The problem Payfluence solves

We allow anyone to attach an existing memecoin (ERC20) to a tip engine, think of the Degen system but generalized for any ERC20 token. Create an airdrop schedule for your Memecoin's Tip Engine and share it with users, you can add parameters such as "Minimum Token Balance required" so only holders of your memecoin are allowed to participate, and anti-sybil rules such as having an account created before the airdrop start dates.

Before Payfluence, memecoin creators would have to spin up their own backend and frontend for delivering a tipping experience to farcaster. Now with Payfluence, anyone and their grandma can attach an existing ERC20 token to a tipping engine and get started right away! Tipping engines specify the exact "tip string" (ex. $DEGEN) that users must post with on farcaster, any cast that matches to an existing tip engine with "tip string" is automatically processed. As long as that tip string is unique!

Easily manage airdrop schedules such as start time, claim date, and an optional claim end date. This allows memecoin creators to focus on community development and ignore the complexities involved with managing whitelists, as tips are only converted to tokens for eligible users based on customizable requirements and specific claim dates.

We abstract the complexities of the tipping engine by simplifying the deployment process to a two step process: deploy the engine, and funding it with ERC20 tokens. You fund the Payfluence.sol smart contract and users directly interface with it to claim their rewards from airdrops periodically. Signatures are used to verify participant claims on our backend. We also have a simple public frontend genrated for each tip engine.

Going forward, we would like to add additional tip methods besides a "tip string", such as API calls. This would actually allow us to imitate the $BUILD mechanics - create a customizable allowance formula outside of Payfluence's codebase and use any means to distribute tips.

Happy tipping!

Challenges we ran into

The challenges we ran into were authentication, choosing the right technology stack for fast development, and simplifying the tipping flow to make the system easily generalisable.

When we were initially scoping the project, we struggled with the idea of how we wanted to authenticate users on the tip engine dashboard. We thought logging in with farcaster made sense at first, like how it makes sense for participants to log in with their farcaster account and claim their tokens from airdrops. We decided to use Dynamic for email logins on the dashboard, this way we could connect the email to a subscription and allow the user to connect any wallet or farcaster account on their dashboard, all pointing back to their email for easy customer management on our end.

Choosing the right tech stack was crucial as Andre and I (Matthew) have full-time jobs at technology startups, so we needed something we can iterate on fast and with a unified code base, so we settled with Turborepo. Deploying the system consisted of 4 cloudflare workers and 2 frontends, and 1 database. This was the most complex part we struggled with , so we settled for a local demo instead.

Lastly, the main challenge we faced was "how do we generalise a tipping mechanic?". Degen is famous for being one of the most popular tippable coins on Base, although very complex. $BUILD is another example but it operates through a single frontend and not through casts on Farcaster. We decided to create a simple formula for calculating daily allowance that is shared between all tip engines, as it is based on a users farcaster account age, and post activity. The more you post, the more reactions you get, the higher your allowance. Having a single endpoint serve as a source of truth for daily allowance for every airdrop/tip engine lowered the complexity and allowed us to have a cache on the endpoint to quickly serve allowance numbers to users.