Bracky is one of the most used agents on Farcaster, built by the team behind Bracket Game. In the six months Bracky has been live, they’ve built a cult following of users and fans on Farcaster - who talk to Bracky to bet on everything from basketball to tennis to soccer (yes, it’s called soccer).
Sports viewing and betting is an inherently social experience, but current leading apps are private and single-player. Bracky turns these assumptions on their head by creating a sports betting experience that lives directly where its users do: right in the social feed.
The Bracky agent also adds another unique layer to the UX - instead of transacting in an app to trade, users trade via a conversation with the Bracky agent itself. This has a few implications:
Any additional context a user might need about a game or a bet, they can simply just ask Bracky
Instead of needing to sign transactions manually or navigate a complex UI, they just tell Bracky to place the bet for them.
For the Bracky team, any conversation with Bracky that happens on the timeline is built-in marketing for their product because the users’ followers all see it; this creates an attention flywheel designed for virality.
And it’s worked! The $BRACKY token has been strong over the last six months, currently hovering around its all time high at $4M.
Much of Bracky’s Farcaster infrastructure is powered by Neynar’s tooling under the hood. Let’s walk through it:
Mini App Notifications
Bracky uses Neynar’s Mini App Notifications to reach their mini app users directly to notify them about bet outcomes, new markets, and more. As Max said,
“I initially spec’d out what it would take to build out our own notifications system. Neynar evaporated a week of engineering time by having a built-in solution out of the box”.
Notifications are one of the most powerful features of mini apps because they enable apps to reactivate users at relevant touchpoints. Instead of hoping that users will choose and remember to keep returning to each mini app (increasingly difficult in today’s Internet), notifications can pull users back into the app when it makes sense.
Webhooks for Outreach
A huge recent growth tactic for Bracky has been reaching out to users who are casting about a game, but aren’t yet set up with Bracky or using it to bet.
Neynar’s webhooks enable Bracky to use regex filtering to subscribe to events with specific keywords or formats (in the above case, something like “game 7”. After ingesting the event, Bracky can check to see the user’s status with Bracky, decide they are someone worth onboarding, and automatically transfer $BRACKY tokens with a prompt to place a bet on the match.
Even if the amount may be small, this onboarding flow is an aha moment for the user that makes them more likely to reach out to bet in future games. It also eliminates a common point of friction in crypto products - when a user has to transfer funds into the wallet for a new app.
Using Neynar’s webhooks to enable this outreach feature has been a huge success for the team, leading to a 500%+ increase in net new users per game.
Neynar Score
Bracky uses the Neynar score for everything related to reputation management for new and existing users.
For the NFL playoffs, Bracky airdropped 2% of its supply to Farcaster users, with ⅔ distributed to previous Bracket Game users, and ⅓ distributed to new potential users, validated via the Neynar score.
Bracky also uses Neynar scores to manage its ongoing allowlist; due to spam, it’s impossible for Bracky to be a full public-access agent while still wanting to be free-to-use. The Neynar score is a holistic onchain reputation tool that lets Bracky gate who has access to the agent (and, for example, who might be eligible for outreach responses mentioned above).
We think Bracky is one of the best examples of an agent and product taking full advantage of all parts of the Neynar stack. They use Neynar Score to manage permissioning, our mini app notifications to retain users, webhooks to subscribe to messages for outreach, and our signers and APIs to send messages to and get information about users.
Bracky started out as just an experiment for the Bracket team, that they’ve now shifted to working on full-time. In Tim’s words, “we wouldn’t have even tried the experiment if the cost to do so had been higher. Neynar made it possible to try building Bracky in the first place. Building without Neynar would make things really [expletive] hard.”