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Sector Overview, Farcaster, friend.tech, Lens, Zora & Receipts

• Warpcast, the primary client on Farcaster, has seen a 50% drop in daily activity from its all-time highs, with slightly over 700k daily casts today versus ~1.5M in mid-April. Much of this drop in activity can be attributed to bots and airdrop farmers, with Andrew Hong of Dune Analytics pointing to changes in $DEGEN tip allocation and the Warpcast algorithm as potential explanations. Season 1 of Ham (Farcaster social memecoin) coming to a close is another likely culprit for the dropoff.

• Both Farcaster and Lens Protocol are continuing to grow overall users, with Farcaster reaching nearly 650k FIDs and Lens reaching nearly 390k unique handles. Across both Farcaster and Lens, over 70% of users have fewer than 50 followers. 41% of Lens users and 49% of Farcaster users have fewer than 10 followers.

• Last week, onchain social app friend.tech announced plans to depart from Base and move to Friendchain, its own L2 using $FRIEND as a fully transferable gas token. The announcement didn’t spur any material change in user activity. In contrast, the friend.tech airdrop on May 3 catalyzed a record high for transactions on the application.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Receipts.xyz is a new crypto-enabled social app and attestation platform for runners and other fitness enthusiasts. Through an integration with the Strava API, users can attest and mint “receipts” for their workouts. Last month, Farcaster user @andyk ran a 125 mile trail race — and the receipts are onchain!

• Farcaster has seen a surge of new account creations in the first half of 2024. Following the introduction of Frames in late January, Farcaster hit a peak of over 14K new accounts a day. New accounts spiked again in March as DEGEN price peaked, and rebounded going into June following Farcaster’s fundraising announcement.

• Warpcast Power Badge holders (aka active power users) activity has picked up over the last few months, reaching as high as 236K casts created a day, signaling Farcaster has an engaged core user base. See the Warpcast Power Badge docs for more info.

• Farcaster accounts can be connected to onchain addresses, which makes it possible to see Farcaster user activity across different applications and blockchains. Going into onchain summer, Farcaster user activity on Base has increased in proportion to Farcaster user activity on Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Zora (measured by total number of transactions sent).

• SocialFi dApp and protocol friend.tech saw breakout success in 2023, after launching as one of the first consumer applications on Base. A week after launch, the protocol outpaced both Uniswap and Bitcoin in 24hr fees generated, ranking among the top five fee-generating protocols in one month. Since then, activity has plateaued. Last month, friend.tech saw an unusual surge in activity following the launch of its native token, FRIEND. On token launch day, friend.tech hit an ATH in daily transaction volume.

• On June 7, friend.tech announced plans to develop its own blockchain, ‘FriendChain’. Users were confused, and traders capitalized, causing FRIEND to jump 64% to $1.31 within 20 minutes before dropping to $0.89 an hour later. Over the next 24h, FRIEND dropped another 32% to $0.64.

• Even before this week’s announcements, the data looks grim. Daily fees from friend.tech's new feature 'Clubs' plummeted 99% MoM, from $344,591 on May 3rd to $2,787 on June 4. Platform volume and daily active traders both dropped by 99% and 98%, respectively. Where does friend.tech go from here?

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: At one point, friend.tech points were trading on the secondary market for over $10/point. One user earned $104 selling 10 friend.tech points for $10.4 each. The cumulative data suggests that the majority of users driving activity and transactions on friend.tech are primarily motivated by short-term gains and farming opportunities. This implies that the platform's core product and value proposition lack stickiness for the masses, as evidenced by the high churn rates reflected in the data.

• Lens is an onchain social protocol. Its key user behavior, "actions" — posts, comments, mirrors, and quotes — have approximately tripled in the last three months going from roughly 3,000 actions per day to over 10,000. Of those actions, mirrors, which are similar to retweets on Twitter, have made inroads since early February when they constituted less than 30% of actions — nearly 75% of actions are mirrors today.

• In a demonstration of Lens' proliferation as a protocol, rather than a single application, over 44% of the protocol's users have used multiple apps which rely on the Lens as backend infrastructure. Different apps induce different mixes of actions — the social app lenspeer is nearly 85% posts, take, an app for video, is over 62% mirrors.

• Phaver, a social media platform, leads all Lens-enabled applications in the last 30 days with over 383,000 interacting users. Hey, another social app built on Lens, has the second most with nearly 190,000 in that same time frame. Orb slides in third with over 106,000 interacting users.

• Zora is a content minting platform that aims to make creating on the internet free and valuable. Zora has hundreds of thousands of transacting users and, in the last 30 days, has processed over 800,000 mints. To date, Zora has paid out over 2,738 ETH ($9.6M) in Creator Rewards, while Zora itself has made over 1,179 ETH ($4.1M) through its portion of the Mint Fee (0.000777 ETH) shared with creators and collectors of each NFT. Including Zora’s cut, a combined $25M in rewards have been paid out.

• Last year, Zora launched the Zora Network, an L2 on the OP Stack focused on onchain media. To date, over 526,000 unique addresses have bridged onto the Zora Network, and latest TVL is just over 7,700 ETH ($27M).

• In February, Optimism allocated 10M+ OP to over 22k unique addresses through their OP Airdrop #4. Among airdrop claimers, Zora is the NFT platform of choice. Zora is the most interacted NFT platform (22.2%) over the last 90 days, nearly double its peers like Foundation (12%) and Manifold (12.3%). 

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: The most recent Farcaster protocol release, Kangaroo, was deployed on June 12. Each release is commemorated with a free NFT drop on Zora, available for collection over a 30-day period. The last release, Jaguar, saw nearly 47,000 unique minters during the month it was available to mint, generating 23 ETH in creator earnings. 

• Receipts is an onchain fitness platform where you can attest and mint your workouts as NFTs on Base. Receipts has crossed 5.8k unique users minting workouts through the Strava integration, and ~16k workouts have been attested. Receipts v2 will tap into wearable data directly and give out rewards for working out.

• For June 3 to 9, top activities are running 71%, cycling 8.06%, others 9.4%. Isolating runs, the mean is ~7.46km per run (4.6mi), and the median ~5.49km (3.4mi). The graph is skewed towards the left, and a long right tail by a couple of longer distance marathons and even ultramarathons of 60km+

• $HIGHER launched a running challenge on Receipts, from Jun 3 - 23. Users who do 20km+/wk (12.4mi) on receipts, will receive 35k $HIGHER (~$750) split between all 68 athletes completed wk1 with 1,192 collective miles ran, an all-time high.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: On Monday, I did a zone 2 run and minted it on Receipts. The NFT on Base proves that I ran, and has all it's metadata. It was a 6.23mi run, avg. pace was 12:00/mi, total time 1h15! Receipts v2 will be a mobile app that taps directly into my wearable data. Also, I'll be able to earn points for running. Brands will offer me discounts and other rewards that are redeemable with my points earned. You'll see me working out more then.

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