$47 million in stablecoins + itty-bitty payments • TWiF #12

Before getting into anything else: Apparently Farcaster users hold $47 million in stablecoins. What?! That is a lot of money.

Anyway. Last week we discussed airdrops, in particular Warpcast as an airdropping platform. As the program ramps up, more info about its effectiveness is becoming available.

$hunt airdrop results:

967 addresses claimed so far:
- 71.15% held the full airdrop
- 3.93% bought more
- only 24.92% sold

$tab airdrop results include a 377.6% jump in app installs with notifications. Big percentage!

From Linda Xie, who is running this program, "data on the first several airdrop offers:"

- average of 1,900 users for each airdrop
- 69% claim rate
- 70% hold rate from claims ($ spent by teams)

"Love it or hate it," remarked Justin Ahn of Quidli, "the experimentation around programmatic value distribution is inevitable with the convergence of open social graphs & web3."

I will say, as a consumer evaluating these airdrop offers, my interest has drastically dropped... they're feeling random and overly frequent. Will subsequent developers need to up the ante to achieve similar ROI? I suppose we'll find out.

Itty-bitty payments#

Phil wrote a thought-provoking cast about the "microtransactions meta" developing on Farcaster:

This shift is caused by several converging trends: low gas fees, social identity tied to wallets, and an influx of liquidity (e.g. Warpcast Rewards) that lets users play with "house money".

He's not wrong; microtransactions are happening. But as ever, microtransactions are a tough business:

• Any function that users have to pay for every single time, they will use less than they would if it were free. This problem is by no means insurmountable. However, if a free equivalent of your product can be monetized through advertising instead, that version will dominate in terms of user activity.
• You cannot sustainably monetize through fees without absolutely massive volume, in which case advertising probably works better anyway.

Warpcast#

Our friends at Merkle Manufactory have been busy! (ICYMI, Merkle Manufactory is the company behind Farcaster, the open protocol, and Warpcast, the most popular client for that protocol.)

Warpcast's dev rewards program was expanded from a pool of $2000 with 25 recipients to a pool of $3000 with 50 recipients.

New weekly tips feature:

- Once a week, we summarize the people on the network you interact with the most
- You can opt-in to sending them a $1 USDC tip by tapping
- We batch all the tips in a single transaction

"Token pages now default to show holders that you follow."

A charity initiative uses Daimo to "enable cross-chain donations of just about any token on any chain in your wallet," supporting earthquake relief in Myanmar.

Two upcoming builder AMAs in April, with the cofounder of Optimism and founder of Product Hunt.

The new mini apps docs site is live 💃

More than 187k transactions originated from mini apps (via Warpcast) over the past ~month! Wow.

Last but not least, "You now have the ability to minimize your mini app just above the navigation bar at the bottom of your app," and immediately…

Links#

…FC Audio Chat debuted on the timeline.

Zapper is building a wallet and Farcaster client. The team will send out invites soon, and is currently seeking name suggestions.

Tradeoffs, always tradeoffs: "embedded wallets break identity," with an example.

Zora shipped a "Coins SDK" for their token launchpad features.

"Bankr is live in Warpcast DMs for Bankr Club members! Swap, trade, send, get information, and place limit orders privately without leaving the app."

Interact with Hybersub via mini app.

Good blog post: "How can open social protocols fail us in 2025," comparing and contrasting Mastodon, Bluesky, and of course Farcaster.

"Digitizing Your Aura: A Guide," the tech stack behind Moshicam's viral mini app.

Speaking of viral mini apps, another guide: "how to build viral mini-apps on farcaster," which is "less about complexity, more about tight loops, social moments, and dopamine triggers."

An update on the $build project, including this milestone: "Made $BUILD a fully decentralized public good with 163B tokens airdropped to 40K+ community members and no more treasury or gatekeepers."

Paragraph snapped up paragraph.com (versus .xyz) and refreshed the homepage.

"Starting today, anyone can use Amps to purchase Likes from their followers."

Try out the Cura mini app focused on surfacing the best content from channels.

Reflections on building /poidh, including usage data.

Voilà, "a mini app that lets you make NFT collections."

Clankermon updates and roadmap: "overhauled most of the UI to lay foundations for a bunch of features that will really tie the experience together, this is crucial as introduce way more things to do."

Test Livecaster, "a mini client in a mini app" intended for livechatting.

That's all for this week. What'd I miss? Hit reply and let me know.

Cheers,
Sonya

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