Original author: NP Hard (X:@xingpt）
If you have played on the Base chain recently, then you must know that the most popular token on it is called Degen, and its market value today exceeded US$1.5 billion. After the launch of the Degen channel on Farcaster in January 2024, users will be allowed to use Degen to reward high-quality content creators. As of now, there are more than 83,000 holders and it is still growing rapidly. So how did Degen grow into a $1 billion “golden dog”?
Innovative airdrop gameplay (rewards)
Beginning in January this year, Degen quickly became popular in the Farcaster community. Community members reward their favorite high-quality content in the form of number of comments + DEGEN. Degen will obtain an amount (allowance) to reward others based on the users farcaster activity and enggement. The airdrop quota each quarter is based on the total amount of rewards received by the user from others, so users need to post good content on Farcaster to receive rewards. Many active users can reward thousands of dollars every day.
Community niche communication
The price of Degen ushered in the first wave of increase along with the popularity of the community. At this time, the market value of Degen rose from 10 million to about 50 million. In turn, Degen also brought a wave of user growth to Farcaster. Teacher Pingfeng’s description of Degen’s reward is very appropriate:
Angel round financing
In February, Degen announced the completion of an angel round of financing of 490.5 ETH (approximately US$1.47 million), led by 1co nfirmation, with participation from Farcaster OG and others. The funds will be used to develop the Degen ecosystem and community. It can be seen that part of the share is given to some community projects, such as Drakula, etc., which also pave the way for Degens utility.
Application empowerment
The decentralized Douyin Dracula on the Base chain was launched on March 14th. Dracula was created by Alex Masmej, the former issuer of the fan token $ALEX, and received investment from Paradigm. Due to the previous Degen community grant of 10 m DEGEN (currently worth about 500,000 US dollars), Draculas app uses degen as a token. Users can use degen to purchase favorite bloggers, similar to the gameplay of Friend tech. Users can also publish and watch Make short videos, share links, buy creator tokens to earn points, and use BLOOD for tips.
In addition, similar to the NFT casting platform zora, community projectsBracket.GameandRounds.wtfAlso works with degen as native token. At this time, the market value of Degen has grown to about 70 m-100 m. DegenCast will also use Degen to buy the creator’s Key.
Degen L3
Degen started cheating on March 20. First, on March 29, Degen announced the news of cooperating with Syndicate to develop Base-based L3. The Gas token of Degen Chain is also DEGEN. So far, Degen Chain has more than 4 Millions of transactions and over 100k wallets.
The second news is that Farcaster parent company Merkle Manufactory raised funds at a valuation of US$1 billion, with the founder of Paradigm leading the investment. Since Farcaster did not issue tokens, the community began to view this financing as a benefit for $Degen.
Since Degen released L3, the entire valuation space has been benchmarked against major public chains. It can even be said that $Degen has become the token of Base, and its market value has generally risen to 2B within a few days on a rocket.
Inspired by Degen
Degen originated from the Farcaster community and is rooted in the Base chain. It can be said that it achieves mutual success with Farcaster/Base. The price of Degen attracts users. Without the Farcaster community, Degen would not be produced. The Farcaster community project also provides application scenarios for Degen.
Degens narrative has evolved from community project self-entertainment tokens, to social core project utility tokens, to public chain gas tokens, from 10 M to 100 M to 1 B. Every progress in the narrative represents an increase in valuation. Magnitude improvement.
The rise of Degen has also given Farcaster a path to rely on for the development of community projects. Follow-up projects such as Drakula, DegenCast, etc. are worth looking forward to.
