📝 From the Editorial Team:

This entire week we’re examining Onchain Culture, covering the entire spectrum of crypto applications and experiences built for regular, mainstream consumers like you and me.

The ON research team alongside our community carefully coined this category to be all-encompassing and evergreen, since new types of applications and experiences are launched on web3 every day. For us, whether it’s NFTs, decentralized social networks, or memecoins, Onchain Culture means going to the edge of what’s happening on these platforms to ask — what new and impactful actions are mainstream end-users taking onchain?

There’s certainly a lot of new going on. In this issue we have contributors talking to AI agents about tokens they launched, AIs becoming memecoin millionaires and launching $1B+ tokens. There’s also been more down-home action, like $44,444.44 given to people on who tell good bar stories.

Bountycaster, a project which posts to-dos as bounties facilitated the bar-story contest. As a whole, the project is doing well — 765 parties have created over 2K bounties on the platform and doled out $370K on the way.

As if this wasn’t enough, we’ve got Onchain Culture part 2 coming on Friday.

With that, enjoy this issue on crypto’s bleeding edge.

Farcaster | Terminal of Truths | Pump.fun | Clanker | Bountycaster | Courtyard

• Farcaster is an open social network where developers can build permissionlessly. The protocol thrives when founders can build projects that reach many users and can bring more in. In other words, Farcaster is an economy. A leading indicator for the protocol is the trading volume of its native projects and tokens — this hit $1B in November, beating Farcaster's $910M all-time high from April 2024. Notably, the composition is more diversified than the April high driven by DEGEN, with three of the top five tokens less than a month old.

• This volume is driven in a rapidly increasing part by tokens launched on Clanker, a bot that launches tokens based on in-feed interactions with Farcaster users. Since Nov. 8, users created 6,900+ tokens, generating over $880M in trading volume and over $8.8M in fees for creators and Clanker.

• New user growth surged to 8,000+ in the last week of November, almost 4 times as much as the weekly average for the month of October. This marks a trend reversal from the highs of the summer that were driven by the launch of Moxie, a system for rewarding Farcaster users, and the continued airdrops of DEGEN.

• Terminal of Truths, a semi-autonomous AI bot created by the technologist Andy Ayrey, gained fame for founding The Goatse Gospel religion and posting viral content on X. Despite halting trades after its initial decentralized exchange (DEX) activity on GOAT, the AI agent amassed a $20M–$60M cryptocurrency portfolio through 150k+ micro airdrops from users, earning its title as the first AI millionaire.

• On Nov. 27, Terminal of Truths’ previous holdings were migrated to a new Solana multisig wallet for enhanced security. As of Dec. 1, its portfolio consisted of 55% ZEREBRO ($13M), 22% Fartcoin ($5M), and 10% GOAT ($2M).

• Terminal of Truths’ original obsession, GOAT, peaked at a $1.56B market cap in November but dropped to $760M in December. Despite the decline, token holders grew to 70k+. From creating a memecoin religion to releasing a music album, this AI agent shows how AIs are reshaping culture, tech, and finance.

• Pump.fun is the pioneering memecoin launchpad, launched on Solana, which allows anyone to create token easily and with low fees. Clanker emerged as a competitor on Farcaster, allowing anyone to launch a token for free, all within the Farcaster feed. Pump.fun token volume is hovering ~$400M in daily volume, while Clanker tokens are around the $30M-$100M range. Both show the product-market fit of projects that enable users and AI agents to launch memecoins.

• Pump.fun earns revenue by taking 1% on trades along tokens' bonding curve + 2 SOL tokens for a listing on Raydium, a key DEX on Solana. Clanker, on the other hand, takes 1% perpetually from a Uniswap V3 pool. Even though Clanker has been live for a just couple of weeks in November, the project generated ~7% of Pump.fun's revenue.

• Launchpads are a power law. The top five tokens for Pump.fun have a joint market capitalization of ~$3.5B, and in Clanker's case, of $120M. The limitation of Clanker is that it exists only within the Farcaster ecosystem, while Pump has had a more broad distribution.

• Bountycaster is a bounty system built on top of Farcaster for users to post and discover bounties. Since it had launched a year ago, 765 creators posted 2.3K bounties, offering a total of $1.4M upon completion. 51% of these bounties have been completed, resulting in $370K paid out. Besides individually sponsoring bounties, there are options to crowdfund bounties, however, only 96 bounties, 4% of the total, were created via this route.

• Amongst 460 bounty creators who have paid users for successfully completing proposed tasks, the user linda has been the most active with 64 bounties created. Participation from bounty creators has been diverse — even linda only accounts for 6% of the bounties. The most valuable bounty creators —spencermarell.eth, frodo, toshibase— are responsible for over a quarter of overall bounty value.

• Users spent a total of 214,576 hours to complete 1,133 bounties, averaging just over a week to complete each bounty. Collectively, linda's bounties took 6,402 hours to be completed —3% of total Bountycaster hours— followed by spenser's bounties, which accounted for 2.5% of total hours. These small percentage's show the amount of time other bounties require to complete them.

• Courtyard is an onchain collectible trading platform on Polygon. It has experienced consistent growth in NFT sales volume over the past nine months, achieving six consecutive all-time highs. Last month, the platform recorded $8.74M in sales volume, a 32% increase compared to October's $6.61M. Notably, marketplace activity has nearly tripled, surging from 439M events in October to 1.24B events in November, underscoring robust engagement amongst the traders.

• A key collection of Courtyard's assets is Pokémon cards. They, too experienced a tenth consecutive month of growth in their sales volume, with the most recent month setting another all-time high —for the eighth time!— of $4M. Their lifetime sales volume is now $15M through over 320k sales.

• Courtyard's user base has grown to over 9.2K cumulatively, with 23K unique minters (originators) contributing to the platform. Pokémon cards dominate the trading activity, making up slightly more than 50% of the total sales volume across all collections.