Why are you participating for Based India?

We’re participating in Based India because we want to make going onchain easier and more approachable for everyone. With Castmoney, we aim to create a platform where users can bring their friends onchain in a way that feels simple, social, and not intimidating.

In India, investment decisions are often influenced by social networks, whether it’s family gatherings or friend groups discussing market trends. We want to build on this cultural insight by making it easier for people to explore DeFi with their social circles. Imagine a scenario where even kitty party aunties are excitedly sharing which memecoins Sharma ji's son just bought, lol. Castmoney aims to leverage this inherent social behavior and make investing in DeFi a shared, trusted experience.

Over the last few years, our team has actively contributed to the Ethereum ecosystem in India. We’ve been advocates for the community constantly pushing to get more builders involved onchain. Through onboarding our IRL friends into crypto, we’ve seen firsthand what confuses or overwhelms them. Castmoney is our solution to address these challenges and make the onboarding experience smoother for newcomers.

Our team is born and raised in India and we’ve been deeply involved in growing the Ethereum India ecosystem. Participating in Based India is a way for us to give back to the region and help drive the adoption of base and ethereum further within our social circles through Castmoney.

What challenges are you focusing on?

DeFi today is like the wild west—exciting, but risky. Casual users often get burned because there’s too much activity happening onchain and it’s hard to make sense of it all. The challenges we’re focusing on with Castmoney include:

PvP nature: The ecosystem is intimidating, competitive, and often unwelcoming to newcomers.
Too much noise, too little signal: It’s tough for users to navigate and filter out useful information from the sea of transactions and contextless hex addresses.
Lack of guardrails for new users: While seasoned DeFi users have all the tools they need, newcomers are left without any protection or guidance, often falling victim to bad actors and losing money early on.

From our experience onboarding friends into crypto, we’ve seen how intimidating this space can be. Once they lose money, they hesitate to return. Castmoney makes DeFi more accessible by integrating a social layer, letting users explore and engage with friends, making it a safer, more enjoyable experience.

Social equals fun. We’ve noticed that being onchain becomes more engaging when you do it with friends. Once we onboarded our friends, we found ourselves becoming much more active onchain. The stickiness of any behavior increases dramatically when it’s done socially. Castmoney is DeFi made social, making it both fun and trustworthy.

How does your submission address this challenge?

We aim to make DeFi less intimidating and more trustworthy by leveraging an often-overlooked insight:

Your social connections influence what you buy and where you buy it from.
Your network unlocks economic opportunities: Social connections often provide early access to opportunities.
Trust built through networks: Commerce and interaction are smoother when there’s trust fostered through known connections.

With Castmoney, users can discover onchain opportunities: swaps, positions, staking, bets, etc that your Farcaster network has already interacted with. Instead of relying on unverified information from influencers or KOLs on Twitter or Telegram groups, Castmoney enables discovery based on actual onchain actions from people in your social graph.

While the current v0.1 focuses on swaps, we’re planning to expand into more onchain activities: NFT mints, Polymarket bets, social vaults, DeFi positions, staking, lending/borrowing opportunities, and more — making Castmoney a one-stop platform for users to explore DeFi through the lens of their social connections.

Our thesis is that interacting with DeFi protocols will become far less intimidating when social proof is involved. When I onboard a friend to Castmoney, they can see what protocols I’ve interacted with and what other friends on Farcaster are doing. This social validation lowers the trust barrier significantly.

Essentially, we’re inheriting trust from a user’s Farcaster social graph. If user A trusts user B on Farcaster, it’s natural for A to trust B’s onchain activity. With Castmoney, we are focused on delivering the most intuitive UI, powered by social graph insights, to make it easy for casual users to discover and engage with DeFi.

Challenges we ran into

1. One of our biggest hurdles was collecting and processing transaction data across Base and Ethereum networks. The complexity of handling such large volumes of data and mapping it to the Farcaster social graph presented several technical obstacles.
2. Building the real-time feed itself was a challenge, especially with the need for low latency and data consistency. Ensuring the feed updates smoothly while reflecting onchain activities accurately was crucial.
3. We addressed these challenges by optimizing our backend, streamlining the data aggregation process, and refining how we track and display onchain activity in real-time.

Additional Features

1. We started working on Castmoney long before the Buildathon and even built an earlier version of the product. However, we encountered technical challenges in scaling that version to handle real-time data and user discovery.
2. During the Buildathon, we shifted our focus entirely toward developing the discovery engine, the feed, which helps users find real-time onchain opportunities based on the Farcaster social graph.
3. The feed is now the core feature for this submission, reflecting our commitment to real-time discovery and user engagement.