Farcaster Meme Coins

This is a timeline of the Farcaster meme coin scene.

Warps (Nov 2023) https://warpcast.com #

This is a Farcaster/Warpcast native token that emerged around the time when other platforms were creating offchain points systems. Companies are adopting this approach as a way to circumvent paying royalties to Apple and Google, as well as to avoid scrutiny from the SEC for selling a security.
Other examples similar to warps include Blast Points, Rainbow Points, friend.tech Points, Rabby Points, etc. All these types of points cannot be traded on decentralized exchanges, and their use is completely controlled by the issuer.

Crypto natives dislike this since crypto was invented to remove middle men and counterparty risk.

$POINTS (Ethereum — Dec 2023) https://points.cool #

In response to these companies creating offchain points systems, a person named Mathias on Farcaster introduced an onchain version of reward points as a joke. The contract was straightforward where you visit a site, pay 0.01 ETH for 100 points.

However, Mathias underestimated the situation because, within a few days, his treasury accumulated over 239 ETH (about $500k). Mathias terminated the minting function on contract which led to people saying it was a rug pull. What began as a joke escalated too far, and everyone started requesting roadmaps from Mathias.

Overwhelmed, Mathias seemed to be experiencing extreme anxiety. He made a few appearances but was reluctant to manage all that money and lacked a plan for its use. He ultimately took 35 ETH for himself and donated the remaining ETH to others to manage.

A /degen channel was established in Farcaster where degenerate gamblers discussed $POINTS.

$MOREPOINTS / $WOWOW (Ethereum — DEC 2023) #

After $POINTS, people in /degen tried to kick off a few other meme tokens but nothing caught on until $DEGEN.

$DEGEN (Base — Jan 2024) https://www.degen.tips #

A team from Poland, led by Jacek, created a token using Farcaster’s onchain metrics to reward users with a new airdrop they named $DEGEN. Because Farcaster has an open onchain API (unlike 𝕏), everything can be measured. $DEGEN was designed with a roadmap for 3 airdrops based on Farcaster activity, followers, ownership of certain NFTs, posting in specific channels, etc.

The incentive structure of $DEGEN resulted in extensive engagement farming. On January 8th, the first airdrop was released, followed shortly by the start of liquidity mining and the 2nd Airdrop rewards program. The first place position of the $DEGEN Airdrop 1 leaderboard earned over $100,000 in rewards as of this post if they didn’t sell.

$FRAME (Base — Jan 2024) - https://frametoken.vercel.app #

On Friday, January 26th, Varun, the co-founder of Farcaster, introduced a concept called a Frame. It simply allows the use of HTML open graph meta tags to create any custom UI inside a Farcaster page, enabling the development of games, polls, galleries, shops, etc.

A developer named Max launched a Frame called $FRAME, where a fixed supply of tokens was distributed to each user based on their Farcaster ID (FID). He posted the frame, and it minted out in 3 hours. Fame subsequently launched a site with a roadmap for offering grants and bounties to reward Farcast users.

Summary #

WARPS - offchain token made by Warpcast Team
$POINTS / $MOREPOINTS / $WOWOW / $DEGEN / $FRAME — onchain tokens made by Farcater users