Parsec Weekly #57
Farcaster and Puffer Finance
Farcaster
-kezfourtwez
gm sufficiently decentralised social media enjoyers, and welcome to another week of kez ranting about his experience.
It’s been one week since I joined Farcaster (I know this because I am about to happily receive my activity badge), in that time I have:
Casted 296 times
Given 1098 likes and 41 recasts
Received 842 likes and 55 recasts
In that same time on Twitter I have:
Tweeted once
Given 14 likes and three retweets
Received 4 likes
There’s obviously some shiny new thing syndrome affecting these stats and the time I’ve spent on twitter this week. I just want to illustrate that beneath all of it I’m having a lot of fun, and I’m going to attempt to explain how Farcaster has managed to capture my attention so well.
I think a big part of the reason it feels fun and liberating to post on Farcaster as opposed to Twitter, is that it feels like a new beginning. My FID (Farcaster ID) is somewhere in the 250k range, so I’m not terribly early but I feel like I am. It feels like I joined at the beginning of a mass migration where everyone started from scratch, with no followers, no hang ups and a clean slate. But maybe users will experience this feeling less as time goes on and the social fabric grows.
The part that I can’t quite put my finger on yet is that I feel completely free to post utter bullshit without social consequence. To meme, to shitpost, to ask dumb questions, post my dumb thoughts and not be judged, whereas I don’t feel the same about twitter and it stops me from posting on there a lot.
I’ve been calling it ‘crypto twitter concentrate’. Some will think I’m being naive, but I genuinely think people are using Farcaster because they enjoy it. There are no financial incentives like there were with Friend Tech. So it has managed to fend off the grifters and onboard an overall higher quality of user that are interested in using social media for its intended purpose, and that purpose to me is being silly and connecting with like-minded people.
That last line really sounded like I’ve drunk the kool-aid didn’t it, but until I’m proven wrong I’ll continue to believe it and have fun. I was there day one on Friend Tech, and yeah I had a lot of fun there too. It took a little while to realise but a huge part of the enjoyment was because we hoped there was money at the end of every rainbow. A few days in and it was already incredibly PvP, I was losing more often than I was winning. We had people like FaZe Banks come over, drop a shill tweet, make $100k in fees in a couple hours and then bounce for good, and I think that’s enough of an explanation.
Ok, so the part of Farcaster that makes the app really great is the channels. It has a sub-reddit style structure where anyone can create a channel dedicated to a topic, and then people can post directly to that channel about said topic.
It gives you a home base to your say your gm’s, your gn’s and laugh and reply to some funny memes (shout out @tervo and the /replyguys)
It makes it much more feasible to engage in conversation about a specific topic. Your posting a specific question into a channel dedicated to said specific topic instead of yelling into the void and hoping someone answers you
This in turn creates a more efficient and productive social dialogue
A few more great things in no particular order:
Frames - Frames let people create interactive experiences, mint NFTs, sign up for a new product etc, all within ...the frame, the end user doesn’t need to leave the app. The possibilities are endless on this one, we’ve only just scratched the surface.
Dan Romero is a tier 1 shit poster, he is one of us and he understands what we want. This includes token gated NFT chats, tipping currencies ($DEGEN), a ‘gm’ or a ‘🎩’ button instead of a like button based on trigger words, and I’m sure many more to come
Crypto Twitter concentrate!
Farcaster definitely warrants a larger and more comprehensive article. Like when something is on the tip of your tongue, the ideas are there and forming but I haven’t yet given enough thought to what it could become.
If we are still using this app in a couple of months I’m sure I’ll write about it again, but in the mean time just have fun with it. Because after all, this is what we are all here for right? Innovation and crypto applications that people actually want to use.
Puffer Finance
Puffer Finance has recently emerged as the latest native Liquid Restaking Protocol (nLRP) on the block. Having been live for just over a week, the flow of ETH into Puffer has been extremely impressive with TVL surpassing Renzo and Kelp... being second only to Ether.fi.
With a grant from the Ethereum Foundation, Puffer are trying to solve slashing with their proprietary “Secure-Signer remote signing” or “anti-slashing” tool. In theory this should allow validators to reduce the risk of slashing while enhancing capital efficiency. If successful, the Puffer-issued LRT should be able to secure every AVS launched on EigenLayer while exposing restakers to minimal additional slashing risk. This would effectively solve the fungibility issue which will emerge as different LRTs across the market secure different AVS’ and therefore have different yield and risk profiles. On this basis, pufETH could emerge as the prominent LRT which offers index exposure across the entire set of AVS’ with the lowest slashing risk.
It is yet to be seen whether pufETH will emerge as the top TVL Restaking Protocol but the trajectory thus far has been extremely impressive:
While an element of the TVL growth will be driven by aidrop farmers looking for a piece of the native Puffer governance token, the rapid pace of TVL growth could be the market is tipping its hand with respect to which might be the leading nLRP going forward...
As always we appreciate your readership, if you enjoyed this article please leave a like and share it around. Have a good weekend and we’ll see you next week!
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