Headless marketplaces, Farcaster frames

Jesse on a new GTM strategy for crypto founders; highlights from our Frames hackathon.

gm!

“Builder energy is clearly back.” On Friday, Farcaster launched Frames, a way to turn any Farcaster post into an embedded app. The feature had crypto builders building, and resonated with our thinking on “headless marketplaces.” On Sunday, we hosted a spontaneous Frames hackathon at our office in NYC. Read on for Jesse’s hack: an essay on how Frames deliver a composable way to build headless marketplaces. We also recap a few of the cool Frames that builders came up with at the hackathon.

Happy reading, and happy building.

—Dan Roberts, Editor in Chief

Headless Marketplaces: Go Where the Wallets Are

Jesse Walden

Composability has been a holy grail for crypto, and we’re on the verge of an explosion of it. The reason is a new go-to-market strategy for founders may have just become viable: go to where the wallets are, build a headless marketplace.

A headless marketplace is a market leveraging global, onchain identity, money, and data while distributing locally—wherever a user’s wallet already is (e.g. inside a Telegram group chat or Farcaster feed).

Since major social platforms cut API/platform access, bootstrapping a new app or marketplace demanded a miracle in distribution hacking. The rise of decentralized social protocols and wallet infrastructure might simplify things a bit.

That’s because it’s now possible to go to where the users are, without fear of platform risk—and crucially, because decentralized social networks leverage crypto wallets for identity, it’s now possible to tap users’ existing identity, money, and data in your application too.

Historically, most marketplaces have been destinations. Users have to travel to a website or open an app, sign up for a fresh account, input a credit card and profile data, etc. With headless marketplaces, the destination can be the user’s wallet in whichever application they’re already spending time. The result is much lower friction to transacting.

About a week ago, I wrote a tweetstorm on this topic and used Bountycaster as an early example of a headless marketplace:

A great example is @bountycaster (on Farcaster), which leverages the social network for its ‘local’ distribution. By tagging the Bountycaster bot in a cast, users can participate in a global marketplace for talent or bounties. Anyone can build an interface to view or transact with the market’s liquidity (and a number already have) but users don’t need to go anywhere but their @warpcast feed to participate.

Since then, Farcaster launched Frames. Frames leverage Facebook’s OpenGraph standard to enable third-party developers to build “mini apps.” These apps can pass signed messages from Farcaster user wallets, enabling arbitrary, structured interactions with third-party applications directly from the feed. Running with Bountycaster as the example, a soon-to-be-built Bountycaster Frame will enable users to bid on a bounty or pitch in funds to a bounty, directly from an embed in their social feed.

For founders, the takeaway is that you now have the ability to tap directly into existing user attention, engagement, identity and data as you plan your GTM, the same way that Zynga famously did with Facebook. Only this time, users’ money will be there too, and their identity and data can’t be rugged from underneath them.

When a new go-to-market strategy becomes clear, a wave of innovation and opportunity often follows. In 2024, you can go to where the wallets are.

Read other recent writing on our site.

Frames Hackathon at Variant HQ

This past weekend, we hosted a Frames hackathon at our NYC office that pulled in hundreds of online or in-person attendees to make Farcaster embedded apps. Here are some of the cool frames that came out of the event, as recounted by Alana.

A better way to browse NFTs in your wallet

20 questions with ChatGPT

“Wowow or meh” - help artists get feedback from their audiences on what looks good (and what doesn’t)

And my all-time favorite… buy girl scout cookies direct from your feed (not live yet, but counting down the minutes til it launches)

Updates from our portfolio

January highlights from the startups we’re proud to invest in.

• Gevulot, the decentralized network for zk-proof verification, raised a $6m seed round led by Variant and announced its devnet coming in March. If you’d like to participate, sign up here.

• Morpho Blue, a new lending protocol from Morpho, went live on Ethereum.

• Euler Labs introduced its Ethereum Vault Connector, a public good and the “first building block” for Euler v2.

• NFT marketplace Magic Eden launched its NFT rewards program.

• Coordinape unveiled CoLinks, a “LinkedIn for web3.” Many members of the Variant team have joined: you can link up with us there. 

• Looking for something fun? ZORA released a new game called CYTO.

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