As AI drops the cost of software creation to near zero, a new era of “vibe coding” is here.
The concept? Use AI tools like Claude or Replit to spin up fast, scrappy apps with minimal polish and maximum speed. It’s already catching on: 25% of YC’s Winter 2025 startups said AI wrote most of their code.
While obviously a technical shift, "vibe coding" also proves to be a cultural one, which actually fits perfectly with crypto.👇
~~ Analysis by @davewardonline ~~
|— Software as Content, Crypto as the Canvas
If vibe coding makes software feel like content — quick, creative, shared — crypto is the perfect place to publish it.
This line of thinking builds on a recent conversation with @dwr and @tednotlasso of @farcaster_xyz. Our space thrives on open-source norms, visible smart contracts, and forkable protocols. You can tweak a frontend, attach a token, and launch in hours. It’s not without risks (rushed contracts can lead to costly exploits), but the synergy is obvious:
• AI training data: Provides AI tools a good foundation of training data to learn from, which is part of what makes vibe coding even possible.
• Social & financial playground: Establishes a social, financial, and technical playground where ideas are quickly shared, reshaped, and turned into something new, perfectly matching the vibe coding spirit.
It’s not a coincidence that crypto’s most popular and engaging apps are simple and social. Apps like @friendtech (rip), @cryptothegame_, and @yapsterxyz — even memecoins — all thrive on community buzz, making speculation fun, and moving quickly through cultural cycles.
Yes, these apps weren’t vibe coded, but they prove that crypto and its financial toolkit stand primed to mesh with the kind of quick, expressive software that vibe coding enables.
A prime example is Farcaster, a decentralized social protocol that embeds Mini Apps (previously Frames) into its feed. Devs there release token drops, diaries, or trading games in days, often just for fun. As a result, it’s become a hub for vibe coding.
You have channels like /vibecoding, which offers a great how-to guide, or /vibes, which ran a “7 days of vibe coding event recently. Additionally, with its recent rebrand of Frames to Mini Apps, Farcaster also announced that their developer docs are now LLM-friendly, making them easier to spin up with AI tools.
And it’s not just Farcaster. On Crypto Twitter, vibe coding is clearly surging:
• @0xDesigner made a mega thread where he vibe codes something new every day
• @b3dotfun's buildathon is seeing devs vibe coding in an onchain games onchain games hackathon
• @tributelabsxyz hosts weekly chaos coding Zoom sessions to build and ship apps in an hour
Meanwhile, projects like @tryoharaAI on Base or @devfunpump and @alchemistAIapp on Solana blend AI-powered app creation with tokens, showing how quickly vibe-coded ideas can become interactive experiences.
|— Cost of Software to Zero, So Where’s the Value?
We’ve seen a similar shift in music: once albums became basically free, the real money moved to live shows, exclusive access, merch drops, and brand deals — all the experiences around the music.
In short, the content still mattered, but the business moved to everything that couldn’t be easily copied or streamed.
Now, as code becomes cheap, the “value” shifts to the experience around the app, created and fueled by tokens, speculation, exclusivity, and social hype.
Digging in here, consider things like...
• Speculating on tokens: Tracking a token’s price becomes entertainment in itself. Whole communities do, and will continue to, form around chart-watching and meme-fueled runs.
• Exclusive access: Like backstage passes, devs can issue NFTs for early access, private chats, or premium features, queue Crypto the Game or @freysa_ai, etc.
• Hype as the product: Sometimes the hype is the product. A new Mini App drops, and suddenly the timeline lights up with people using it, remixing it, and guessing whether it’ll take off. See @pumpdotfun and all its clones.
• Music data underscores this: By 2017, top artists were earning ~80% of their income from touring, while only ~15% came from recorded music. And the trend hasn’t slowed down. Global revenue from live tours continues to hit new highs, showing that when the content becomes free, value lives in experiences.
Put this all together, and you get a pretty clear picture: software is getting cheaper and faster to build, and crypto gives it built-in incentives and social reach, while open-source development is pouring gas on the fire.
Of course, this all comes with caveats. Vibe coding in crypto isn’t risk-free, especially when smart contracts are involved. And for many builders, AI still struggles with blockchain-specific code. As @0xDesigner joked, “If you’re in infra, pivot to vibe-code infra — you’ll make a killing from me alone.”
Yet, in the wake of DeepSeek, as more major tech companies open-source models and software, it becomes even easier to remix, rework, and republish software — i.e. vibe code.
That means more tools, more codebases, more learning material — all of which shortens the distance between having an idea and launching something new. It’s not hard to imagine a world where spinning up an app is as simple as making a meme. In many ways, we’re already there.
Crypto fits into this perfectly, imbuing software with the financial and cultural energy that turns an idea into a living, breathing experience. Tokens, NFTs, loyalty points — they’re not just features, they’re ways of making software and its experience social, valuable, and fun.
And when you combine the two — cheap, fast code with crypto’s built-in speculation machine — you get an environment primed for casual, expressive, internet-native experiments to thrive. The apps don’t need to be perfect. They just need to be interesting, social, and alive.