Finally, I had already given up and thought that history would be recorded as a lie. Dan went on Bankless and made no mention of Degen. Instead, the audience was (probably unintentionally) misled (also by the moderators) to believe that frames spurred the recent rise in Farcaster activity. I can only speculate as to why that happened, but one reason could be US security laws and their limitations on speech. Clearly, however, people scrolled the Farcaster feeds to farm airdrops, and because information got out, a few people made a lot of money through Degen, etc. So this article, to me, is the first intellectual honest synthesis of both frames and degen that explains what actually happened. Happy I've read it!
Haha, Jayme's meme made me laugh. I agree with $DEGEN playing an important role here. Farcaster has been a better way to socialize than Crypto Twitter for some time, but many people stayed on CT for alpha and ways to make money. After Farcaster's memecoin made 150X in less than 3 weeks, it def generated some FOMO among CT users. Frames also played their role as many founders & devs learned they could easily reach a 10k+ users' FC community. There was a lot of Frames-centric noise on the builders' side of Crypto Twitter. So there's a perfect storm of $DEGEN, Frames, and - one factor I'd add - free signups in many countries: https://x.com/dwr/status/1753127215599141145?s=20
Thanks for publishing on Kiwi! This means a lot. To your point I think that for legal and marketing reasons Dan has created a narrative for Farcaster that excludes $DEGEN. And to be fair some other builders also want to believe that Frame is the only driver behind growth. On my end after 5 years in crypto i'm done lying to myself lol. As pointed out by Mac its more of a 50/50 thing, speculation aligning interests between degens and builders... I believe that's the whole story of this upcoming cycle... I'll write something!
Agreed! And I can understand why they chose to exclude DEGEN. It is probably a legal thing. But it also leads to extremely strange outcomes as e.g., I was totally expecting Dan to talk naturally about it on the Bankless podcast. So it gives me "censorship" vibes that they didn't. Anyway, I fully agree that it's a 50/50 thing and that some speculation is actually really useful!