Variant Fund co-creation: wallets, composability and headless markets

Author: Jesse Walden, co-founder of Variant Fund; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

Composability has always been the holy grail of encryption technology, and we are on the eve of the explosion of composability. For founders, a new go-to-market strategy may just become feasible: go where the wallets are and create a headless marketplace.

A headless marketplace is a marketplace that leverages identities, funds, and data on a global chain for local distribution—no matter where the user’s wallet is (e.g., in a Telegram group chat or Farcaster feed) .

With mainstream social platforms cutting off API/platform access, launching a new app or market requires miracles in terms of distribution and promotion. The rise of decentralized social protocols and wallet infrastructure may bring a level of simplification.

That’s because now you can go to your users without having to worry about platform risk – and best of all, decentralized social networks leverage crypto wallets for authentication, so now you can applications that leverage users’ existing identities, funds, and data.

Most markets have always been the end of the road. Users must first open a website or app, register a new account, enter credit card and personal information, etc. In a headless market, the end point can be the user's wallet and has nothing to do with the application, resulting in greatly reduced transaction friction.

About a week ago I tweeted about this topic, citing Bountycaster as an early example of a headless marketplace:

A good example of this isBountycaster (runs on Farcaster), which leverages social networks for "local " distribution. By tagging a Bountycaster bot, users can participate in the global talent or bounty market. Anyone can build an interface to view market liquidity or trade liquidity (many people already do this), and users only need to use their Warpcast feed locally to participate.

Since then, Farcaster has released Frames. Frames leverages Facebook's OpenGraph standard to allow third-party developers to create "mini apps." These applications can deliver signed messages from Farcaster user wallets, allowing arbitrary structured interactions with third-party applications directly from the feed. Taking Bountycaster as an example, the upcoming Bountycaster Frame will allow users to bid for or contribute to bounties directly from their social feeds.

For founders, you can now directly leverage the attention, stickiness, identity and data of existing users to plan your go-to-market strategy, just like Zynga did with Facebook. Only this time, users’ money stays there, too, and their identities and data aren’t quietly stolen.

When a new go-to-market strategy becomes clearer, a wave of innovation and opportunity often follows. In 2024, you can go where your wallet is.