Last week, shocking news was released by Farcaster team.

Dan Romero, Farcaster founder, made headlines with a bold strategic pivot, announcing a substantial change in the Farcaster client: it will become a wallet first social app.

From a Twitter-like social network, Farcaster's app is set to evolve into a wallet and trading platform, leveraging its existing social features.

He and co-founder Varun Srinivasan, after over five years of development and a $1 billion valuation, announced that the social-first approach hadn't achieved sustainable product-market fit.

Coupled with the October acquisition of Clanker, an AI token launchpad, this has positioned Farcaster as a contender in the SocialFi space, blending social elements with finance.

This move has sparked mixed reactions: excitement over potential growth and revenue, but concerns about abandoning its decentralized social roots.

This article dives into Farcaster's journey, the pivot's details, controversies, and what it means for users and the ecosystem.

Farcaster, launched in 2020, aims to create an at-scale decentralized social networking protocol used by 1 billion people daily.

Unlike other centralized platforms like X, Farcaster emphasizes "sufficient decentralization" a pragmatic approach that balances decentralization with usability.

The protocol includes core elements like casts (posts), follows, reactions, identities, and now wallets, all permissionless for developers to build upon.

Farcaster is the protocol, allowing anyone to build clients (apps) on top of it. Originally, it was just the protocol, with Warpcast as the official client developed by the team. Now, 'Farcaster' refers to both the protocol and the official client, built by the company Merkle Manufactory.

During the last week, a huge mess happened on Farcaster, so huge that someone decided to dismiss all his 40+ Farcaster miniapps.

Why?

Dan Romero posted this cast which probably will mark a decisive breakpoint in history of Farcaster:

TLDR: no sustainable growth with the social-network-first client so they are switching to build a wallet.

They realized that the wallet is the ultimate mean of traction for the protocol.

He mentions that Merkle will adopt a "come for the tool, stay for the network" strategy to acquire more users.

Dan and Varun aim to develop a compelling tool, likely marketed as a wallet, to encourage downloads of the Farcaster app. They will rely on its built-in social features to drive long-term user retention.

In the same direction of this shift from decentralized social to wallet first app, a few posts by Varun and team during the last month outline the trend of Merkle to go in that direction:

• end of creators rewards - no change to dev rewards for miniapps yet

• other new features already in current version of wallet, like the possibility to comment a swap you made

• some possible native functionalities on the roadmap of the farcaster wallet: limit orders, HL perps, private wallet copytrading and... an appcoin launcher?

And Farcaster team also pushing other clients, as shown in this cast:

As I'll talk about in the article, Farcaster shift is aimed to point more in the direction of giving the users a mean to trade & speculate, built for traders. Dan published, some months ago, some words on his personal website about that, quoting:

in crypto you need speculation, in order to make revenues.

Community looks very disappointed from this pivot.

Cassie, previously a member of Farcaster team, expressed her dissent on the new shift:

Already against the incentive model of crypto+social networks, she publicly express dissent regarding the pivot, emphasizing that the issue isn't the wallet's quality but the broader cultural shift away from Farcaster's original decentralized social focus and the lack of clarity of the team.

What did she do? 3 proposals (I love the pragmatism of this girl):

These three proposals from Cassie aren't just technical tweaks. They're screaming a clear message about Farcaster's current state.

Proposal #256: Opportunity For Another Chain

Snapchain (the blockchain layer behind Farcaster identities) is too dependent on Base. If one corporate-backed chain dominates, it threatens the "sufficiently decentralized" promise, one company could potentially censor or control parts of the protocol.

Solution: Let Farcaster support multiple chains for storing and resolving FIDs (user IDs) and fnames (usernames), making identities truly pluggable and resistant to single-point control.

Proposal #257: Opportunity For Another Consensus

This proposal is around the governance & consensus model. Currently Farcaster relies on Proof of Authority (PoA) which is a consensus mechanism where trusted, pre-approved validators validate transactions and essentially govern the protocol.

Farcaster has five consensus set member owned by the same company, and the proposal aims to decentralize that.

Solution: Open up validator spots to the community or switch to a more open consensus model (modern PoW or PoS) so no single entity holds the keys.

Proposal #258: Opportunity For Another Curator

This is proposal address a hidden challenge in growing decentralized social platforms: creating good feeds (the "For You" or following feed that keeps people scrolling).

Building a good feed is expensive and complex. Right now, every client team has to build their own from scratch, which slows innovation and hurts client diversity.

Solution: Make curation a core protocol feature, let anyone create and share public feeds (algorithmic, manual, personalized) that any client can use. This lowers barriers for new clients and turns curation into a shared strength.

What are these proposal are really saying?
Farcaster protocol is not "sufficiently decentralized" yet; there's still too much trust placed in Merkle and Base, and building a real alternative client remains hard and costly.

Cassie - many others agree with her - says: You're pivoting the official client to a wallet, that's your call, and fine. But at least give the rest of us the tools to build meaningfully on the protocol without being completely dependent on your decisions, Base, or Merkle's infrastructure.

In the same period, @zinger joined the Merkle team to drive trader outreach and growth.

From what I've gathered from Zinger's social media, he has a background in startups and product growth, and he's clearly passionate about trading, particularly memecoins. His Farcaster profile is filled with discussions on tokens and market trends.

As Farcaster pivots from a social network aimed at attracting builders to a wallet-centric app, the team now needs to onboard traders, and Merkle requires someone fluent in their language to facilitate that process.

Zinger's hiring was not without controversy. If you're like an old Italian nonna from a small village, craving gossip and pointless arguments, grab your popcorn and read here, here and here . I won't dive deep into it, as it's not crucial for understanding Farcaster's future, but it highlights community reactions to the strategy shift.

In my opinion, they very likely will stay: they will maintain the infra to have miniapps on farcaster but it won't be the main focus of Farcaster client from now on.

Builder rewards were already dismissed, and now you get some incentive if your miniapp is between the first 100.

Will they remove these kind of incentives? Will they remove support for miniapps? comment and tell what you think about that.

If you ask me to imagine the new Farcaster wallet, I would just get the Base App, with a miniapp section, change colors and font, then add some features like integrated Clanker and here you have the new Farcaster Wallet.

Farcaster acquired Clanker.

Clanker is a platform to make tokens fair launch. You can do so using the app, by tagging @clanker on a farcaster cast, through the API or the SDK. It makes it very easy to launch a token.

This move puts Farcaster on the same playing field as Base App + Zora.
Base App relies on Farcaster protocol for the social feed and on Zora to "coin content". Every post on Base App is mintable on Zora and others can buy it as a form of support.

If Farcaster wants to compete in the same SocialFi space, what was missing? A seamless way to tokenize everything. With Clanker, they've filled that gap decisively, diving much deeper into SocialFi and positioning themselves as a direct Base App rival.

As Base App uses Zora to make content coins, Farcaster uses Clanker to make appcoins. Here an example of appcoin, the presale of $HOUSE

Some users are disappointed, after the pivot announcement. Why?

• Why build yet another wallet when dozens already exist, with far more experience and users?

• People worry Farcaster will turn into a "casino," with most volume from low-cap memecoins that inevitably rug or go to zero.

• Sure, data shows the wallet driving recent traction, but if it's mostly speculative trading of low-value tokens destined to crash, is that really sustainable growth?

• How can we build a new client on Farcaster protocol if this is yet very tied to Base and Merkle and the stack to build on top of it is still not-mature?

In my opinion, Farcaster users have historically been builders. The work builders did on farcaster is amazing, and the success of miniapps is defined expecially by the social-first nature of Farcaster. If the platform changes focus, then building on farcaster won't feel as rewarding as before.

Dan Romero said it clearly. If you don't like the direction Farcaster client is going,

change - the f**ing - client

Which are other clients?

Base App: The biggest client so far. Run by the Base team, it's projected to have a lot of success on the wallet scene. It integrates miniapps, content coins and it is probably the inspiration Merkle team got, when reasoning on the change of shift.

Cura: Mobile first Farcaster client. It is focused on channels and you have a rank in each channel (I rank 3rd in /ETHRome channel). The more you post the more you climb the leaderboard of the channel. If you are the channel owner, you can airdrop any ERC20 to channel contributors.

Zapper: Client focused on tokens. The feed also displays what users are buying or selling.

Uno: It's in closed beta - ngl, I couldn't get a lot of info on what it is. I asked in this cast.

Recaster: Simple client to post and schedule casts on Farcaster.

Herocast: Twitter-like client. You can do pretty much everything you do on farcaster, schedule posts and analyze your engagement. It's early stage and it costs $1 to get in.

Firefly: A Farcaster client which embeds miniapps, prediction markets and a sections where users can post articles.

Degen: Client built by $DEGEN team. It has a channel based feed and it's focused on the "tipping" use case. Currenly launched as a Farcaster miniapp.

Tunecaster: Client focused on music. The feed contains songs you can listen from the client itself. You have a section with trending music, a section with users playlists. To cast on this client you need to go to the /music channel on Farcaster and post there a music video/song/playlist.

other clients in this post from Dan.

Farcaster is pivoting!

Let's tell It clearly: Farcaster will be a wallet with a social network integrated. It will be focused to make traders and speculators happy, there will be more technical trading features as Varun prophetizes on this post.

Dismissing your miniapps feels like a bit of an overreaction. With the wallet pivot potentially bringing in more users, your miniapp could actually get a more exposure… or maybe not!

If you're a miniapp developer who loves DeFi, you're actually in a great position now. The new target users aren't just builders anymore, but also traders and speculators.

If DeFi isn't your thing yet but you're a miniapp builder, now's probably the time to dive in, if you want to keep building successfully on Farcaster.

If you don't like this shift you can go to another client or build a new one yourself: While the Farcaster client will change, the protocol will remain untouched, or even improved.
I know, this last point is controversial. Currently there are no clients at the same level of Farcaster, so Dan says "go to another client if you don't like this" but man, others clients are too early. Where do I go? Where do I have fun?
I think you'll still be able to have fun on Farcaster, in a different way.

You'll likely still be able to have fun on Farcaster. just in a different way. The feed will lean more toward trading, token launches, and DeFi energy, but the core social tools aren't disappearing. It'll evolve with a new crowd.

Additionally, if you're a builder, it may be just about time to fill the gap left by Farcaster and build a new super cool sufficiently decentralized social network on top of Farcaster protocol.

And for last: Base team said there is an important announcement on 17th December for the Base app. Do you think it's something somehow related to this Farcaster Pivot?

What do you think about this pivot? Are you optimistic, skeptical, feeling a bit betrayed… or something else entirely?

1. https://farcaster.xyz/dwr/0x408cdcfd

2. https://farcaster.xyz/v/0xf48818f9

My name is Fabrizio and I do developer engagement at @urbe.eth. I am a softer engineer with passion and experience in Blockchain.
I'm loving writing articles about more disparate topics. If you like it, comment and spread the voice.

More on me on my website: fabri-dev.vercel.app

Stolen arms from smart contract development