Farcaster Frames and why they matter for web3

Transcript

the first big news story of the week which is forecaster frames this is a massive innovation in the web 3 space basically what forecaster frames is it allows any app to pull a frame within forecaster to create a frame within our forecaster and what a frame is is it's basically a way that you can engage a user to take an action but you can keep them in farcaster you don't have to take them off now this is built using uh Facebook's open graph protocol Facebook created this open graph protocol which was this idea that okay Facebook Facebook actually wanted to do what

forecaster is doing right now but couldn't do it because their business model went in the direction of closed wall Garden in order to monetize for ads basically with their business model now obviously with decentralized social that changes so what farcaster frames allows is it allows a user to be on foraster and forecaster is just like Twitter it's a social media platform a decentralized social media platform and you're on foraster this is where all your users are every day I mean I know not a lot of us are yet on forecaster it's still new but let's if Twitter was doing this we're all on Twitter every day and we're

every business that's on Twitter is trying to get take your attention that they have on Twitter and they're trying to get to take an action right they're trying to get you to subscribe to their newsletter they're trying to get you to buy a pair of shoes from them they're trying to get you to sign up for a course they're trying to get you to take an action and in order to get you to take that action they have to take you off of the platform where your attention is because you can't transact on that platform you can't sign up for something you can't give your email to something you can't purchase something because there is no monetary way to achieve Commerce on that platform so what frames does what forecast frames does is it brings that ability directly into

farcaster where the attention is this is just it's a huge huge Innovation because think of it think of it like an embed for those that aren't using fargas you know you can embed like a tweet in a newsletter and now you can like like the Tweet but you're actually still just reading your newsletter which we do with ours all the time it's basically that but for anything whether it's like Commerce whether it's reading our newsletter you can actually like embed using a frame our par our newsletter that's on paragraph and you can be scrolling on forecaster stop see that frame of our newsletter and then actually read the entirety of the newsletter in that little frame which is pretty cool so you never actually had to leave and go to our our site which is quite interesting and there's a lot of functionalities that can come from that

as well especially when you consider that your forecaster account is a wallet or not a wallet is your well it is a wallet yeah it's it's basically your um crypto account right and so now that's already connected and you can make purchases without having to like put in your credit card information or leave the page you just do it all in there so that just hopefully helps you guys kind of visualize what this means yeah to give you a couple other examples of what's happened so far so Kai mentioned that paragraph which is our newsletter platform has already developed a frame so you can read our newsletter or subscribe to our newsletter directly within farcaster a few other things that have happened is somebody has launched an instant checkout as using a frame so in this case they did it for cookies so

you can if you're on foraster and you want to buy cookies because you're following this this cookie brand well you could instantly check out and buy the cookies and as Kai said the key there is you already have your wallet is what you use to log in to forecaster with so you already have a wallet that has Commerce abilities and has money in it you would obviously have to have some crypto in in your forecaster wallet but assuming you did you would be able to check out instantly and if you didn't it would just likely ask you to add some money to your wallet and likely that would be just through a credit card hey add money to your wallet and then you

can check out and do this also somebody made a frame of Doom the old remember Doom Kai the the game from the 90s that I used to love playing this game was like one of the first firstperson shooter games that made it really big so somebody made a frame where you can within farcaster you play Doom you can play this game it's just they've embedded this game somebody else are friends at sound sound made so you can listen or mint a song directly within farcaster so like right now your friend shares a song on I I always like using Twitter as an example because we all understand Twitter X better than we necessarily understand foraster but it's like I share a song on Twitter X and I'm trying to encourage my friends to listen

to that song or I'm an artist and I'm sharing a song they're going to have to click a link and go listen to that song on a different platform right that's a lot of friction that's taking people off platform Twitter doesn't like that so they actually push that post down on the algorithm so that doesn't nobody's winning in that case whereas with frames now oh you can listen and mint that song directly within a frame and there's been multiple other frames that people have built look this is to me there's two takeaways here one is we are developing a crossover between the attention economy and the e-commerce economy and we never really had that before like attention was in one platform whether it

be Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and then when you wanted to transact you had to go to a different platform we're now merging those together with web 3 this is just a huge unlock and the other thing is lot less a dream for marketers yeah and we're creating a new new sort of go to market strategy in that our login is going to become wallet based and obviously the whole internet isn't there and isn't here yet online has not moved to onchain but when it does and this is why onchain is so much better than online you will no longer log in like you do right now where you log in with Facebook or Google or your email you'll log in with your wallet and when

you log in with your wallet you have so many more abilities in terms of what you can do on that platform because your wallet can transact and hold money your wallet can also be a more secure version of your identity and we'll go down that rabbit hole of how identity can change with wallets as well but this means that now because you're logging with Wallets on these platforms you have much more ability as a brand to interact with your user in ways that you didn't have before and what we're going to see is is really a new goto Market strategy for crypto companies and onchain companies I think this is going to be a big meta for 2024 is if you're launching a new brand

and you're going after onchain users you need to focus your go to market strategy you go to where the wallets are and foraster has wallets and there's other platforms that have wallets spend your time there where the wallets are because that's where your users not only they there they can engage in so many ways with your brand because of their wallet yeah I mean to be fair there's 14,000 daily active users on fargas so the wallets are not necessarily there yet but in the crypto world that is where the Walts are there's a lot of crypto natives which is a target audience for certain people that are engaging over on farcaster now and have left Twitter or X and so like for some people that might make sense to Target them if you're like

a mainstream brand like I don't know forecaster is probably not the place you need to be spending your time at least not right now but hey doesn't hurt to be early as well right so I love that it removes friction from the payment my only issue is like most people in the world have a spending problem as is if we are removing friction from spending I like I said it's a dream for marketers probably terrible for the average person because most people are terrible with their finances now people in crypto already generally are much smarter with their finances that's why you're here probably and so like you're probably all good I I fear for when this becomes a mainstream thing it's like one button and I mean the guess the good about Crypt is you actually have to have the money it's not credit and so like that

maybe a good thing but I'm sure we'll get credit tied into this at some point too and then I'm I'm nervous for the average consumer people just I love how you went to the like sociology impact of this yeah well gu we don't generally go down like more philosophical psychological impacts but yeah watch out users you might have to be better with your finances