Welcome to the 654 new people who joined the Terminally Onchain community since Sunday!
I'm thankful for all 6767 of you and I hope everyone is having a great week so far 🔥
If you're enjoying my writing, please share Terminally Onchain with your friends in Crypto and join the /toc channel on Farcaster 🤝
Before we dive in, I wanted to wish all the moms reading a Happy Mother's Day!
A pulse check before Onchain Summer
It feels so damn good to be back at my desk. The last month has been nonstop socialization (personal & professional). In fact, I feel like my work has been recently more focused around operations, curating, and partnerships rather than research & writing.
This past week back in NY was tough for me. I think I was just exhausted from the traveling and honestly for the first time this year didn't feel like writing. It was such a drag getting myself on the Paragraph editor.
Fortunately, I got some rest and sunlight (summer's back baby!) and am feeling ready to go again.
In today's post, I'll of course have my normal weekly mints, but I'm also using it as a chance to provide all of us with a quick pulse check on what's happening. There have been a ton of announcements and changes during Farcon, and I needed to go through all the news to get a birds eye view.
Personally, it feels like we're entering the next phase of crypto in 2024. In between the period of frames launching in January up until Farcon last week, there's been a ton of excitement, building, energy, etc. Founders, creators, and community members all saw a glimpse of what could be as the Farcaster ecosystem grew in size and activity. In fact, to me, the last few months have felt like it was building up to the conference and everyone finally had a mini-celebration IRL.
But! Just like when any celebration comes to an end, it's time for us to clean up, reset, and lock back in.
The catalyst for ecosystem activity in the next few months will probably be led by Base's Onchain Summer push and that will hopefully grow momentum in the markets leading up to Devcon in November.
I have no idea what this next phase will bring us in terms of market prices, products, etc. but I do know that Onchain Summer and Devcon will both be important narratives for us in the community to keep the energy high.
With that being said, today's post will have 3 sections:
My Farcon Reflection
Product Announcements & Hot Discussions
What I minted this week
Let's dive in 🚀
My Farcon Reflection
Farcon did a great job of bringing the OP Stack ecosystem (Farcaster, Base, Zora) together. The conference was exactly what many of us were looking for: a chance to connect with others on a deeper level and have a good time with our "work friends" IRL.
In all honesty, I didn't come out of this conference feeling enlightened about the future of consumer crypto or anything like that. Rather, the value add for me was more so feeling comfortable and friendly with the people I interact with on a daily basis.
For example, I got a chance to meet @colin from Paragraph and @nonlinear from Hypersub and it was awesome hanging out with them in person - it gave me the confidence of building TOC on their products. We talked about new features, got a chance to give each other candid feedback, and just had a good time in general. Everyone on Farcaster has been putting in the work nonstop since 2024 started so it was nice to see people taking a quick breather.
One thing I did notice throughout a variety of conversations is that the competitive nature of Farcaster has definitely increased. This is not a bad thing and if anything means that the ecosystem has grown to a point where many people have opinions, want to get their hands dirty, and prove their thesis on the future of this protocol is right.
I made a cast on Thursday mentioning this point just to get a pulse check. Dylan's response was an even better (and less aggressive lol) framing in my opinion.
The point is less about the positivity/negativity and more so that there is clear competition between folks building in the ecosystem and a that lot of the kumbaya talk will slowly start to drift into discussing pros & cons of similar products. People will have to choose sides as their attention is limited and ultimately founders and creators will need to do what's best for them to keep their businesses growing.
And the only other small point I'd make about Farcon is that Degen's presence felt a bit underwhelming consider how much of a force they've been in Farcaster the past few months. Obviously there were the shirts and hats but I mean more so in terms of setting a real stage for being the L3 in the coming months. Don't get me wrong, I love the degen community, hold the token, and tip folks but I just didn't feel excited about "degen as a project" coming out of Farcon. It didn't seem like anyone was talking about it that much and overall I wish there was more of a push from the stewards to help others understand what's next.
I also hosted a Terminally Onchain event at Farcon and thought it went really well! Had about 50-60 people show up on Venice Beach to enjoy some pizza and the LA sunset.
But I'll have more on this in Wednesday's post...there's something cool I'm finishing up with a friend that I'm excited to show you all.
Now, let's get into some of the many exciting changes that were announced at Farcon!
Product Announcements
Paragraph acquired the Mirror Product
Very impressive considering Paragraph started ~1.5 years after Mirror and only have a team of 3. They acquired their main competition and it seems like they'll be taking the best features of both products and merging them later down the road.
The Paragraph team also raised $5m from USV & Coinbase Ventures.
Check out the announcement here.
Mirror CEO Dennis Nazarov launched Kiosk
Now that the Mirror product is under Colin and the Paragraph team, Dennis is working full time on Kiosk which is a new Farcaster client. The core idea is "social meets onchain".
Interface (you can read my post on it here) is a product that is in the same category but instead of a standalone app, Kiosk is taking a client first approach.
The team raised $10m from Electric Capital, a16z, USV, & Variant.
Check out the announcement here.
Nook announced their raise
For those of you that haven't tried Nook, make sure to do so - it's another Farcaster client that launched ~6 weeks ago.
The team is @slokh and @emo.eth, both incredibly talented developers. For those of you that were around on Farcaster during permissionless signups, you may remember Kartik building Flink which was a client he was working on that overtook Warpcast on signups!
I'm excited to see how both of them iterate and what the coming months look like for Nook.
They raised a pre-seed round from Variant. You can read the announcement here.
Zora acquired Mint.fun
Similar to the Paragraph/Mirror acquisition, Zora acquired the mint.fun product (not team)!
Mintdotfun is a discovery tool for new mints and the team has been absolutely killing it the last 2 years. In my opinion, they were doing a better job at curating fun mints than the Zora discover page itself. So it's cool to see the teams merging together.
You can read the announcement here.
Rugdotfun Launched
A new product launched by the mintdotfun team. I won't go into depth here but you can check out what the game is on the website. Game #1 just wrapped up two days ago.
Here's the Farcaster channel.
Redstone Gaming L2 Launched
Redstone launched Farcon week after a year of development.
There's a whole cohort of games launching in the coming month. I got an early sneak peek at words3 by @0xsmallbrain and it was a blast. It'll be interesting to see how development on the chain goes in the coming months after the initial launch hype. I don't know too much about the gaming ecosystem but definitely want to spend time looking into Redstone in the coming months.
Agora Launched
The Agora team has been shipping nonstop for the last ~2 years. It was great to see them launch their governance tool for anyone.
They also announced a $5m round led by Huan Ventures.
You can read the announcement here.
Miscellaneous Topics
Here are some topics I noticed have been getting a ton of attention lately. I'm simply bullet pointing, not expanding in this post.
Smart Wallets (Coinbase, Dynamic, Privy)
SocialFi (Fantasy Cards)
Points (Stack, Rainbow)
Onchain Feeds (Nook, Kiosk, Once Upon, Interface) - note the first two are Farcaster clients and the other two are standalone products
Discussion around Farcaster spam, bots, qDAU, etc. - honestly getting a bit tired of this but it's definitely been top of mind for the Merkle team and client builders
What I minted this week
Every Sunday, I share what I minted throughout the week.
It can be hard to keep up with everything that's happening onchain so hopefully the list below helps you discover a fun project or initiative you may have missed.
Note: some of the minting periods may have ended. None of this information is financial advice, DYOR.
Paperboys
Two months subscription to @0xdesigner's hypersub Paper Boy. He airdrops you every single one of his daily UX designs. It's on the expensive side but I already mint so many of his designs that it just made sense for me to subscribe.
Kiosk Announcement
I minted this Kiosk announcement post so I can get access to the product. Minting it puts you on the waitlist but I'm not sure about the timeline for launch.
Particle NFT Project
This was a art project released by Mercedes-Benz NXT which is the home of Mercedes Benz's digital objects studio.
The "particles" are parts of the company's design language and brand identity.
Almost 17k pieces were minted.
l--o--l NFT Project
A fun project by @vrypan..."9,999, one-line, ASCII art, fully onchain, spaceships".
Learn more about it in the link below.
If you found the list above helpful, please share it with friends in crypto who you think should mint as well 🤝
That's all for today, I hope all of you have a great next week!
- YB
