Analyzing Farcaster’s growing agency economy may be one of the biggest innovations of this cycle

Original author: YB

Original translation: Plain Blockchain

“For the first time, users can touch and experience decentralized artificial intelligence - it is no longer just an abstract investment theme. Just like decentralized finance (DeFi) in 2020, the increase in percentage is largest when the probability of success in a new field rises from 1% to 25%, not from 25% to 100%. I think "DeFi in 2020" is roughly the state of cryptocurrency combined with artificial intelligence today. This may be the biggest real innovation trigger of our cycle so far.” - @RyanWatkins_

Source: Syncracy Capital

In today’s post, I record my experience at Farcaster

1. Agent Economy = Smart Internet

In short, the agent economy is the process of moving the Internet from search-based to action-based. Before, you had to go through multiple intermediary steps to communicate with a dApp on another chain (a→b→c→d), but now you can get to your destination directly through intents and solvers (a→d). ——Axal Blog

The "intent" here refers to what you - the human - want to accomplish, and the "solver" is a series of agents that work together to complete the task. You can think of the intermediate steps as a black box, and humans don't have to worry about it anymore.

A simple analogy is that looking back at the late 90s and early 2000s, Yahoo and Google were seen as miracle tools - you could type anything into the search bar and get relevant results in seconds.

Similarly, as on-chain AI infrastructure improves, we will be amazed that we can type anything into the action bar and the result will be a receipt for the task completed, with a proof link (i.e., a transaction).

I think the key point to understand here is that the vision of the smart internet can only be implemented efficiently on crypto infrastructure. You need agents to be able to use APIs without permission on the social layer, have funds, be able to trade, show proof of work for their tasks, and collaborate effectively with other agents. At this point, smart wallets, stablecoins, decentralized social, tokenization, etc. must all be connected.

If we use traditional Web2 infrastructure, we will greatly limit the capabilities of these agents.

2. Farcaster Framework as a Large Language Model API

I spoke to @anquetil (founder of the first Farcaster agent, Aethernet) about his experience running the bot so far.

To explain some context, last Friday Aethernet started issuing bounties through Bountycaster and paying people through Paybot. This is possible because every Farcaster account has a connected Ethereum address.

For the most part, Martin mentioned that the conversations between people and the bot were pretty natural. And it’s really cool that the agent has a wallet (note: all transactions currently require Martin’s approval).

But one insight he mentioned that particularly stood out to me was that he began to think of the Farcaster framework as an API for these agents to work together.

This is from @ljxie on Warpcast.

This is like the 0.0001 version of the vision from a to d I mentioned above, designed to make tasks done for you.

For example, suppose you want an agent to: 1) pick a hot topic in the news, 2) make a meme that demonstrates its understanding of the key points, 3) mint this meme on Zora, 4) claim the minting reward, and then use the profit to 5) buy $HIGHER.

You can imagine an "agent commander" first making a request to Gina, then passing the output to a "meme bot", then giving the image to a "Zora agent", and finally sending the reward to a "trading bot".

All of these steps are now done by the framework, it just takes the agents figuring out which bots to use and in what order.

3. Supercast AI Pets

Supercast, which @wojtekwtf is building, just launched AI pets. Basically, these agents have their own Farcaster account that evolves over time by learning from your content.

I’m still on the waiting list, so I haven’t had a chance to claim my pet yet, but I’ll keep you updated.

Did you notice that I mentioned “Agent Commanders” above? I imagine these AI pets can act as coordinators between agents to help complete the tasks you request.

Think about it. They are the agents that you interact with the most, and they understand how you like information presented and work done, which tools you prefer, and so on. When you tell it a task, it figures out the steps to get the job done based on your preferences and contacts the required bots through the framework.

It’s like how DeFi aggregators find the best path for your transactions. Similarly, these multi-agent coordinators try to accomplish your intent efficiently within the budget constraints you’ve given them.

4. Neynar’s Opportunity

@neynarxyz, the developer tools company behind Farcaster, suddenly had a unique opportunity to grow their customer base and revenue.

Until now, Neynar’s focus has been on getting builders in the Farcaster ecosystem to use their API and central services. But now, if the number of agents/bots on Farcaster grows 10x, they have an opportunity to attract this new “audience”, as these agents will need API keys to complete their tasks.

Then it became how Neynar could increase the number of agents deployed on Farcaster. The answer was simple: provide users with a natural language interface that enables them to deploy an agent to a new Farcaster account and wallet with one click. This means that you only need to describe the type of agent you want (i.e. its purpose, how you want it to behave, etc.), and the rest of the work will be done automatically. This is what @rish_neynar mentioned last week that the team is working on.

Of course, this will result in a flood of agents into the feed, which may become annoying as most of the agents will probably be poor performers, and will affect the Farcaster user experience overall. So I believe some kind of curation process will be needed. But once the initial rush is over, I bet we will see some really creative agents that will take the Farcaster experience to a whole new level.

This may also trigger a "framing moment" where we will see a large influx of new users into Farcaster to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities.

5. Ultimate On-Chain Agent

I also spent some time thinking about what a Ultimate On-Chain (TOC) agent might look like. Right now, one of the main issues I run into when running TOC is community interaction and maintaining a consistent posting frequency in the Farcaster channel.

It would be great if a TOC bot could read all my writing, keep up with the topics I follow, and interact with my hypersub members in a natural and meaningful way. For example, if a TOC subscriber posts about stablecoins, it could reply with some useful and relevant information based on the views in my previous posts.

In addition, I could have this agent follow all my hypersub members and update the community chat about any important announcements, interesting views, or content they post.

I could even have it follow the news and post its own opinions on some hot topics based on my writing and the resources I share in my posts. This could also be as simple as asking a question in the chat every morning to prompt discussion.

Since the agent will have a wallet and funding from me, I can also have it reward HIGHERTokens to those who engage in meaningful conversations with it, correct mistakes, recommend new reading resources, and so on. It could even offer free TOC professional grants to Farcaster users who I think are a good fit for the community!

The TOC community works together to become the best agent for on-chain strategies and is rewarded in the process.

Honestly, I've just scratched the surface of all the examples above, but the main point I want to make is that a TOC agent could increase my community management efficiency tenfold overnight. Most importantly, though, this agent needs to have a personality that people enjoy interacting with, otherwise the entire brand may suffer.

6. Unexpected users of Splits Teams

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on @0xsplits titled "Launch my first on-chain SMB in 5 minutes". In this post, I talked about a new product launched by the Splits team: Teams.

In simple terms, this tool can quickly create an on-chain SMB. When you create a new team on the Splits dashboard, you first need to set up administrators and access permissions. Each team has two accounts: an operations account and a treasury account. Think of the treasury as a checking account for team funds, and the operations account is like a credit card for the team. The treasury is the main storage place for team funds, and any transaction requires approval from multiple people, while the operations account is used for daily expenses.

The screenshot below shows the dashboard for the Late Night Team. Overall, it feels like looking at any old fintech dashboard.

I mention this because last week I was setting up Splits Teams for Terminally Onchain. During the onboarding process, I realized that I had no team at all, just me, so I had no idea who to add.

But this week it occurred to me that I could add a TOC agent as one of the signatories. It has access to an account and is paid a small stipend to do its job. Any income it earns can also be split in interesting ways. For example, 15% of what the agent earns can be used to try new experiments, 45% goes to savings, and 40% goes to me.

Isn't this weird, haha? I just proposed a way to pay my agents a split, and now it's just a few clicks away! Of course, by signatory I don't mean it can approve transactions on its own.

To me, this would be a great way to make agents "official teammates".

(My discussion with @abram)

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