Last week I attended FarCon NYC and I wanted to jot down a few reflections while everything’s still fresh. It was a packed few days of hacking, talking, walking, laughing, eating, drinking, dancing, recording, interviewing, more talking, and also felt like a reunion with friends I’d known forever.

Here's the list of events I attended, my personal reflections and what I'm excited about, and where I'm going next.

Events Attended

Wednesday April 30

GM Farcaster Karaoke Happy Hour
Welcome event for hypersub members and friends of the show.

Thursday May 1

Builder Day – FarHack
Talks from 10AM–12PM, followed by 12+ hours of hacking with Tiago and Graham. After pushing through hurdle after hurdle, we finally shipped Coinaroid, a mini app that lets you coin content and share to Farcaster, all without leaving Farcaster, a little after midnight.

Friday May 2

GM Farcaster Early Breakfast
Hosted a members-only breakfast at the Summit location for our hypersub crew. Passed out VIP gift bags and enjoyed the calm before the storm.

Farcaster Summit
The main event. Dan and Varun opened with remarks and a Q&A. Dan also had a fireside chat with Fred Wilson. Jesse shared his vision for bringing social into Coinbase Wallet with the Farcaster feed front and center, and then gave us all beta access.
Community talks from Limone, Phil, Samuel, YB, Jihad, and Tayyab. Followed by Hot Ones with Rish & Cassie. Hackathon winners announced.
Meanwhile, we hosted the GM Farcaster podcast studio from a 2nd floor balcony overlooking the main stage and recorded short interviews with all the speakers throughout the day.

Base Golden Hour
Evening happy hour hosted by Base. Caught up with The Park, Humpty, Boop, Oxbid and others.

Bright Moments After Party
Great venue with distinct spaces: quiet lounges, a smoke-filled dance floor, and a few vibes in between. Reconnected with Metamonk, Charles, Les, JTGI, Matallo, Grin, Links, Pichi, Statuette. Met Coinbase's US policy manager (and fellow Nittany Lion). Finally met folks like Irina face to face. I know I'm forgetting names.

Saturday

Farcaster Brunch
Chill rooftop brunch. Demoed Coinaroid to a bunch of people, chatted with my hacking team about next steps as we all want to continue to build it out.

Padel Tournament
Just like the pickle ball tournament at FarCon Venice, I love seeing events that get people active and competitive and having fun. That being said, I was happy to be a spectator this year because by the time the tournament started I was already feeling so tired.

Lunch with Chicago + Prof
Snuck away for a lunch at 12 Chairs Cafe with Nounish Prof and Chicago. I casted a picture of my lunch and it's fun to see the feed still go wild for a good food pic.

Forever Library
A standout event - scholastic book fair meets a cocktail bar. Brought my IRL friend, who ended up buying a book and joining farcaster.

Reflections

1. URL to IRL Pipeline and Internet Friends

The best part of FarCon is just hanging out with internet friends. Most conferences and networking events can be draining - meeting so many new people and having to repeat the same surface level conversations over and over again. While there’s some of that at FarCon, a lot of my time was spent with people I consider actual friends, which makes everything feel easier and more natural.

The URL to IRL pipeline is a better way to make friends. You meet people on a text-based social network like Farcaster, where connections are built around the words you write and the topics you care about. You get a feel for someone’s personality and perspective without knowing things like where they live or work, their gender, how old they are, or what their politics might be. It feels more pure than meeting someone IRL and making snap judgments based on appearances.

2. Consumer Crypto is Here and It's Good

Ordering bagels at the Summit through the Blackbird app wasn’t just easy and better than most crypto apps, it was better than any web2 alternative. I used my phone to pay, one tap and done (Blackbird even covered it with $10 of $FLY when you sign up). When my food was ready, they called my name, even though I never told them who I was.

Warpcast has obviously been getting closer and closer to closing the UX gap with existing web2 social networks, removing all mentions of crypto during the onboarding, but with the launch of the Coinbase Wallet beta app with Farcaster as the home page, we're having more consumer apps enter the space. Makes me super bullish on decentralized social built on Farcaster.

Alexandria Books hosted a book fair and I brought my IRL friend who isn’t into crypto. He was able to use Apple Pay through their app to buy a book and got both a physical and digital copy. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

3. Fred gives venture capital a good name

The highlight of the summit, based on chatter in-the-room and on-feed, was the fireside chat Dan hosted with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. Luc casted some highlights and we'll be posting the recording on GM Farcaster YouTube channel as soon as we get it back from the AV production team.

Right before Fred went on stage I had a chance to show him Coinaroid, the mini app we built the day before for the Hackathon, and he immediately tried it out, and then gave it a shout out from the main stage.

4. FarCon needs some soul searching: Is it still a memetic icon or has it growing into a Tech Conference?

Has FarCon outgrown its original community meetup vibe?

The first FarCon happened in 2023 as a community experiment. Grin, one of the original organizers, described the FarCon formula as a decentralized conference for a decentralized protocol—an event for us, by us. He wrote:

The core purpose of a FarCon is to deepen connections and promote collaboration.

That original event had about 70 people who came together on a Saturday to give some talks and share their work. FarCon has grown a lot in two years. This year saw 420 ticketed attendees, and maybe twice that many in town for all the side events. FarCon is still entirely community-led and volunteer-run, but this year it got some criticism for being exclusive, for shutting ticket sales down months before the event, for not letting everyone who wanted to attend in.

It's understandable and expected. The organizers aren’t getting paid. They have to secure venues before knowing how many people will actually show up. Sponsors don’t always commit early. Planning something like this is hard.

But it starts to raise a question: what is FarCon now, what should it be, and has it outgrown the "by us, for us" community meet up vibe?

Looking ahead, is it still about deepening community and promoting collaboration among current active users? Or should it be more of a public, external facing, growth conference to reach new people interested in joining the Farcaster ecosystem? I don’t know the answer yet, but I can see a future where Merkle takes it over and runs it more like an open, commercial conference.

5. Hacking is my happy place

I decided to participate in Builder Day this year. I’ve been having so much fun building the GM Farcaster AI Bot, and I wanted to find more ways to build on Farcaster. I’ve tried messing around with mini apps before but kept getting stuck. Joining FarHack felt like the best way to learn. I was right.

I teamed up with Graham and Tiago. A few hours before Builder Day started, we shared a Google Doc to brainstorm ideas. Everything was fair game—no judgment. We had some open-ended chats to figure out what each of us wanted to get out of the hackathon. When it started, we realized no one was attached to any single idea. So, we set a timer for 10 minutes and said we had to pick something before the timer went off.

To help decide, we listed out what mattered to us:

1. We wanted to ship something—an end-to-end MVP.

2. We wanted to learn. Each of us needed some new surface area.

3. We didn’t need to optimize for prizes. Winning wasn’t the goal.

4. We wanted something attention-grabbing.

5. And we wanted to have fun.

One idea I threw out was a daily horoscope mini app. Tiago pointed out we could probably clone a JC4P repo and be done in an hour. That wasn’t true for me—it would’ve taken hours—but it was a fair point. We wanted a challenge for everyone on the team.

With that list, the decision became easy. Coinaroid was the only idea that checked all the boxes.

We worked nonstop until 9PM, when we got kicked out of the venue, then kept going at a bar until after midnight. We hit roadblock after roadblock—mostly around how to host images in a way that would work inside Zora. We tried Pinata with both IPFS and HTTPS gateways, Imgur, Arweave, AWS. Nothing worked. Eventually we got Cloudinary to work. I was ready to give up more than once, but my team kept pushing. It was such a good reminder of something engineers know deeply: the obstacles are the way. You just keep going.

Finishing the project and submitting it as a working mini app was already a huge win. Seeing people use it the next day was even better. Winning the Base award? Icing on the cake.

It also made me realize how much I miss working on an engineering team.

6. Final Thoughts

FarCon was really well executed. Everything ran flawlessly, and Emma did an excellent job pulling it all together.

I’m proud of GM Farcaster and everything Nounish Prof and I have built together. It’s incredibly encouraging to meet people who watch our show and appreciate what we’re doing.

Farcaster is going to make it. (I could be wrong, but hard to think anything but this after the energy at FarCon)

Next Steps

• Keep building on Farcaster. Keep building GM Farcaster Network.

• Reach more people. Move one of our GM Farcaster episodes to a West Coast–friendly time (probably Monday or Wednesday).

• Open source the GM Farcaster AI bot to bring in more dev collaborators (shoutout to JTGI for the push).

• More dev work - build the GM Farcaster mini app, build out coinaroid, build out the AI bot etc.

Photo Album