Farcaster is a decentralized social networking protocol that utilizes smart contracts and hybrid storage technology to facilitate social connections, content sharing, and data ownership among users. It supports diverse and flexible client and application development.
In March of this year, the memecoin project Degen, part of the Farcaster ecosystem, gained widespread attention with a more than 20-fold increase in value and a market capitalization exceeding $1 billion, making the Farcaster ecosystem the center of attention.
In May, Farcaster’s developer, Merkle Manufactory, announced the completion of a new round of financing led by Paradigm, with a total amount of $150 million, raising the company’s valuation to $1 billion.
According to data from Dune, the total number of Farcaster users has reached 540,000, with daily active users increasing from 2,000 at the beginning of the year to 56,000 currently, achieving a growth of more than 28 times.
Farcaster is not a new social project. During the early testing phase, founder Dan invited many well-known OGs, including V God, to join through personal influence and relationships. He also selected early users by obtaining invitation codes through Twitter direct messages. As a result, the user base of Farcaster has a high concentration of “elites”.
This practice of setting thresholds is aimed at gathering a highly similar user group in the early stages, making Farcaster, to some extent, a concise version similar to Twitter. Early users can enjoy a higher quality posting and interactive experience.
In addition, users with early qualifications are usually influential KOLs. These users have high social influence themselves and may have a certain sense of social superiority in experiencing Farcaster early. They also have stronger motivation to discuss and promote Farcaster on other platforms.
In October of last year, Farcaster opened registration but still set a $5 entry threshold. This effectively blocked a large number of robot accounts from registering and maintained a good atmosphere for Farcaster as opposed to Nostr, which declined due to an influx of robots.
As of now, Farcaster has accumulated nearly $1.9 million in revenue through registration fees and data storage fees.
Both founders of Farcaster, Dan and Varun, have held important positions at Coinbase, which makes Farcaster closely linked to the Base ecosystem. Jesse, the core person in charge of Base chain, is also very active on Farcaster.
From another perspective, among the top 500 users with the most followers on Farcaster, over 70% of on-chain interactions occur on the Base chain.
Therefore, for those who are optimistic about the Base ecosystem, Farcaster is also seen as a potential treasure trove of Alpha.
Farcaster protocol data is stored in on-chain and off-chain hubs, and developers can choose to run hub nodes themselves or obtain data through third-party service providers like Neynar.
All this data is permissionless, and based on this available data, developers can build various clients and applications, greatly increasing the richness and innovation space of the Farcaster ecosystem.
Users can track the progress of the ecosystem through the decaster website, and here are some highlights of the projects.
WrapCast
Warpcast is the primary application under the Farcaster protocol and the first Farcaster client. It has been developed by a top engineering team led by Dan for over a year.
Its overall architecture is similar to traditional Web2 social software, with a smooth user experience, currently occupying 90% of the Farcaster protocol’s traffic.
The registration process for Warpcast is simple, and the system automatically generates a bound wallet for the user. All Warpcast accounts are associated with a Farcaster ID and store the generated content in the Farcaster hub.
This design allows even non-cryptocurrency users to easily enter the on-chain world, greatly reducing the cognitive threshold for new users.
For users familiar with on-chain interaction, they can also bind their commonly used cryptocurrency wallets. These adjustments not only provide a user-friendly experience but also play an important role in promoting the growth and user acceptance of the Farcaster ecosystem.
Warpcast is designed as a social platform similar to Twitter, where users can post tweets (casts), comment, retweet, and follow other users.
In addition to the social media functions similar to Twitter, Warpcast also introduces functions such as channels and actions, which give rise to more interactive ways.
For example, DEGEN uses the participation of users in the Farcaster ecosystem to distribute tokens. Users can participate in DEGEN’s airdrops by following channels and interacting, and the airdropped tokens can be given as rewards to other users.
Farcaster’s significant growth this year is closely related to the Frames feature launched in February. Frames are mini-applications embedded in Warpcast that allow users to engage in more diversified interactions without leaving the Warpcast client, such as minting NFTs, content subscriptions, playing games, and receiving tokens.
For example, far.cards is a collectible card project exclusively for Farcaster users, developed based on mint.club. The attributes of each user’s card are determined by their level of activity on Farcaster, such as the number of followers, likes, and replies received.
The price of the cards is determined by a bonding curve, and the acquired cards can be collected or traded.
As shown in the figure below, the application of far.cards can be published in the form of a Frame in a tweet, and users who see the tweet can directly purchase the cards through the Frame without leaving the Warpcast client.
The launch of Frames greatly enriches the playability of Warpcast and allows Farcaster development to go beyond building a decentralized Twitter.
Currently, nearly 40,000 users are using the Frames feature, generating over 150,000 on-chain transactions, and the number of interactive contracts designed has reached 1,624.
Jam
Jam is a creator economy platform based on Farcaster that can turn every tweet a user makes on Warpcast into an NFT asset similar to Friend.tech Key. Users can buy/sell each tweet, and the price is determined by the bonding curve shown in the figure below.
Within 72 hours of its launch, Jam’s trading volume exceeded $10 million.
Using Jam for the first time requires consuming 10 warp points, and 100 warp points are given as a gift when registering for Farcaster.
After binding the Farcaster account, users can see the feed on the homepage and find tweets worth minting. The Top list includes tweets with the most recent transactions and the latest tweets, and the Trades section shows real-time records of tweet transactions.
Unlike Friend.tech, each tweet can only have one owner at a time, so there is no situation of grabbing a bunch of tweets and then selling them. However, the profit strategy is similar, as users need to find and buy tweets with viral potential as early as possible and focus on Farcaster core developers, V God, KOLs, etc., to ensure subsequent buyers.
If the user is a KOL or someone skilled at tweeting, they can also earn a 5% transaction fee by constantly writing tweets to spark memes and promote dissemination.
Jam currently does not have tokens but has internal points. The overall gameplay and similarity to Friend.tech are very high, and there may be significant potential for airdrops on Farcaster.
Degen.Game is a website that organizes Frame mini-applications. Users can log in with their Farcaster identity, view the latest Frames every day, and interact with them.
Clubcast
ClubCast is an application on Farcaster similar to Zhi Shi Xing Qiu (Knowledge Planet), which has implemented token-gated casts. Users need to purchase club tokens from other users to unlock and view hidden content on clubcast.xyz or in Frames. Currently, it requires developer permission to use.
BountyCaster
BountyCaster is a task platform built on the Farcaster protocol and founded by Linda Xie, former co-founder of Scalar Capital and Coinbase product manager.
As shown in the figure below, users can add the tag @Bountybot when sending content on Warpcast and other clients to post tasks, and other users can claim the corresponding tasks and receive rewards.
Similarly, services and prices that can be provided can also be published. Users need to log in with their Farcaster account to view published Bounties, available services, and even job opportunities on the BountyCaster website.
AlfaFrens
AlfaFrens is a creator economy application built on the Base ecosystem and Farcaster protocol, developed by Superfluid, which supports the flow of on-chain assets.
Similar to Friend.tech, users can subscribe to KOL channels and access exclusive chat rooms, and can further receive tokens generated by the channels.
There are two currencies on the platform, $Degen and $ALFA. $Degen is an ERC20 token on the Base chain, while $ALFA is a proprietary token of the AlfaFrens platform that can currently only be obtained within the platform and is non-transferable.
$Degen is the consumable token of the platform. When starting to use AlfaFrens, users need to prepare some $Degen and deposit them into the wallet generated by the platform.
Users can use $Degen to subscribe to KOL channels, divided into three levels: 500, 1000, and 1500 $Degen per month. The subscription fee is linearly consumed, and users can cancel the subscription at any time. 70% of the subscription fee is distributed to users who pledge $ALFA to the channel based on the pledge ratio.
Every day, the platform produces $ALFA tokens, and each channel distributes the allocated $ALFA equally among subscribing users based on the amount of $Degen received from subscriptions.
Therefore, in terms of gameplay, users can subscribe to channels with higher popularity, obtain $ALFA tokens, and pledge them to the channel to earn more $Degen.
$ALFA is currently not a circulating token and does not have a fixed price. In the early stage, it can be obtained by exchanging $Degen for $ALFA. Therefore, different participation strategies can be formulated based on income preferences (whether to obtain more existing $DEGEN with value or more $ALFA that is not priced yet).
Summary
As people become more accustomed to “living” on the Internet, social graphs have become important personal assets, and the demand for data ownership has increased.
Web3 solutions naturally adapt to the pain points of current Web2 social platforms, but the decentralized social field has not been particularly successful.
Many projects focus too much on decentralization and overlook the importance of user experience. Dan stated in an interview with Bankless that the positioning of Web3 social is not to replace Web2 social but to improve it, allowing users to join more on-chain gameplay while owning data ownership and doing things that Web2 cannot do.
By storing value data on-chain and high-frequency data off-chain, Farcaster significantly improves user interaction fluency.
The team has attached great importance to mobile development from the beginning, as they are well aware that mobile devices are the primary usage scenario for social software.
Therefore, the Warpcast client has a good user experience, is fully functional, iterates quickly, and constantly introduces new features such as long posts and interactive features (actions), providing developers with more and more capabilities to build new applications.
Although Farcaster is far from perfect and there is still much room for improvement, it is already an application that can attract users and maintain growth. In the future, more excellent products based on Farcaster will definitely emerge. Let us look forward to and pay attention to the development of Farcaster and participate as early as possible.
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