FarMarket

Maximonee Capital has acquired an additional 2 sub 10k FIDs for an average price of 0.205 ETH. Maximonee Capital now holds 5 sub 10k FIDs at an average price of 0.27 ETH.

I’ve had people ask me why I bought low FIDs & wanted to write out my thoughts.

Tl;dr: I like the numbers

Longer answer: I grew up on MMOs & online communities. I’ve traded rare accounts, usernames, etc. for years. I see a lot of parallels between the two & believe if Farcaster succeeds, low FIDs will be valuable

Smart contract dev & security eng @ rtfkt.com

Creations at /maxi - @punkbot, @farfinder, Social Graphs, Capture the Hat, Reply Guy, Bag Bias, Fact Checker, ++

In MMOs such as runescape, rare usernames such as “good/clean” words or low char count were very desirable and people would pay a lot of money for them. Early steam IDs (very similar to low FIDs) sell for thousands. People like to collect rare or early things, it’s been like that for most collectible assets.

For many, it may be confusing why any of this stuff, including fids have value. Speculative utility aside, it comes down to the flex factor. People like to flex, both physically and digitally. An early steam account ID does absolutely nothing, yet people will pay thousands for it. I expect the same and more for FIDs.

FIDs are decentralized.

One of the biggest risks of buying accounts for centralized services is it is typically against ToS. This means a company can ban your account if you purchase it, making it a huge risk. The company/game can also die out increasing the risk of irrelevancy.

FIDs are the decentralized identity that all clients building on Farcaster use. This means your rare FID isn’t a flex for one application, but every client/app  expanding the impact exponentially. Rare usernames are cool, but they aren’t decentralized. It may take some time for people to grasp this concept however.

If Farcaster takes off, it seems almost inevitable that there will be a market for low FIDs naturally as collectors come - we saw a taste of this with ENS already. While potential access gated to FIDs is possible and has happened already, my thesis doesn’t include or rely on this...that is gravy on top if it comes.

There’s a couple downside risks as well

1. Community sentiment never rallies around FIDs being important
2. Farcaster team in the past has been against the idea of trading FIDs. Not a major problem in a decentralized protocol, it could impact community sentiment
3. Farcaster doesn’t take off like we hope it will

With all this said, I’m okay with these being worthless. I’m mostly speculating for fun as I’ve always been into collecting and trading rare things like this. I’m not buying more than I’m okay with going to zero. I’m writing this thread biased as I own some sub 10k fids, and I’m still looking to buy more

There’s 2 main reasons why I believe low FIDs will be more valuable than the traditional gaming accounts I talked about.

1) FIDs are decentralized
2) FIDs are the decentralized entity/identity of a protocol many platforms and apps will build on top of

Breaking each of those down..