TLDR This proposal requests 5 ETH to help fund Farcon swag and 5 ETH to help fund the three day Hackathon that will accompany Farcon. The team (lead by Ted) has already secured locations, speakers, sponsors, and much more. We have over 500 applications to the event and close to 200 precommits. The first tranche of 120 tickets was released and was purchased almost immediately. The funds from this grant will primarily go towards hackathon venues, assistance stipends, and high quality swag that attendees will want to bring back into the world to proliferateFarcaster and start conversations about it.

Why is this a good fit for Purple? Purple’s mission is to help proliferate and expand the Farcaster ecosystem. For Farcaster to grow while maintaining its character, it cannot be a purely online phenomenon. The idea of URL -> IRL is that having in person events will help solidify the connections and relationships made online. Doing so will increase the resilience of Farcaster’s human network, energizing attendees and demonstrating to the broader world the power of Farcaster to connect people in meaningful ways. Together with the hackathon, we expect Farcon to increase qDAU in a few ways. First, the hackathon will expose more builders and creators to Farcaster as we expect incredible and viral projects to be incubated through it. Second, the conversion from URL -> IRL will lead attendees to invest more in Farcaster afterwards, both through increased and higher quality casting, as well as through evangelizing the protocol by sharing their experience at Farcon. Finally, we expect Farcon to generate attention outside the Farcaster ecosystem - future qDAUs will see Farcon and want to be a part of it.

Overview Last year Grin & Cameron hosted the first Farcon in Boston. The event was well loved by attendees and a great kickoff to the URL<>IRL flywheel. This year we’re going big with five days of programming - a welcome party on Wednesday the 1st, the Summit itself on Thursday the 2nd, and the Hackathon/Side events weekend the 3rd-5th. Here is a link announcing all the side events and sponsors we’ve announced so far

Larger events mean more logistics and costs. It also means being more dependent on sponsors. Support from Purple will help us ensure the influence of the community is well represented when weighing the tradeoffs that have to be made during planning.

Budget The total requested budget is 10ETH. 5 ETH for Farcon and 5 ETH for the Hackathon. This budget will be used to create high quality Farcaster swag without the influence of for-profit sponsors. We’ll use some of the money to cover down payments on venues for the Hackathon. Finally we’re going to use some money as assistance stipends for whoever is accepted and needs it. Here is a more detailed breakdown of what we plan to use it for. Though these are estimates, we will do our best to spend the grant in these proportions, with the priority for any remaining funds being (1) assistance stipends (2) swag and (3) venue costs. We commit to providing an accounting of the exact use of the funds with links to the transactions originating from the multisig so Purple can evaluate the effectiveness of this grant and use the information to help inform future forward-looking grants.

Hackathon

• 4 ETH Venue Costs We haven’t released the ability to sign up for the hackathon yet but we are looking at many venues and know the cost will be around this amount. While there will be grassroots locations that pop up, we need to provide hacking space to anyone looking to build on Farcaster over the weekend. Example: The Venue for the summit is $7500 + F&B + Tax + Tip = $22k (~8 ETH) for only 175 people

• 1 ETH Assistance Stipends: We’ve already handed out about 20 scholarship passes at $200 each just from individual donations. We offer assistance to everyone who applies. We don’t show that field when considering applications. This means we let individuals in based on their apparent dedication to Farcaster. If they then need assistance, we provide it.

Farcon: Farcon isn’t run by Farcaster. We are organizing this to help grow the Farcaster community. As such there is nobody with the monetary incentive to create purely Farcaster swag. Purple sponsoring the swag will enable us to produce high quality purely-Farcaster/Farcon branded items that attendees will want to show off to the world, starting many conversations with future qDAUs.

• 4 ETH Farcaster Swag: We want to create amazing high quality swag for the Farcon Summit attendees and community pass holders.

• 1 ETH Farcaster Stickers: We want to make arun of several thousand Farcaster stickers for the hackathon and side events. The proliferation of these stickers will lead to the proliferation of the Farcaster protocol as the talented builders attending the hackathon put these on their laptops and bags, and share them with their local communities of developers.

Multisig A new ⅔ multisig has been created on Ethereum mainnet with @matthew, @mcbain, and @ted as signers. We’ll use this multisig to collect funds and approve reimbursements.

Multisig Address: 0x5e1b182e53f44a72E556FD1dAE0C24A077Cfbe38

Test transaction sending ETH from the Farcon Multisig to Purple: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x01c22881fc58caef7ab270603dea306955641e2272e059676b7b01e288ee028e