Spinning up an onchain brand

Recently Splits launched This Week in Farcaster, a newsletter inspired by the late, great Week in Ethereum News. Farcaster is an open social protocol with integrated financial rails, and a unique community. The culture there is optimistic, experimental, and hands-on.

As Ponder founder Colin Johnson observed, Farcaster is home to the 10x and 100x users: people who don't just trade tokens, but eagerly tinker with Ethereum’s permissionless infrastructure. Composable building blocks enable new methods of coordination and cooperation.

Due to this population of onchain pioneers, Farcaster has become a social network for early adopters who understand Ethereum’s long-term potential. This Week in Farcaster reports on the latest innovations cooked up by the local devs.

We thought it would be helpful to review the steps we took while setting up a new onchain brand. Here’s the stack so far:

• Splits Teams is the hub, providing a joint multichain account easily usable by… wait for it… the Splits team, in this case everyone who works on marketing. We set up a dedicated TWiF sub-account, which can login to any service that uses wallets as the access credential and identity (via WalletConnect). For example…
• Paragraph is the newsletter provider, registered to the TWiF wallet. As you may know, Paragraph is basically Ethereum-native Substack.
  • Paragraph was the perfect choice because there is an in-feed reading experience for Farcaster. We hope that Paragraph will add Farcaster notifications for subscribers, a capability supported by frames v2.
  • Being able to designate a non-Paragraph canonical URL is handy. We can crosspost from the Splits blog and reap any SEO benefit for our main website. (Alternatively, we could use a custom domain on Paragraph and treat it as a CMS, but crossposting was more convenient with our existing setup.)
• ENS identities are the onchain equivalent of domain names. We picked up weekinfarcaster.eth for regular use, plus thisweekinfarcaster.eth to prevent impersonation.
• Farcaster supports ENS usernames, so we are @weekinfarcaster.eth over there. This feature came in clutch, since it allowed us to sidestep some confusion during the account setup process.
  • It took a bit of blundering to find the happy path. Pro tip: Ethereum accounts need to be deployed on mainnet before syncing with Farcaster. We hope that soon Merkle will support EIP 6492, obviating the need for explicit deployment.

Next up will be Pods, as a home for the Farcaster builder interviews that we’re currently uploading to YouTube. We’ll probably keep sharing those live via Streamm, and uploading shorter clips directly to Farcaster.

This “brand stack” exemplifies what we love about Farcaster and the broader Ethereum ecosystem: composing different tools and protocols into something greater than the sum of its parts. Each piece represents a building block that can be assembled in novel ways.

Setting up This Week in Farcaster has been a learning experience, one we’re sharing in hopes that it helps other builders navigate similar paths. The tools are new and sometimes rough around the edges, but that’s exactly why we’re here: to experiment, document, and push the ecosystem forward.

Join us as we chronicle the evolution of Farcaster, one week of shipping at a time. Subscribe via Paragraph or find us on Farcaster. Suggest the next tool or service we should try!