What does good onboarding look like in crypto today?

Not seed phrases. Not Discord chaos. Not bloated user flows built for devs.

In the final episode of Code, Clout & Crypto with our friends from Ontology, we explored how a new class of builders—from games like Farville and Clankermon to platforms like Farcaster and the Base app—are creating onboarding that feels like play.

Missed the previous episode? You can read it here:

🕹 Soulbound Tokens, Interoperability & Privacy in Onchain Games

As Web3 gaming matures, builders are rethinking how players earn, own, and express their digital identities. In the third installment of our collab series with Ontology we unpack how soulbound tokens (SBTs), zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), and interoperable asset design are shaping the next era of onchain games.

https://news.cryptosapiens.xyz

• Limone – Farville, Builder’s Garden

• Samuel – Founder, developer at dTech

• Matthew – Clankermon, Trivia, and more

Shipping on Farcaster is like shipping inside a chat with friends. Builders ship and iterate in real time. Instead of Discords or feature request forms, feedback happens in the feed itself. The app is the distribution.

Limone described the magic of this dynamic:

“Whatever you're building and shipping, you're shipping it on a public feed. That already gives you a channel to interact with your users.”

It’s not just a social graph—it’s a live testing environment for onchain creativity.

The panel didn’t shy away from the challenges of using incentives to grow. Everyone agreed: short-term boosts often come with long-term noise.

Matthew gave the sharpest take:

“You can light money on fire to make the chart go up. It'll do what you're looking for—but does it matter?”

Builders shared real examples—like bots flooding Farville leaderboards for weekly rewards—and emphasized the importance of aligning incentives with actual value creation. That means rewarding behaviors that build community, not extract from it.

One theme that stood out: onboarding gets better when identity is composable.

With Farcaster FIDs and public usage data, developers can start to answer questions like: Which users refer others who stick around? Who participates in events? Who contributes, not just consumes?

Matthew saw this as a huge opportunity:

“If you refer people and they stay—that should be worth more. There’s real value in sticky reputation.”

Samuel added that while the data already exists, the missing link is usability:

“We have all of the data laying there—just nobody makes it actionable.”

He called for someone to build tools that help developers identify power users, surface social signals, and plug into referral quality—not just raw numbers.

“There’s a huge opportunity for someone to crack open the mini app developer space... not with ads or CRM, but something new, built specifically for this layer of open data.”

Reputation, in this new model, isn’t just about what you’ve done. It’s about what your network does because of you.

The next wave of onboarding won’t be about getting crypto people into better products. It’ll be about getting everyone else into crypto without them realizing it.

Limone is watching Base closely:

“I'm excited to see how long it takes for Base to onboard net-new users—not just people migrating from Farcaster.”

Samuel is focused on turning user data into smarter outreach:

“What if you could actually predict who to onboard next based on who’s already active?”

And Matthew? He’s all-in on the rise of onchain entertainment—games, social experiences, and creative applications where every item, choice, and action is onchain by default.

“The entire game is just a massive web of incentives. Every item is something you own. Every choice you make incurs a cost and creates an outcome. That’s what onchain entertainment makes possible.”

For him, the excitement isn’t just about games—it’s about new economic layers for participation, co-creation, and culture. When you combine crypto, open social, and AI, you don’t just onboard people into crypto—you onboard them into a new kind of internet.

Catch the full replay on Spaces and browse earlier recaps at news.cryptosapiens.xyz

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