert claude for wrangler so if you have any thoughts nikki
i i honestly i envy that wrangler because not having to rewire your brain after coming like i was an evm dev since ethereum came out essentially so i've built a lot on l one and of course on base and some of the other l twos i also worked on a on another l one that was not evm based at all it was utxo based similar to like a bitcoin network so i have all of these blockchain infrastructure wires in my head that are definitely all tangled together now after twelve years of of doing this so then like going to solana after being on the evm for so long you're just like there's a lot of differences in the in architecture and you know i think even jesse the other day he posted about like why is it so expensive to deploy smartcontract like little trade offs like that wrapping your head around them when you've already had your head in this other space for so long is actually quite difficult like you coming into it super fresh like that is probably actually really sort of a level up or a benefit to you but yeah i mean there's there's some glass to chew for sure when whenever you're learning anything new but once you i think once you get it solana lends itself really well to a lot of consumer applications but the and i don't know if you found this the consumers on the chain like each chain has its own sort of culture where yeah i think base has a very builder centric culture they're very they're long term thinkers to some extent they're happy to support people who are developers and things like that whereas solana and this isn't a negative it's just the way it is is very much more speculative like it's more of a casino a lot of the applications lend themselves to trading speculative assets and things like that plus they had the most liquidity this cycle so i think that is also probably a reason for this you know they had that huge drop to like $8 right now they're back at even now a 160 k or a $160 so you have a lot of liquidity in that network similar to what we had in 2021 with ethereum
i do i do regret a little bit of of fading when i was looking at do that it you know or it didn't even get lower than that at one point it was very low
like yeah it was it was and i really thought it was dead so i was like there's this there's no coming back from spf right so that's really the you know the reason so i really didn't think it would but i appreciate you know the ones who are faithful believers and kept it going because it's pretty impressive to see what's happened on the chain in just the past couple years it's incredible but you were i mean great point about the liquidity that makes a huge difference and we've had this sort of you know it becoming a stable coin situation which has you know definitely changed things a little bit in terms of that aspect in terms of the speculative act in terms of the building aspect it's been guns blazing incredible amazing in terms of evm chains but huge difference in terms of that speculation side for sure by the way you have a shout out from ben broad here to your earlier question launching and trading on circus is a great experience just volume dependent however if your token catches bids the rewards are significant so yeah nice shout out there
thanks ben yeah we give 70% of the trading fees to the creator token nice they can they can claim it at any time so i forgot to mention that appreciate that ben
have you seen a lot of activity so far on circus i haven't had much time to like really play around with it but how's it going
yeah i mean obviously you know we've had these couple of big moments at accelerate right the server pretty much crashed like almost instantly like linda got on stage and i'm in the back of the room like trying to watch her and also like dealing with all this craziness so that was really fun and you know we more than i think we almost tripled our user base just that day so that was fantastic wow and then of course airdrop day we also saw right intense activity people are launching tokens people are experimenting a couple have graduated like actually bonded out and graduated to the to the meteora decks awesome i think it's still early because because our focus is so heavily on farcaster and that community is still building i think we'll grow as farcaster's solana community grows you know there is a a dapp that you can use outside the farcaster context but we're leaning very heavily into the the farcaster side so it
seems like there's almost like a little i don't know flywheel of where if you have more people launching mini apps on solana then they'll they might launch a token that goes with it using circus and like this whole like sort of connective threads that just need to get get rolling that's exactly for that to happen and then on top of that and then you'll have operator which will be reporting what everyone's buying from circus and it'll all it's all happening
this so nikki should people by the way should like you know we used to kind of like always ask the question of like don't launch a token unless you really know exactly what it's gonna do
what would the token do
your full road map right then we saw all the meme coin launchers and clankers and content coins should people be thinking about and i know you kind of talk about the one degree closer towards something that is i forget what word you used but
yeah away from kind of zero sum but does that mean should people be thinking about circus more like like a a meme coin launcher and that like i don't need to think too deeply about something i can kind of experiment because that's what i thought was nice about finders like yeah just kind of play around and it's okay or should there be a little more thought into it before launching
yeah you know i think we're in a in a in a place now as an industry where coins are quite ephemeral you know there's people that do build projects around their tokens and clanker's done a really good job of cultivating that again i think that that's also a testament to the way that base culture works we haven't quite seen that i know believe is trying to do that a little bit with like web two projects i would say you know circus is essentially brand new it's two weeks old so go on try launching a token no one's gonna expecting you to like commit your life to a token you randomly launch
update the decks bro
right exactly and the the nice thing with circus is like you don't have to necessarily update the decks because there's a token page that's automatically created for you you have a dev page so there's there's these little things that kind of like bridge the gap but
that's really huge by the way i think we underplay that and the same thing with clanker too it was like having this whole page that's our like you launch it and automatically all this infrastructure is there for promoting and supporting the the token like that wasn't possible like six eight months ago like it didn't happen so that's a huge thing that makes it it gives makes it way way more open to experimentation which i think is great because that's how you figure out what works and what doesn't like until we do have millions and millions of tokens we don't know what's really good and what's not like you have to do all that
and and everyone's experimenting in this space it's it's pretty much like it's like a fractal of a dev the design space because it's literally constantly evolving and there's really no right answer you can constantly iterate and iterate and iterate until something catches on maybe it catches on for a little while maybe it is the end all be all unlikely but that's what's beautiful about like the token launching space i think you know creating another launcher is a meme it's a circus but like
yeah
i like the design space because there are many answers to the same question and we're constantly getting a little bit closer to making a system where people aren't just getting rubbed every five minutes and that's really
the and i i think it was really smart to tie it to farcaster too because we didn't have a solana token launcher like there is nothing built in already you know there's nothing like that already whereas you know yes people may still be using pumped up fund in other spaces it's way more likely that somebody launching something on who's active on forecaster launching a token on solana they're gonna do it they're gonna use circus so that's exactly i think you know huge opportunity for a new market which makes a lot of sense
yeah i mean it makes perfect sense if you launched it just in general to you know in competing with pump you're it's it's a much harder climb rather than targeting wanna just shout out this question whoops i lost it from emma she asked what is the and i think this is more mostly for linda most used mini apps on farcaster and the best mini apps if not the most used or maybe it's for each person like what are your individual most used mini apps and favorite mini apps actually let's ask all of you but i'll start with linda
the most used i mean i've i mean like everybody like mini word i've i've actually just been practicing like new york times crossword puzzles on the side so i can get better at it because the social graph really like forces me to improve because i don't wanna rank so much below everybody else
so using the new york times as training ground that's hilarious
oh yeah like i'm pretty competitive with that stuff so i'm gonna get better because i i my times were like five minutes six minutes
that's where i that's the range i'm in and i'm i'm fine with it but yes that's where i'm at
yeah yeah and then best i mean there's so many good mini apps right now i mean the one that like the my focus this week was actually bringing in a lot of the monad community oh yeah we had 10 monad mini apps shout out to sperm games sperm survival they they they were such a meme but yeah i think it's like the goal is we're just bringing a lot of these like different communities and therefore like more users like user growth and now there's just more people that can use your mini apps and now you can just like build sustainable businesses so big fan of like just embracing these communities
by the way this is hilarious i'm looking forward to your your autobiography someday to see how you explain this along with your various you know dick butt you also casted something about that fairly recently how often that comes up in a conversation in a work conversation yep so yeah yesterday this is from linda yesterday for work i was dming people about empty which is slumps and now i'm dming people about sperm game yep yep that's yep that sounds right yep sounds right for the rest of you what are your favorite mini apps and what especially if they're on solana if there's anything that's on solana that you're seeing that you really like but any any any particular mini apps that you enjoy the most let me go to kevin first entropybender
i haven't seen like too many solana apps like literally like i just tried out circus so
yeah
got out to circus i guess
so we're making that our favorite solana mini app there you go
yeah yeah in terms of like overall favorites i was pretty addicted to that base drop thing where you like merge the different points
love that game where like
i would i would like start playing it in the bathroom or whatever and then just like be sitting there for forty minutes and then i'll get up and like oh
my information kevin too much information
but like it's actually so addicting and it's like so frustrating when you're like trying to get the physics of it correct but like it doesn't like i don't know there's like there's like something interesting on that game where it's like it's it's a lot more fun than a lot of the other games i played i also really like i there's like that monad one yesterday i think that i tried the the twenty forty eight one where it was like the it was like a transaction like every every move you make and i thought like that it was the notifications are kinda like weird to see that popping up but i was like this is actually like really cool because like my friend has been building a a fully on chain game for a while and it it like i've seen him like go through like the sheer architectural just hell of trying to get these actions to be snappy and like cool and whatever but yeah this one was literally like you're just swiping constantly making moves every half second and it's like instant the transactions are like updating like instantly so i thought that was like a really really neat mechanic yeah i'll probably like say those two are oh and then i've been really loving pine tree i just like pull up like kia's like sets in the like right corner i think it's really improved by the fact that like you can refresh and like basically navigate around the forecaster app and the mini app doesn't like have to refresh or like change right it just like stays there right in the corner
yeah and and i saw you cast about that kevin yesterday about pie what do you have pine tree pine tree on your bottom right and claude in your in your left or something
yes yes exactly
alright we lost prof she's on on vacay so i assume it's a a wi fi thing or something the $20.48 did you guys all see that one too yesterday it's on it's on monad so i think people are asking if you go to the mini apps on mini apps tab the editor's choice is discover monad mini app so if you click that you guys will see you can play twenty forty eight and you fund it you have to like fund your wall you fund the game first with a little bit of your mon token and then it kind of just drips out and every action is on chain i was playing that too i thought that was really cool
yeah and it's cool because monad foundation slash team built that so they're like very like all in on i mean not all in but like they're very motivated to like build on farcaster
yeah well i remember when i was like thinking about when i was joining farcaster and hearing about kind of the different decentralized social options and my my memory at the time think i was looking at lens and is lens the ones whose content was all like a like on chain like the cat like and i was like oh that sounds annoying like the extra friction to do everything on chain so like from a gaming perspective i guess that was like 2048 every time you're doing something it's going on chain but it doesn't feel like it and it's like tiny tiny micro transactions so it's maybe that's the future
oh yeah
so it's really tricky
well it it felt yeah it it feels it but even then i kept having to like it was like you have to fund it kept having to fund the game it's like it felt like an arcade you gotta put the quarter in yeah and then you play for thirty seconds and you run out and you didn't even win or lose they just had to keep taking my money which is not real money it's on test net but
sorry about that i my battery was dying and then it they blamed it on wi fi i like i was watching it and i was like no i still have time no i do not sorry about that
yeah it's it's hard to it's hard to choose i mean i i think it's
i've i've like i've used paragraph i'm like looking i'm looking at the list right now i think ponder's cool i think amp is cool and yeah this like this 2048 thing like i i feel like it's easy to get cynical about crypto and be like oh it's just another l one whatever but it's actually super crazy to have sub millisecond transactions experience like this so yeah just just excited for like i i guess like what what that the implications of it right it's yeah i think it's like fully i don't think like i i think we're so like deep in the mix that it's like hard to like like i mean we're on like a like a farcaster podcast right now so it's like we're so deep in the mix it's like it's it's hard to see but but i think it's gonna be really cool and crazy oh and bankr's i i tried out bankr's new mini app yesterday super cool i think in feed in feed like chat i mean i'm biased but i think it's super cool
deployer's just cooking so hard it's amazing amazing amazing yeah
oh noise i forgot about noise
noise noise yeah i i i was trying to remember but yeah
because you're thinking as when he said he was playing twenty forty eight you're like noise
noise yeah exactly exactly
i think that's a sign it's time to start wrapping up when when we start losing people to go with and everyone's just playing mini apps
they're all like i gotta i gotta go try out that mini app that kevin does on the toilet let me go check his
favorite one this is amazing this is a great chat i'm really excited to see what you're all building and linda i can't shout you out enough for everything that you've been doing it's amazing to see the builders getting more sort of love and handholding and just making their experiences that much better is incredible so excited to see what comes next maybe later today
maybe i'm in for issues right now but yeah thanks thanks so much for having me and us and yeah we're a huge fan of you guys as well
well thanks so much and one last shout out to what we have going on tomorrow and that is the community talks from farcon will be streamed tomorrow at noon eastern and then we'll drop them in all the places so you'll be able to watch the recordings after the fact but we'll be in the chat talking about the community talks and then friday at noon we'll have the base talks the poidh base wallet talk from jesse as well as interviews with jesse and shintan so that is friday anything else adrienne before we wrap
no just thanks to everyone for joining and thanks guys for coming to talk about experience launching solana mini apps on farcaster
thanks so much and i gotta go i gotta go launch a token on circus that's what i have to do i gotta put it on my on my list of things to do
my favorite thing about this conversation today was hearing entropybender talk about being scared to launch a mini app on farcaster because and kevin is the one is is i i credit him completely for gmfc one zero one and i don't know how you know this but i did know talking about building an ai bot and i was like how would you even do it he i was just like it's really easy and i was like i'm sure it's not easy he's like yeah you can do it in two days and he got on the phone with me and was like here's how you do it and it didn't take it took like more it took about five days but it was like he kevin i've said this before but thank you for that conversation because you gave me so much confidence pointed me in the right direction and i learned a ton from you but i liked hearing you be scared of mini apps because i built one recently so now i feel like i can tell you it's
now she can help you there you go
it's not that hard she's complained about how hard it was but anyway it's hard alright and with that everyone we will see you tomorrow for the farcon community talks watch party and we'll be back on friday with gm forecaster at 08:30am and with that everyone thanks so much and with that we say bye bye