The problem PointCaster solves

Points are the craze this cycle. Points provide incentives for users to try out new protocols and accrue loyalty rewards in the face of airdrops, reputation scores, access to exclusive products, or retro-PGF grants. Building this points infrastructure on-chain is very important to ensure that your early contributions to a protocol are not unfairly distributed or revoked due to opaque calculations and management.

These point systems are very active in DeFi protocols like Ethena, Etherfi, EigeLayer, etc., but staking/restaking is not the only way to provide value to a protocol.

Community engagements like posting valuable content, resolving FAQs on public forums, developing, and sharing useful tooling around a project add genuine value to the ecosystem. PointCaster sets out to analyze user engagements towards particular communities and channels on Farcaster.

We built an algorithm that runs inside a micro-rollup powered by Stackr and settled on Avail so that the computation is run verifiably. The algorithm weighs data points like user interactions in the channel, cast likes, recasts, the user's followers, etc., to gauge the impact of their contributions towards the community.

Through our infrastructure, protocols can track contributions from their early supporters and use these metrics to reward them through airdrops, fund their open-source projects through grants, exclusivity, etc.

Challenges we ran into

It was all smooth sailing as I am a chad dev

jokes aside it was a bit tricky to understand api's provided by neynar and integrating them into our client to fetch farcaster details.