One reason we’re so excited about building on programmable social is that it provides a fertile ground for developers to experiment with both crypto and AI to build new applications and social experiences. For example, we’re already doing this in-house with our @neynar agent, which combines the intelligence of today’s LLMs with robust tooling built around permissionless onchain and Farcaster data. But we also see tons of other developers using Neynar to build their own new products leveraging crypto and AI that are only possible because of the platform enabled by Farcaster.
Today we want to highlight Emerge, a great example of a product doing exactly this, led by @atown. Emerge is an app on Farcaster that enables users to create composable AI workflows for generating media, and earn when their workflows are used by other people. Here’s how it works:
Users can prompt the @tryemerge.eth agent with a workflow via casting at the agent.
Emerge then takes that prompt and turns it into a content generation workflow that any other Farcaster user can use after paying a small fee. It replies to the prompt cast with the first output, alongside a mini app url for other users to use that workflow to create their own personalized generations for a small fee.
The creator of the workflow earns from the fees paid by users of the workflow.
We’ve already seen AI-generated media create immensely viral trends across social media. Remember the Ghiblification phenomenon when OpenAI first launched their new Image model in ChatGPT? It took over the entire internet, with even the White House using it, and to this day Sam Altman having a Ghibli PFP.
Despite often being dismissed as slop, AI can enable deeply resonant creative experiences for individuals and communities. Emerge translates the underlying phenomenon of the Ghibli trend into an elegant product experience that’s 10x better because it leverages open social and crypto. You can leverage your taste to create a workflow that people love and earn from all of its generations. It’s an elegant economic loop that doesn’t exist today with viral AI trends, but is sorely needed as more and more online trends are downstream of AI-generated media.
Further, Emerge’s product is also only possible because it’s built on Farcaster:
Emerge can access users' profile pictures to remix because the Farcaster protocol is open and permissionless to read from.
The Emerge agent can programmatically respond to users who prompt it just by casting where they already do. Users don’t need to install the app to kick off creating a new workflow; instead, Emerge can meet them right where they already are, on the feed. This is also a huge distribution advantage for the Emerge team - by building via agents on public feeds, it also accelerates discovery of workflows because they are created right on the feed, instead of users needing to actively choose to browse or search for workflows.
Because every Farcaster user has a built-in wallet, Emerge can integrate seamless onchain payments that instantly are distributed to workflow creators and the Emerge platform.
Emerge leverages Neynar across its stack, from using its APIs to fetch profile pictures, to webhooks that let the agent know when to respond, to using our mini app notifications to keep users engaged on the app.
As Atown says:
The magic of Emerge isn't just having an AI agent on Farcaster, it's that we can make it deeply personal AND ridiculously easy to use. Here's how: Neynar gives us access to users' profile data, their FID, pfp, cast history, social graph, all of it. We feed that into our backend contextually and suddenly the outputs aren't generic, they're tailored to each person.
Then there's the agent itself. Because Neynar's webhooks catch every mention instantly and their APIs make posting seamless, we built an experience on the feed where users can literally imagine a workflow, tell our agent, and boom, they're creating and earning from it. No friction, no technical headaches.
That's the secret: personalized AI that feels like yours + an agent that turns your ideas into earning opportunities. It's proven to be sticky, and it only works because Neynar handles all the infrastructure that makes both pieces possible. We genuinely couldn't have built this without them.
Since its launch in late September, Emerge has been gaining steady traction, with its agent being called thousands of times so far across over hundreds of creators. Top creators on Emerge have earned over $100 in fees, simply by prompting the agent and making something people want to use themselves.
The traditional view of composability in crypto originates from protocols being able to interact with other protocols due to the permissionless nature of blockchains. Anybody can build a product on top of Uniswap or Farcaster, since the underlying protocol is open and not owned by any single entity.
What we’re seeing now with products like Emerge, built on top of open social protocols, is AI accelerating a new type of composability: the composability of media itself. When anybody can take an image and remix it to a theme or to their personal taste with the click of a button, we’ll start to see media transform from finite images and videos, to becoming as fluid and memetic as culture itself.