Miniapps ecosystem on Arbitrum - BuidlGuidl's Builder Bootcamp

Transcript

All right. All right. Hey, what's going on, guys? Um, I know probably a lot of you here were previously building many apps and uh talking about a lot of uh devi techy stuff. We're going to talk a little bit about uh ecosystem and more on the side of the social side of Farcaster today uh with a little bit of uh arbitum flavoring. Uh my name is Hunter. I do community strategy at Offchain Labs. We build Arbitum and uh you know it's been my pleasure to do a lot of the uh ecosystem leading uh within Farcaster on the Arbitum side. So we'll touch on a little bit of uh you know what Arbitum is like today for those of you who don't know some of the experimentation uh being currently done in the ecosystem.

Uh why Farcaster, why arbitrum has decided to kind of make the deep dive into Farcaster the past couple of months. uh the state of Arbitum and Farcaster and of course uh what's next and of course if you have any questions feel free to hold them until the end be happy to answer them. So talking about arbitrum to begin with not to get too deep um a lot of people know it as like the land of liquidity so to speak. So you know arbitum mainly dominates currently in DeFi as per RWAS lending and borrowing any of the financial stuff you would like to do on chain uh and of course capital flow. So that's like the classic on-ramping off-ramping uh through Hyperlquid, Aster, and of course direct connections to uh other big exchanges and of course uh teams uh like Robin Hood as well. Um but I think the

uh you know main thing to keep in mind here and kind of the reason why why I bring this up is because these are all important features for uh sustainable projects and for uh teams that want to build long-term an ecosystem that continues to thrive and continues to have a lot of capital flow in and out. So what about the experiments? That's kind of what Farcaster is all about. I think in its own way, Arbitum has a lot of its own experiments going on currently. Uh I'll touch on each of them and why I consider them experiments in a little bit. Uh USDA is probably one of the uh one of my most uh favorite ones currently that's recently come up. You can essentially earn yield by providing liquidity to AI companies with real collateral. Think like Tesla chargers, think like kind of GPU farms and stuff

like that. And essentially they have a token that is able to uh uh bear the yield that those things provide on chain. uh they currently have about half a billion dollars in capital across arbitum, arbitum one and plasma. Uh the cool part about that is any of the capital on other chains besides arbitrum has underlying liquidity uh on the arbitrum itself. So anything on plasma essentially has its own kind of uh staking on arbitrum too. Uh we have Talos crypto's first agent controlled treasury project with D5 strategies across arbitum uh backed by onchain labs and supported by Ethereum a couple times. And of course, Robin Hood. Um, probably didn't expect me to say Robin Hood was an experiment, but hear me out.

Uh, this is the first traditional finance company to commit to bringing their business completely onchain. Uh, kind of leading that launch and migrate model that we like to talk about. um you know in a lot of our other speeches you may hear essentially launching uh primarily first on arbitrum one uh very neutral very uh liquid kind of a main chain and then later migrating and kind of creating their own kind of ecosystem on their own chain with offchain labs kind of being the partner with them all the way throughout that journey. Uh you'll probably hear me talk about the launch and migrate stuff even more throughout this speech uh and see how I kind of related to Farcaster a little bit.

So why Farcaster? So, uh, number one, indie builders. I think, uh, Farcastaster is like probably the best breeding ground, best breeding ground for idea stage developers. Um, and I I I I say this because I think like if you've kind of interacted with the ecosystem uh, on the timeline and you've spoken with a lot of the developers there, um, a lot of them just have incredibly great ideas. Uh, while there's a lot of people on Twitter who have the same thing, I feel like Farcaster folks just tend to put those ideas into action much more often than people on X do. And that's definitely one thing that I think uh the Arbitum ecosystem when I first kind of got got started back in 2021. Uh I've been I've been there since then is uh kind of like the like the soul and like the blood of

arbitum's growth. Uh these kind of very small teams to begin with just experimenting trying new things out and of course uh leveraging the arbitum ecosystem for the growth. So Farcaster has a ton of that and I wanted to make sure that you know the arbitum ecosystem is able to provide support for indie builders there and also help them grow uh alongside ourselves. Uh the second is the creator economy and onchain social. You probably did not expect to hear that in an arbitum uh speech. Um the strong social graph within Farcaster uh I think is what makes for a great foundation for communities to grow. Um I myself am a content creator. I've been creating content since 2020. um crypto videos on YouTube and like different platforms

like Library, Odyssey, and even Steemit if some of you guys remember that stuff. Um but I think that this is a really really uh important and vital piece uh why I think Farcaster is valuable because um there's never been a better time to be a content creator uh just in general, especially in crypto. And I do think that uh any ecosystem can benefit from incredible people that can tell stories in an effective way and uh deliver that to people inside the ecosystem and outside the ecosystem. Uh and then working with these people obviously uh to me is of course invaluable since I like to do this stuff myself. And of course uh arbitrum everywhere. I won't dive deep into this one too much because that could be an entire slide an entire presentation. But I I think the main idea here is that

wherever there is value to be tokenized uh we want arbitrage to be the premier option for that. Uh and what I mean is you saw the experimentation uh kind of uh slide earlier where we mentioned a couple of different projects both uh quite small actually and obviously as big as a Fortune 500 company. And the idea there is you know you're not too big or too small to come up with an incredible idea and have and you know see that grow with a partner like Offchain Labs like arbitrum. And uh that's why we want to be in places where people have these incredible ideas and have these uh visions for seeing things that you know if we're tokenizing things like today we're talking about stocks, we're talking about commodities, tomorrow we may be talking about someone was pitching me nautical assets the other day like things on the water or

maybe we're talking about like coffee beans. Someone tagged me in a coffee bean post calling them rwas. Um you know there there's no idea too big or too small I think for it to potentially succeed and uh you know have some sort of adoption tied to it at the end. And we want to make sure that uh you know arbitum is your first choice uh to deploy something like that. So what are the state of things? Uh I put that picture last minute cuz I thought it was kind of cute. Um so currently there are about nine different mini apps on Farcaster. When I say nine additions I mean like nine like really pillar mini apps to the Farcaster ecosystem like Noise, Clanker, Empire Builder, uh stuff like that that have been around in Farcaster for quite some time. uh that have of course worked with

the arbitration ecosystem to integrate that into their stack. Uh we have 27 exclusive or native mini apps. Uh I put 27 there because I think this was like I made this a couple maybe a month ago or so. May have increased and gone up a little bit since then but it includes stuff like bribe uh cardboard as a community arbs flap I think it's like flapum like a bunch of different mini apps that exist on arbitrum today. Um I couldn't list all of them here because otherwise the slide would be too long but uh there's a lot of really really cool ideas and a lot of uh people experimenting on arbitum. A lot more of course uh people that I'm talking to as well that I think are creating really really interesting ideas and ideally creating things that are a little bit different than what already exists on

Farcaster today. The idea isn't to replicate things and just have them be copy and paste onto one chain into the other. I think the idea is to kind of come in and create a net new kind of ecosystem of ideas and mini apps and uh just have the farcaster ecosystem equally benefit as much as the arbitum ecosystem does. Um we have an active uh directcast group dedicated to arbitum community and builders. So shout outs to you guys. Um I was posting a ton in the chat before then. Um it's actually a great place to like kind of you know hone in everyone's ideas, kind of get thoughts, you know, provide feedback, try new mini apps. Uh again, Farcastaster in general does a great job at that. So I think having an even more siloed group chat with like an ecosystem like that. Uh we call it the RB cabal.

If you want to join, just let me know afterwards. Um it's it's infinitely valuable for anyone kind of building things, wanting to get feedback, try things out, iterate, etc. And of course, officially marketing Farcaster as an added distribution channel uh for teams. So currently we actually do this for teams that are doing things that are uh as I was saying earlier a little bit experimental in nature maybe uh not necessarily only DeFi related. Uh we'll touch on the D5 part in a second but um you know it's it's been great to be able to tell people hey like you know obviously X is great LinkedIn might be great too if you're kind of doing something there you know that maybe resonates there but Farcaster is another great great example or great place to say you know if you want someone to just dog food your app try it out give you

feedback etc. probably one of the best places to do it to be honest. Um, and again, people are very receptive uh of actually when I when I I tell them far caster. I usually have to give them a little bit of like an explanation on why, but it ends up resonating very well after the fact. So, what's next? Um, I probably should have included the dewards part one on that original slide, but essentially for the past couple of months, there's there have been uh essentially 2500 bucks going to the top five arbitrage mini apps in the Farcaster ecosystem. Um and you know while that program has been paused for about a month or so there has since been a uh kind of like a developer crowd crowdfund for arbitum devs uh created by flow state. So I think they

actually created something similar called cracked farcaster devs a little while ago. Uh now they have an arbitum version of that. So cracked arbitum devs and um you know we're currently figuring out the next iteration of the dev rewards program but until then there's like a crowdfunding thing going. And I think the main the main point thing the main thing to point out here is that uh there was a lot of learnings from the first program. Um it's great to reward people for uh building you know things that drive impact on Farcaster but I think more than anything uh go back to the original point is we want to try to drive more innovation within the Farcaster ecosystem. There's a lot of great minds there and a lot of great ideas. And I think to uh you know, I feel like at least my personal job feels

like it should be to get people to be even more creative, get them to experiment more and get them and and of course have them benefit from that experimentation whether it be through dev rewards or whether it be through even just further partnership uh and more of a deeper collaboration with the arbitum ecosystem. The second thing is the DeFi mini apps. I think like I I I feel like decentralized finance or just finance in general in the Farcaster mini app. Uh there isn't enough of it. Uh my original goal coming into Farcaster a couple months ago was to try to drive a lot of that. I think I was uh you know I I I was more successful in driving more general mini apps but not enough DeFi ones. So it's something we're going to try to figure out as time goes on. That means like per that means lending and

borrowing. That could even mean just like existing uh DeFi experiences that exist today. but maybe you're just more gamified or more interactive than they would be if they were just a standalone app. So that's something I I would love to see more on Farcaster and something that I think if it were to come from anywhere it would come from the arbitum ecosystem. And lastly um working with longerterm teams I think I might have just word vomited over here so you can ignore that. Uh but pretty much you know there's a I I mentioned the launch and migrate model earlier uh kind of talking about the whole arbitum everywhere thing and I think this also applies to Farcaster in a sense. I think there's there's something to be said about being able to work with teams work with people that have like I said earlier these

great ideas but maybe don't have their distribution maybe they don't have the right connections maybe don't even have you know someone to talk to from a chain ecosystem that they're building on. And that's where I think we could be the most valuable for people. essentially taking them from stage zero idea to stage one kind of production Farcaster and then of course stage two, you know, expanding their app beyond Farcaster and being almost a success story for the Farcaster ecosystem and saying like, you know, here is this incredible app just, you know, crypto app that has, you know, done tons of transaction volumes, has driven tons of uh impact and has, uh, you know, you know, crossed like many different ecosystems. uh but it was born on Farcaster first and I I think that

would benefit quite literally everybody. Um, and it's something that I think we can position the arbitum ecosystem very strategically as. Uh, not necessarily, you know, being able to help out the long tail of a thousand devs that are on Farcaster, but more so saying we can create tailored experiences and work and kind of give these white glove kind of uh, you know, experiences to the devs that are saying, you know, that are thinking long term and saying, you know what, I have this idea. I think it can be incredible. I want to, you know, try it out on Farcaster as a mini app. uh make it work, get it viral, maybe as a top five trending app. And then I want to figure out a way to expand beyond that and make this idea into a product that people actually use day-to-day in and out of the Farcaster mini app

ecosystem as a regular app. So that's definitely something that um we're going to try to kind of figure out as an ecosystem and really tailor more experiences towards. We're already kind of doing this with a couple of mini apps on Farcaster actually. Um but it's early days. It's very early days. And that being said, uh I think that's it. Thank you. Uh yeah, thank you guys. You have any questions? I'm happy to answer them now or off the stage. I don't know if anyone has a mic. There's a mic over here. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask me. Arbitrated, forecaster related, um content creator related, anything. But otherwise, I'll be sitting there in the audience afterwards.

All right, sweet. Thanks, guys.