One of crypto’s biggest social innovations has been the creation of new liquid markets around not just protocols, but individuals and ideas as well. Leading tokenization platforms like Zora and Pump have been accelerating the idea of creators launching tokens tied to their onchain identities. With these creator coins, any user can now express their material belief in an individual via buying their token, and capture the upside from a creator’s growth via their token’s appreciation.
Capital allocators have invested in people for as long as finance has existed. It’s taken many forms, from buying an artist’s painting to venture capitalists funding an entrepreneur’s startup. Creator coins are just a new iteration on top of this intrinsic existing behavior, but they are unique in that they are the first time these markets are liquid, open, and permissionless from the very first day the asset is live.
With the rise of creator coins also comes the rise of new tools built on top of them. One such product is Cobuild, which launched earlier this summer as a way to connect token markets with organic social activity on Farcaster. Just as Noice and Tipn enable users to tip funds based on their reactions to casts, Cobuild extends that same design pattern to token markets themselves.
Users can load up a balance of Base USDC on Cobuild and set designated amounts per like, recast, reply, quote cast, and follow. After doing so, any time they do the respective action, it will check to see if the recipient user has a coin - either their Zora creator coin, or a custom token they’ve set - and market buy that token with the approved USDC.
Cobuild isn’t just limited to buying a users’ creator coin. Because users can set any token they want to be their Cobuild coin, it’s also a permissionless way for communities to organize and express aligned belief together - especially because not every user has a creator coin yet, but many users do have projects or communities they’re proud to be a part of and support.
Cobuild builds on top of the composability of Farcaster’s open social protocol by enabling users to express liquid belief alongside prosocial behavior they’re already engaging with. So far, they’ve already had some impressive stats, with over $11k in volume from microtransactions across over 100,000 swaps. This has happened across 1.8k unique users and 3.3k coins!
The integration of social networking and finance is only accelerating, and the idea of pairing engagement with economic activity is a core pillar of what the future of consumer crypto will look like. On the Zora app, there is no such thing as “liking” - if you like a post, you’re buying the coin of the post. The Base App is similar, enabling a user to buy a post coin directly in the feed and keeping a post’s market cap as a core engagement metric alongside likes and recasts.
Cobuild’s innovation is bringing this pattern to Farcaster users directly where they already are - the Farcaster app - and building it in such a way that it’s triggered across the protocol, not just an app. By leveraging Neynar webhooks to get protocol data on reactions, they can execute buys instantly without needing to worry about reading from or interacting with the Farcaster protocol.
Cobuild also leverages Neynar’s Mini App notifications stack to notify users whenever their coin has been bought, or if they’ve run out of balance in the app. We’ve seen that intelligent notifications are the best way developers can improve retention in mini apps and are always proud to support apps like Cobuild.
We are thrilled about supporting new use cases in social microtransactions (if you can’t tell – we’ve already written about Amps, Noice, and Tipn in this space) and think apps like Cobuild are only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible with pairing Farcaster and onchain composability broadly.