Maybe "death by a thousand paper cuts" is the ideal UX • TWiF #13
Embedded wallets came up again this week. Shot:
genuinely curious why so many project founders choose embedded wallets v. connect.
as a user it feels like death by a thousand paper cuts.
And chaser:
1. Embedded wallets work reliably on mobile.
The issue is the mobile operating systems have poor support for switching between apps, especially if it requires multiple rounds.
2. Most people in the world don’t have a wallet
Tradeoffs, always tradeoffs! Both solutions are inconvenient but in different ways.
What’s annoying about embedded wallets is that now you have assets here, you have assets there, with no unified view of everything — unless you set up an additional tracking dashboard, which is then another thing to manage. Nothing syncs between mobile and web, which is super irritating when your time is split between your phone and your computer. Also, users don’t have full control over embedded wallets; often you can’t even see or export your private keys. But if you can… great, more private keys to worry about.
However, the benefit of embedded wallets is that once yours is funded, it just works (within a given product). You don’t have to juggle apps or copy-paste stuff back and forth.
Degen founder Jacek shared an interesting perspective on how Warpcast’s own embedded wallet might evolve:
Maybe Warpcast just becomes a wallet with social as an add-on. If it’s listed in WalletConnect, you can use it with any dapp. The business model seems to be taking a cut of swaps and mini app activity, so if the wallet is the core product, social only matters to the extent it drives usage.
Some users may only care about the wallet. In that case, it’s just another option—one with built-in mini apps and a feed pushing buy/sell/borrow/earn flows. If you want a quieter experience, use MetaMask. Over time, wallets likely consolidate, and Warpcast could easily be used outside its own app unless there’s some technical blocker I’m missing.
Where do you fall on this debate? Hit reply and sound off.
Links
Maybe Warpcast will go back to being named Farcaster, like the underlying protocol 🤷♀️ Meanwhile, the app-still-currently-known-as-Warpcast added trending topics and a “This Week in Mini Apps” livestream on Fridays.
New frontiers in vibe-coding: "Every app you create on Ohara automatically transforms into a Mini App on Farcaster. No extra steps, no extra code — just instant usability." One of the cofounders says: "our #1 job is to maximize distribution for every creator, so we're excited to build out more for the farcaster ecosystem." Here are two examples of resulting mini apps.
Another live audio mini app, this one amusingly called Spaces (just like on X). And from its creator, a mini app starter project to get you rolling.
Rundown of FarCon 2025 community talks. Also, apply to speak at the Neynar event.
"Coinllery lets users create custom galleries of their favorite coins on Zora using the Coins SDK."
Great builder AMA with Jing from Optimism. A quick sample:
I have hopes for plasma, zk, and many other solutions. All these fancy names are really mostly the same concepts with sometimes very small differences in design tradeoffs. More adoption and more usecases will elucidate which tradeoffs make the most sense, and the OP Stack is built modularly so that it can adapt quickly to changing tides.
Titles debuted a mini app for minting AI creations, plus an incentive program to go with it.
bariOS is a cute retro mini app that contains its own mini apps: "Paint. Chat. Lofi tunes. A synth. A web browser and a photo booth. All inside, one tap away. And yep, more apps are on the way."
Tortoise: "You can use it to stream, collect, and share music from your favorite artists on Farcaster."
With Hypersub CREATE you can "launch an onchain membership directly from a mini app."
Higher Market is open again — time to go shopping!
That's all for this week. Did I miss anything good? Hit reply to scold me.
Cheers,
Sonya
Follow @weekinfarcaster.eth, and subscribe to This Week in Farcaster on Paragraph.