Welcome to the 269 new people who joined the Terminally Onchain community since Sunday!
I'm thankful for all 4655 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 🤝
I'm hosting a Terminally Onchain pizza party next week at Farcon!
If you're part of the token gated community, check out the event page and sign up here.
Details: Friday, May 3rd from 5 pm - 7pm
A letter to Farcon
Farcon is only a week away!
I've been attending crypto conferences for a few years now, and I can easily say that I haven't felt as excited about attending one as I am about Farcon. And it seems that many of us on the purple app feel a similar way.
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The crypto industry has been global from the start and it's fair to say that a good chunk of people working full time in the ecosystem operate remotely. In fact, many of us are even working with anons on a daily basis so it's wild to think even then how comfortable we are with each other.
Because of this, the few conferences a year that garner the most attention (i.e. Devcon, NFT NYC, etc.) provide rare opportunities for us in the industry to interact IRL with so many of our work friends.
Just yesterday, I was thinking about how much has changed since the first Farcon.
Last year, Farcon was a small gathering of friends in Boston with some funds raised from an open edition. And this year, there are hundreds of people flying into LA for a full fledged 5 day conference packed with events, sponsors, merch, a hackathon, etc.
I was doing some research on early crypto conferences and came across this photo of Gavin Wood speaking at the first Devcon in 2014! Check out how it looks...literally a classroom with an old school projector 🤯 Compare that to the more recent Ethereum conferences - there's probably a higher budget for some of the parties now than they had for the entire conference back then.
Anyone who was around in the Ethereum community in 2014/2015 probably looks back fondly at those times. A true gathering of nerds all excited about a new technology and ready to do whatever it takes to grow the community and spread the vision. And now, a decade later, Ethereum has a $400 billion market cap with full fledged communities within the ecosystem itself.
And that's when it hit me....these are the good old days of Farcaster.
Right now, there are less than 100k daily active users. We just crossed Farcaster ID #500,000. And the community is still building together to grow the protocol out of its early stages.
In 10 years, heck even just 5, things will look so different. The way we all think of Farcaster today will have morphed into something totally unexpected. I mean...did any of us think channels or frames would be such a big part of the protocol even this time last year?
My point is that if you're active on Farcaster today and attending Farcon...(dare I say it) you're so early. Everyone in the community today is helping morph the protocol so that hopefully billions of people will interact with it in the coming decade.
Unfortunately, I'm not old enough to know what it felt like in the early 2000s when all the social media apps we know today got started. But I'll never forget reading this cast from Jason that helped me realize I should be embracing the spirit and energy on Farcaster right now. It won't always be this way and I want to look back years from now feeling happy that I was a dedicated member of the early community.
Casters dogfooding at Farcon
The main point I wanted to call out in today's post is how impressive it is that a good chunk of this conference is being organized using the Farcaster stack.
Everyone involved in hosting Farcon (Ted, McBain, Erica, Dylan, and many others) have done an incredible job on being proactive of plugging in Farcaster native founders/products where they can.
For example, many of us started out by using Fabric crowdfunding to start pitching in pre-commit funds for the summit. Between two separate rounds, there was 5k USDC sent to the Farcon multisig to get things going!
Then, community members started receiving "acceptance NFTs" over the next few weeks that they could claim using Unlock Protocol. The NFT contracts are on Base and soulbound meaning they are non-transferrable.
When attendees get to Farcon, they'll pull up a QR code they received from Unlock Protocol which will be scanned at the checkin booth. This will update the dynamic NFT meaning the metadata will change to show "attended" and update the image itself as well.
Then everyone will receive a personalized lanyard that has an NFC Icebreaker badge. This badge is pre-mapped to your FID account on icebreaker so you can immediately let anyone else tap it to get your Farcaster account...tap networking + onchain attestation all with a name tag 🤯
Take a second to update your Icebreaker profile if you haven't already!
@j4ck gave me permission to give all of you a sneak peek of my badge 🔥🔥🔥
Okay, so now you're registered and have your badge for Farcon! What next? Well, it's time to get going to all the cool events 👀
Fortunately, @matthew has been working on Events for well over a year now and absolutely crushed it to make sure the sign up process for side events is seamless. It's so simple to sign up for events using the events frame.
If you haven't gotten a chance to check it out yet, scroll through this frame to see all the things that are happening. It tells you whether you're already on the list or not as well.
You can also log into events using Farcaster and see a list of what's going on as well, here's a glance at my week.
I'm personally using events to host the Terminally Onchain Pizza Party - reminder to check it out if you're a paid community member!
All summit pass holders will also be getting a "swag bag" through which they'll be able to use Daimo and Bountycaster as well. If you have any funny ideas for IRL bounties lmk...I'll take a picture for the newsletter.
For a lot of the booths and merch related stalls, @jacopo from the Slice team is doing a great job of plugging in onchain commerce.
And if you're bored this week and can't stop thinking about Farcon, you can go check the list of everyone who is coming on Interface and start reaching out to folks you want to meet 🤝
Lastly, I wanted to mention the intentionality in making sure anons feel comfortable as well. The whole purchasing process was done onchain (without KYC) and anons can choose to opt out of pictures as well by adding a sticker to their name tag.
With that being said, I'm sure there are a variety of products not mentioned above that are being used in some form or fashion. My main goal with the section above was to emphasize how amazing it is that a consumer crypto conference is actually using crypto rails to make it happen. It truly demonstrates the quality of folks in the community and I can't even imagine what Farcon 2025 will look like...the progress is happening so fast.
If you'll be in LA next week, make sure to shoot me a DM if you'd like to meet!
I'll see you all on Sunday, I hope everyone has a great rest of the week!
- YB
