Tipping on Farcaster has a long history. It began when $DEGEN first launched in December of 2023, kicking off a new meta that went viral across crypto and leading to the first big influx of post-permissionless new users on Farcaster. Since then, there have been a number of tools and products built around tipping on Farcaster: Ham, Paybot, Enjoy, Noice, and Merkle-built features like Gifting Warps, Tip Tuesday and Collectible Casts.
Today we wanted to write about Tipn, which launched in April of this year. Built by @kompreni and @niftytime, Tipn is a suite of tools that is focused around enabling the programmatic flow of capital in various forms on Farcaster, centered around tipping at its core. There are a few different components to the Tipn protocol, so let’s dive in to each one:
Tip with likes
Tipn enables any user to tip via liking casts, by depositing USDC into the mini app and setting an amount to tip per like. After this, any time a user likes a cast, it will send the designated amount of USDC as a tip to the caster, with 10% of the tip being collected as a fee to the protocol.
By participating in USDC tipping, tippers are also rewarded with $TIPN that they’re then encouraged to stake.
$TIPN Staking
Users can also stake $TIPN - by doing so, they receive a pro rata share of all of the USDC fees earned by the protocol mentioned above.
So far, over 43% percent of all TIPN has been staked by the protocol, which means all of those stakers are accruing the value from the $40k+ USDC fees earned so far by the protocol.
Tip with comments
Lastly, similar to the original $DEGEN model, users can get a $TIPN allocation by holding $TIPN, participating in tipping, staking, and more. Comment tipping occurs in seasons, enabling more flexibility and iteration as time goes on. For example, in season 2, Tipn partnered with $BETR to give users $BETR allocations to tip out as well.
The Tipn product suite is more than just peer-to-peer tipping, however. The team has also designed a composable primitive called Tipn Actions, which enables external protocols to plug into Tipn to enable new types of behaviors derived from tips. For example, in our recent Livecaster piece, we wrote about how Livecaster built a custom smart contract that leveraged Tipn actions to direct all tips during a Livecast towards a common pool. Recently, the Tipn team also launched BIG TIP THURSDAY, where users can opt-in to have all their tips for that Thursday to go towards a common pool instead of directly to the casters. After the day is over, half the pool gets split between a random tipper and caster who they tipped, and the other half is used to buy back TIPN and distribute it to all the tippers. This diagram from @itsbasil shows how Tipn actions can generally work:
Any developer can build a custom Tipn Action smart contract that does new, creative things with funding from users who tip. Once that action gets listed in the Tipn mini app, users can opt in for their tips to go towards that action instead of the default p2p micropayment model.
The results of the Tipn mechanism have already started to prove themselves, with some quite impressive metrics. Over $400K in USD has been tipped on the platform across millions of tips, with daily tips consistently reaching anywhere between $5-10K in aggregate value. Some days have had over 150k tips!
Micropayments are one of the white whales of crypto - they’ve been tried many times over the last decade, but have always failed to gain traction. Farcaster is our industry’s best shot at changing that: the last couple of years have shown that by combining a wallet, a robust social graph and network, and now mini apps, we finally have the tools needed to build micropayment systems that can create real, sustainable economic value for users and developers alike.
Neynar is thrilled to be able to support Tipn in building out their tipping infrastructure. Our webhooks enable anyone to build similar products on top of like and comment events that happen on the protocol. Developers can focus on what’s unique to their product, without having to worry about handling anything related to Farcaster itself.