Builder AMA with @seb the cofounder of Zapper in 10 min, get your questions ready!

gm! AMA about Zapper, building onchain for the past 5 years, founder life, or anything else!

Developer ecosystem @farcaster, co-founder @bountycaster. Previously: co-founder of Scalar Capital, product at Coinbase, co-producer @ethereumfilm

- What you build in a bear may take many months to years to materialize into growth, be extra careful of pivoting away from a diamond mine- 
- Don’t optimize for valuation 
- The most high potential products are the unobvious ones, operating in small / new markets 
- Markets are a bigger predictor of your potential success than your product. Focus on markets. Build a surfboard for the next wave.
- Getting caught into CT trends or narratives is a disease against independent thought and critical thinking 
- VCs are as clueless as anyone, and get caught into CT trends as much as anyone else, there are always exceptions but founders often lean way too much into their advice
- You spend most of your time on stuff that literally does not matter, build products that people love and are gonna talk about to their friends. that’s it. That’s how most big companies got big
- Pay extra attention to who’s building currently, some of them will become massive during the next bull

What advice would you give to crypto founders starting today?

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

1) Back in mid-2019 closed up my previous startup and was starting to look for ideas for my next big thing. Wanted to look for high growth potential markets & it immediately clicked with DeFi, made myself the average DeFi user, putting money in literally every protocol. Quickly became obvious that tracking my assets was going to a much bigger problem overtime. Indexing DeFi was challenging and allowed us to expand into being a much more general-purpose indexer.

2) DAUs, although simple it's what most closely aligns with how our typical market behaves - tracking your portfolio is something you do daily or every other day. Daily retention close second

1. Why did you start Zapper originally?

2. What is your current north star metric?

Zapper's new API product has been steadily growing over the past months 🚀 

Closing in on 100 daily active builders (paying)

Builders - would love to help you get setup. We offer all your onchain data needs: token prices, defi positions, nft data, farcaster profiles and much more!

Two things mainly:
1) Growing the amount of builders using our API https://warpcast.com/seb/0x39551786

2) Building a wallet that aggregates all the social signals around onchain content (starting w/ token), and organizes conversation around that content. Inspiration is reddit but for tokens, imagine every token is its own subreddit. And it's built on Farcaster too!

appreciate it! we just have an amazing team ⚡ 

also design in code > design in figma

How is Zapper so good? Probz my #1 pick for best designed product in crypto

fortune cookie casts, memes, parenting, building frames, /framedl, /framedl-pro & /calmer

I'm impressed by their team and their very user-centric approach to building! They are playing the long game, longer than any other. I am currently pleasantly surprised by their new onchain features, it's the way to go IMO

Protocol-wise, I still think they need to improve the builder client experience. A lot of it is still dependent on warpcast. It's getting much better though!

what surprised you the most about farcaster, either positively or negatively?

Inspiringly bold or foolishly reckless. ops /ethglobal, prev lead ops @devfolio @ethindia. 

- Owning the entire onchain data stack, which most wallets do not. Allows to move 10x faster and build rich and connected wallet experiences
- Building the social layer natively in the wallet

how would zapper stand out from wallets like rainbow and phantom in a longer run?

#1 Simpsons Fan. 
/base-holland
/thesimpsons

🔵Base dev rel

Have had this long term vision for Zapper that I really want to see through, which is building the "everything onchain" app - been building the lego blocks to get there, albeit a lot of mistakes and setbacks. Can see myself stopping till I can bring it fully to fruition!

How have you managed to stay resilient building in web3 for five years?

you probably don’t think about liquidity enough // it is what it is  // build value, not valuation

| 🎩  |  ↑  |  ⌐◨-◨

Going to flip this into you doing an AMA! 😆 

What products are you currently using that solves the problem that we use to solve? And what would make you switch back?

Regarding your question - we're just going to keep focusing on our users and learning about ways we can grow the product. Product loyalty is volatile while user problems are not.

We've switched up our model in terms of how we want to approach something like "Zaps" in the future. Things like @bankr is where the puck is going in that regard!

Long time former user and addicted refresher -

What do you plan to do to re-engage users that formed a mental model around the older versions of the product?

What’s something you want to see built on top of Zaps? Or generally in crypto

Stay Curious // iixii // Lazer Technologies // Prev: CoinDesk, Roc Nation // based

1) I'd say 2020 and 2025 will have more in common than 2021-2024 in how we're approaching building onchain. Basically want to take more risks, it's tempting to prematurely see areas of the market consolidate and make "safer" bets, but in crypto specifically, the foundation is quicksand and need to be hyper agile and keep trying new things. The most important thing for us to achieve is understanding our market and its problems intimately

2) Social, have always had the belief that ethereum is just one big social network that connects people across what we value, and so building a social layer on top of it helps accelerate genuine connection, formation of new startups, achieve global distribution, etc..

3) Problem making onchain art, a clanker but for deploying NFT collections, or some sort minting protocol

1. What's the biggest difference in how you approach building onchain in 2020 vs 2025?  How does that inform where Zapper is heading?  Obviously, the tooling has gotten much much better but more interested in non-obvious differences

2. What do you have strong conviction in across crypto?

3. If you weren't building Zapper, what do you think you'd be doing?

Oh I like this one! Might sound really obvious in retrospect, but the first iteration (2019) of Zapper was very single payer, allowing you to just view your own assets. Users immediately started hacking it so they could view other addresses

And very quickly after that we realized they wanted to see what  token / protocols those users were investing in as a social signal! We're still working on bringing that vision to fruition!

Have you uncovered any odd user segments that use Zapper in unexpected ways?

Really excited about powering ai agents, wallet assistants!

what use of the zapper api would be most exciting to you?

SWE @zapper - building protocol.zapper.xyz

1 year: my family doing things onchain
10 years: folks from high school so I can flex my onchain profile

What would you like to see onchain : 
 - 1 year from now
 - 10 years from now

Building better ways to earn onchain w/ @vaultsfyi |

More: 
https://linktr.ee/ryanrodenbaugh

1) Yes API + swaps, think it's going to be the main revenue driver for now. Some ideas in the future are user targeting (ads) and personalization / pro features

2) Copy trading, trading referrals, launching tokens

I see you mentioned the API in another reply, 1) what's the business of zapper today? API + swaps? 

2) related, I know you have swaps and bridge which are natural revenue generators. How do you think about differentiating zapper's swap and bridge features from other swap interfaces?

DeFi maxi. Building @basketdotfarm on @base.

dev setup as in Zapper's stack?

backend: node.js, nest, clickhouse, kafka, scylladb
frontend: react, react-native, relay, typescript

Question: what is your current dev setup?

It definitely will change imo! Still a lot of on-boarding friction and think the social layer needed to be a lot better.

Think we’re not too far! Everything onchain app probably happens this cycle and is the biggest unclaimed opportunity

Quick disclosure: Zapper was one of Delphi Ventures' first investments. 

Seb - you've been ahead of the rest of the market when it comes down to the chart being the content. I feel like there was and has been a ceiling to this activity though. Why do you think that's been the case? Do you think that will change?

Very hard to find time tbh, I mostly do it on the artistic impulse / during the weekends

How do you make time for your artistic practice?

Product workstream leader @shapeshift
Governance lead at FBL

Formerly: @makerdao. @boostxyz

Because social signal is what underpins every decision. A lot of activity in DeFi was rooted in discord, twitter & telegram.

What gives you conviction that "social defi" is the right path?

Wen ship this feature 
I think it’s been like this for a pretty long time

taco bell, just because we don't have any in Quebec!