Farcaster 2026 writing contest

Dear crypto writers,

We are organizing a writing contest with Purple called “Farcaster 2026”.

The goal is to look at different paths that Farcaster can take this year to reach the next level in 2026. The writers will be able to win 2 ETH in prizes and receive distribution from the Kiwi & Farcaster communities.

Purple has been the OG Farcaster community, with their main goal being to proliferate and expand the Farcaster protocol and ecosystem. They have been supporting Farcaster builders, onboarding new users, and organizing and sponsoring meetups since 2022.

Kiwi has a lot in common with Farcaster. Our Co-Founders (Tim and Mac) have been Farcaster power users since 2022, and met in the Farcaster comments section. Farcaster is where we got our first users. And we were also supported by Purple with two grants in 2023, plus received a grant from the Warpcast team.

So we are excited to finally run a project together. 

Here’s how it’s going to work:

The contest is called “Farcaster 2026” and its goal is to explore different paths that Farcaster can take today to grow as a decentralized social network.

The submissions to the contest start on the 20th of January and end on the 10th of February.

Here’s how you can take part in it:

The prompts for the contest are:

• What updates, tweaks, or features could Farcaster clients do to become better for OGs and newcomers?

• Which Farcaster frontier—agents, games, mini-apps, alt clients, memecoins—has the highest potential to grow the ecosystem?

• How can crypto social legos create experiences that can’t be found on web2 social networks?

• How can Farcaster amp up its marketing and growth activities to bring more new users?

• How could Farcaster go big without losing its soul?

In this contest it's better to dive deeper into one prompt than touch a few more shallowly, so please choose only one prompt for your work. Also, remember that we want to focus on a mid-term future, so things that are doable until 2026.

The contest is generally leaning into essays, but we are open to different forms: you can write an essay, a report, a short story or even a poem. What matters is the quality of the ideas and how easy to digest they are.

Also, for this contest we prepared a separate groupchat for writers, so if you needed some peer support or just had any questions, feel free to join it here.

Link to this contest announcement with the words: “This post is taking part in the Farcaster 2026 writing contest” at the beginning of your post.

Thanks to that we will know you're taking part in the contest and your readers will understand a wider context.

The contest is platform-agnostic, so you can post on apps such as Farcaster, Paragraph, Mirror, Substack, X, Zora, private websites, and so on. 

After you share your post, you need to submit your link to Kiwi.

To do so, you need to have a Kiwi Pass. It is now essentially free (minus gas fees).

To qualify for the contest, the author must submit their post to Kiwi between the 20th of January 00:00:01 CET and the 10th of February, 17:59:59 CET.

The contest will have two tracks, with 2 ETH split equally to their prize pools.

The first track is called “Popular Vote” and its winners will be determined by the number of upvotes received on Kiwi. 

The second track is called “Jury vote” and its winners will be determined by the jury from the Purple & Kiwi teams. 

The prizes will be divided as follows:
1st place: 0.5 ETH
2nd place: 0.3 ETH
3rd place: 0.2 ETH

The "Jury Vote" track is meant to reward posts that we consider good but didn't receive too much attention, so we are leaning into having 6 different winners in these 2 tracks. But if we see some outstanding work, it is not impossible for an author to win prizes in both tracks.

(The jury team is still being determined - if you’re a Purple member and would like to join it, please let us know)

For the "Popular Vote" track we will only count upvotes from Purple owners, Farcaster Power Users and most active Kiwi community members.

Purple owners are people who owned a Purple NFT before the 15th of January.

Farcaster Power Users are those with Neynar score above 0.9.

Most active Kiwi community members are those who before the 15th of January collected at least 5 Kiwi karma points. You can check the user's Karma score, just bear in mind that this is a real-time board, not the timestamped one.

For the “Jury Vote" track we will let the jury decide which posts they liked the most.

If you end up being one of the winners, you will just have to send us a receipt/invoice and the wallet address to which you want the ETH to be sent.

All writers are also welcome to share their posts on X and Farcaster. Our profiles will repost the best submissions.

If you want a retweet on X, you should tag @KiwiNewsHQ.
If you want a repost on Farcaster, you should tag @kiwi, and @purple.

Also, thanks to our great partners for spreading the word about the contest far and wide: Paragraph, GM Farcaster, bountycaster, trpplffct & ted. If you wanted to join this crowd and help us in any way, feel free to DM Mac on Warpcast or Telegram.

We hope this contest will serve as a Schelling Point for writers who want to explore the future of Farcaster - both for those who use Farcaster every day as well those who can give us some external perspective.

And if you have any questions related to this contest, feel free to DM Mac on Warpcast or Telegram.

PS: Authors can use AI for brainstorming or editing but please don't share fully AI-written essays.