One thing I think the Merkle team excels at is flattening the curve.
I'm not being sarcastic, and I know that was like a covid term, but let me explain what I mean by it, specifically.
Bitclout, Friendtech, and other attempts at crypto social blew up and then blew up. By that i mean they rose fast and crashed hard. Steep curves, short lived.
Farcaster with its "deliberate growth strategy" survived years (not months) by explicitly not growing very fast, but nonetheless growing, for the first couple of years. Sure, maybe it has plateau'd for a while, but that's a much better problem than crashing completely, obviously. Relatively speaking, Farcaster is alive and well because people have built habits over that time, got value from the network, made money, made friends, etc. When Bitclout blew up, I didn't really care. If Farcaster disappeared tomorrow, I like can't even think about that.
But now we may be seeing a "flattening of the curve" in another context (tbd) which is completely and entirely different from the growth curve of the network. In this case, I am referring to the price chart of $CLANKER. I could be totally wrong. It could crash tomorrow. But so far, the clanker chart has not behaved as I think a lot of us have come to expect from such an event.
The picture below shows the hourly chart. You can see where the announcement was made (side note: respect to both sides for no apparent leaks or pre-announcement price action). Yes, it's up more than double from pre-announcement, but there's been no massive spike and crash as of yet (again, disclaimer, it's still early, i could be wrong, we are like 1 day in). Instead, it popped, and it's been gradually climbing, in a way that feels, idk, kind of healthy?
I still have a few important questions on the particulars of the deal, which I'll ask the relevant people once the dust has settled, but my sense is that this chart could have been a lot more volatile without certain pieces of the deal being designed as they were, the 7% lock in a single-sided LP as one example, but other pieces as well.
Perhaps in an industry of impatience, Farcaster is a place for the patient. Maybe that's why it's not that popular haha (yet). It's still going to be a very bumpy ride. This is crypto. But I think a lot of people here at the end of the day do still believe that this is going somewhere. I don't need to tell you how I feel. We'll see.