Every user posting on a public social media platform today generally wants the same thing: distribution. If you’re sharing your thoughts, you likely want them to be seen by as many relevant people as possible – or else you wouldn’t be posting them in public. 

But as social platforms grow, and algorithmic feeds become more and more dominant, it feels increasingly challenging to stand out amongst the crowd and have your voice be heard, let alone by the most relevant people. This is even harder for new users on a platform who have to bootstrap a following and reputation. 

Enter Amps, a mini app on Farcaster that’s attempting to solve this problem by creating new markets around content distribution on Farcaster. Amps is a marketplace that lets users permissionlessly pay for recasts and likes from other users, leveraging the unique capabilities of Farcaster signers. 

To earn as an Amps user, you can set a fixed price for a recast and a like. To get distribution on a cast as a user, you can select a cast of yours, and then select who you want to recast and/or like the post, boosting the cast in the algorithm to their followers. This means that as a user with distribution, you can start earning passive income whenever others pay for your recasts and likes, and if you’re someone who wants to increase distribution – say, on a launch announcement for example – you can pay to guarantee that certain users will recast it.  

So far, Amps has done $75k in volume, with almost 4,500 unique users earning from Amps across roughly 5,900 transactions. 

What makes Amps so special is that it’s the type of product that is only possible with crypto and programmable social, while also actually meeting a real non-speculative user need. People and businesses want important posts to reach larger audiences, and Amps provides a way to amplify those messages beyond what might be possible just with a raw post. 

Amps is also a unique extension of the type of apps that are possible with Farcaster’s signer-based design. On Farcaster, a user must add an app as a signer, which gives it the authority to send messages to the protocol on a user’s behalf. Most of the time, this is used in building clients that allow a user to cast or react from inside an app after initiating it. 

But because signers are programmable, it also means that apps with signers can take automated actions on behalf of a user, that write to the protocol without necessarily requiring a user-initiated action. Amps takes advantage of this by automatically recasting and liking on behalf of a user, without that user actually having to do anything beyond initially approving Amps as a signer. This creates a seamless experience for both users in a transaction, where the payer gets instantaneous and guaranteed distribution, and the recipient can get paid in the background without having to do anything or even know that the transaction took place at all. 

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This is all powered by Neynar’s managed signer infrastructure, so Amps doesn’t actually have to build any of the signer management themselves - it’s fully abstracted away, enabling the team to focus on building their core behavior and not needing to worry about dealing with Farcaster infra.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that microtransactions are an emerging category with a wide host of opportunities, especially when paired with the open social graph of Farcaster. We’ve written previously about tipping protocols like Noice and Tipn that are moving this space forward, and we’re grateful to support the Amps team who has invented an entirely new primitive in social microtransactions - enabling users to transact and earn in ways previously not possible.