GM Farcaster is Farcaster's #1 News Show - built on Base since Day 1, now available as a MiniApp!

We have been onchain and live streaming Farcaster news since September 2023, bringing the Farcaster community the most trusted, entertaining, and consistent coverage in the ecosystem. We keep people informed with Farcaster updates and announcements, guide newcomers through the culture and tools that make Farcaster unique, and now - thanks to our new MiniApp - stream our show directly inside Farcaster. No platform hopping. No friction. Just live, onchain news where the community already is.

We solve three big problems:

1. Farcaster moves fast. We're the go-to source for breaking news and the onchain archive for its history.
2. New users get confused and overwhelmed. We break down crypto wallets, tipping, miniapps, rewards, coins, and culture in plain, human language.
3. No native streaming. Our miniapp sends alerts when we go live and streams directly in-feed, so people can watch our show without leaving their social feed.

Building the GM Farcaster miniapp meant learning new technology and tools, solving some technical hurdles, and making a few intentional tradeoffs to keep the user experience smooth and onchain.

Here are the biggest challenges we faced and how we overcame them:

One-click minting from the inside the miniapp.
We wanted users to mint our episodes without leaving our miniapp. This meant I had to learn how to call Pods' smart contract directly, using a custom mint function that lacked documentation. I could have taken an easy route and just linked out to their site, but I believe onchain composability means I should be able to use someone else's code permissionlessly and once I got it working it felt magical.

Dynamic share images that look great
I wanted the embeded preview image to show the thumbnail of our latest episode. To do it, I learned Vercel's Open Graph image generation, fumbled with caching issues, and optimized for file size to avoid excessive bandwidth costs. The result looks fantastic and drives more clicks.

Custom live notifications
We needed a way to notify users the moment we go live. I used Neynar to track who has notifications enabled, and then built a custom tool to send alerts through their API instead of relying on their frontend. This gives us more flexibility and speed.

Staying within YouTube API limits
Every time someone opens the app, we have to check if we're live which is a costly API call. We worked on balancing freshness with caching so users can get up to date info without burning through our daily quota.

Working through these challenges make our miniapp easier to use and more native to the Farcaster and Base experience.

Pods contract
0x327fc58b7d6c582fb261f45c84bd4b942b07a725

Hypersub membership
0xB8eb4A7698DD63Bc48f7f37b7022ff58685c5abC