GM

Good karma comes to those who share Mint or Skip with their friends.

~ It is written ~

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

This is blowing up

Here I go, setting off to distant shores in search of sacred digital objects again. 

This time I’ve landed on the sandy beaches of Farcaster, the fast-growing, sufficiently decentralized competitor to X. 

TLDR

Farcaster is a protocol for crypto social networks built on Optimism.

Anyone can build their own social client on top of Farcaster, but people primarily use Warpcast, the front-end app created by the Farcaster team themselves.

And you could say they’ve been having quite the week in terms of adoption:

This recent surge is tied to a new Farcaster feature called Frames that was released just last week. 

Frames are basically tiny iframes that can be used to embed mini-apps directly into a cast (their version of a tweet). 

Thanks to frames people have started to add things like embedded newsletters, e-commerce flows, fully playable games, and NFT mints into the timeline, which makes for a much more dynamic experience than pretty much any other social network. 

Packy McCormick had a great post on Frames at Not Boring a few days ago, and I’ll just borrow his summary of the potential here: 

And this is just Week 1 – you can expect things to get infinitely weirder in the months to come. 

I joined Farcaster this morning for two reasons: 

1. To grab my username. You know it’s early when I can just waltz in and grab “Giancarlo” with no fuss. If anything, grabbing your name before the trolls show up and start squatting is enough utility to join sooner rather than later. 

2. NFTs. Like I said, people are already adding new mints directly into the timeline, and the app lets you acquire things seamlessly with just a couple of clicks. 

Now I’ll be honest, first impression is that 99% of the mints are Fiverr-grade spam with questionable origins. Here’s a sample of my feed, to give you an idea: 

(ok that last one is hilarious though) 

But this is to be expected. Every new innovative crypto app or protocol must go through an initial phase of lowest common denominator grifting, as if ordained by scripture. 

And Warpcast could get worse before it gets better. 

But I’m more interested in what phases 2 and 3 look like. It might soon make sense for many new crypto projects to start on Farcaster, where you have a core group of crypto natives ready to frictionlessly spend on new things.

This would create a nice feedback loop: more creators launch things on Farcaster → more people come to Farcaster → more creators launch things…etc. 

P.S. Follow me if you join and let me know you came from the post.

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

Frogs of Yakushima by Daichi Mori

If you’ve hung around the emerging art scene over the past year and a half, chances are you’ve come across Daichi Mori’s surreal animations.

His short film loops have garnered millions of views on social media, juxtaposing anime-isms and humorous action scenes of animals (mostly frogs) with an art style suited to traditional handscrolls.

Now, the Japanese cartoonist will make his Verse debut with Frogs of Fukushima, a collection of audiovisual loops further exploring his frog-verse, featuring some of his most polished work to date.

For Pepe enthusiasts seeking other frogs.

Modern Zombies by Wubbushi

The art scene on Solana keeps gaining steam as Ethereum artists continue to explore the chain, like the pseudonymous Wubbushi dropping Modern Zombies, a collection that critiques modern society's tech addiction

It features a post-photography style that embraces glitches, which appear plentiful, probably because of what the artist calls the “Generation Gained” training technique, whereby each successive AI model is trained on the output of the last until reaching the final art.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

BR1 Loot Boxes

BR1: Infinite Royale, the flagship play-to-earn battle-royale game from Bravo Ready studios (in open beta since last Sept.), will soon launch a collection of Loot Boxes containing new weapons and gun skins.

BR1 is the studio’s first game, primarily Solana-based, although there are plans for future Aptos integrations following an investment from the network, which added to a separate $3.5 million seed round in 2022.

Details are scant for this drop, which isn’t the game’s first, and while I haven’t played it myself, the gameplay videos I’ve seen haven’t convinced my gamer heart.

However, depending on the final numbers, it might be a good opportunity to get into a game still in its early days.