Trading is the most dominant social behavior in crypto. Crypto Twitter was born from traders sharing trades and theses, backed up by their own skin in the game. Increasingly, cryptoassets themselves are driven from social context - whether it’s memes that go viral, communities that form online, or apps distributed via social network. Even outside of crypto, traders have formed their own social networks - from bespoke platforms like StockTwits to communities on larger platforms such as r/wallstreetbets and FinTwit. So naturally, it makes sense that there should be a dedicated social trading app that actually leverages the chain and is built on crypto rails.

Farcaster has been home to lots of social trading activity, both in the native wallet and client but also via third party apps building on top of it. We’re excited that developers choose to build trading products on top of Farcaster - it’s core to the thesis a permissionless and open social layer provides a substrate for onchain finance that can’t exist anywhere else.

One of our favorite teams building for trading on Farcaster is Zapper. If you’ve been around in crypto, Zapper isn’t a new name - they’ve been building in the portfolio tracking and wallet space years. But recently, they’ve branched out to building directly on top of Farcaster in the Zapper app, which seamlessly integrates trading into the existing Farcaster social feed. As the our Farcaster client’s direction switches towards a focus on enabling builders and the builder ecosystem, we know it’s important for sophisticated teams to fill the gap in providing a much-needed social trading experience built on top of Farcaster.

Zapper does a couple unique things in their mobile app that enhance its social trading functionality:

1. Integrated Feed

Zapper has a unique advantage of having built onchain transaction and wallet tracking infrastructure for years. In their Farcaster client, they embed transactions such as NFT purchases and token trades directly into the social feed, alongside casts. Because transactions are inherently social already, and all Farcaster accounts have verified wallets, a team can construct a feed by indexing both Farcaster data via Neynar alongside onchain transactions from everyone you follow.

Because Zapper app also comes with its own wallet for users, they can buy tokens directly from the trades they see in the feed, as opposed to having to use a separate app or alerts system. Zapper token pages also show social data mapped onto trades - such as when your friends are buying and selling a coin, regardless of if they’re doing it on Zapper. This is only possible because of the permissionless nature of Farcaster identities having associated wallets.

2. FIP-2

Early on, Farcaster implemented FIP-2, a proposal that enables messages on arbitrary URLs. The initial instance of FIP-2 was focused on channels; however, it can apply to a broad set of use cases.

In Zapper’s case, because transactions are embedded in the feed, any user can also comment or react to a transaction, because the transaction is itself an FIP-2 URL. This is a great way that Zapper encourages transactions being interactive units of social behavior on the Farcaster protocol as opposed to existing onchain and being read-only to other users.

Zapper also leverages FIP-2 for posts about a token at large. You can create a cast referencing a token, and it will exist on the protocol under the general token FIP-2 URL. This allows Zapper to aggregate all activity - both onchain trades and social posts to create dynamic hubs and feeds for any token; great for communities, creators, and developers.

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One benefit Zapper gets by building on Farcaster is that they don’t have to deal with the network effects cold start problem that often arises in social apps. As a user, if you’re using a new social app or social trading app, it only becomes valuable to you once there’s a sufficient network of other people on the app. Because Zapper is built on top of Farcaster, any user who’s been on Farcaster can join Zapper and automatically see a full feed of users posting and trading that they already know. Even new users who haven’t joined Farcaster before can still access all the content and trading activity happening on the protocol. It’s an excellent way to bootstrap a new userbase on the app.

Zapper leverages Neynar’s APIs and indexing services to build a full fledged iOS client where users can read and write to the Farcaster protocol. This lets them focus on the things that are unique to their app like a snappy iOS experience and onchain indexing, without having to worry about setting up bespoke Farcaster protocol infrastructure.

We’re thrilled to have Zapper building their flagship iOS app on top of Farcaster. Social trading is the core consumer innovation that crypto can enable, and there’s no better substrate for a social trading app than the Farcaster protocol - and no better team suited for this endeavor than Zapper.