I am currently on the plane, flying back from Farcon 2025. I am feeling a mixture of excitement, calm, focus and reassurance that the Farcaster ecosystem is the right place to be. I'm going to write a little bit about my takeaways from the conference this year - AI & Tokens, Mini Apps, Growth / Community - and why I am excited

AI & Tokens

Last year, we were all about Degen. This year, we are all about AI and tokens. In the last 12 months we've seen the rise of agents and social. Aethernet & Clanker hit it off, deploying tokens such as $LUM, $CLANKER, and $ANON - with the latter peaking the interest of Vitalik. This excitement definitely carried through to this years conference, notably with Neynar making a fresh hire with Grin specifically focussing on AI & ML. I'm excited to follow Neynars journey into harnessing AI and how that will be used to improve our experience across Farcaster integrated clients.

I can't help but feel that we are still in that hype cycle phase where tokens are exciting new shiny things, and we aren't really thinking about how to use tokens in a meaningful way yet. $ANON is the best example I've seen of this on Farcaster, and it feels like we've all forgotten about it. Even throughout the conference, we didn't really discuss tokens - there's the base narrative of tokenise everything, but maybe this is noise? It would be great if we could be asking whether we should tokenise something rather than tokenising something simply because it is possible. Definitely feels like we're in the spam mail era of tokens. Following the Rodeo release, I went a bit crazy collecting on there. Shortly after, a good chunk of my time was spent manually transferring all of these tokens out of my connect wallet. But perhaps AI will help with this, and tokenising everything is sustainable in the long-term. Times are changing.

Mini Apps

A huge click for me this year was just how powerful Mini Apps are. It feels like I totally missed Mini Apps - thumb explained them to me at a Farcaster Fridays, which prepared me for this Farcon (thank you thumb!). It is clear that Mini Apps will be a big factor in the next stage of innovation on Warpcast. Seeing all of the different apps that have been released - crowdfunding, give, usetab, farville, and more - makes me excited. These are useful apps, that contribute meaningfully to the world and are just so easy to use. A future where these can be pinned to a phones home screen (similar to a progressive web app) would be incredible. I've struggled to get my head around Mini Apps because they were called frames v2. I figured frames v1 were good enough. I was wrong, and am excited to build some of my own Mini Apps.

Growth

Sign up fees are dropping from $3.00 to about $0.20. On top of this, and there will be an ability for an app to purchase storage space and allocate to users for a fixed period of time. Building apps for non-crypto natives and tapping into the Farcaster social graph without charging someone $3.00 has become totally possible. The barrier to entry just got significantly lowered.

I'm curious to see how the import of users from platforms like Coinbase and Zapper pans out - what will this do to my home feed? A lot to come, the next 12 months are going to be fun and interesting. The Farcaster community feels close right now, with everyone knowing of, or knowing each other. Any good platform needs to grow, and there is now a reasonable path forward for introducing new faces to the platform. In just the last 12 months a football (soccer, in the US) player, Nathanael Ogbeta (natogb3), who played for my home town signed up!

I have spent the last few years making crypto easier for non-crypto natives to understand and use, and seeing the excitement that people get when they see the magic of cryptocurrency - from the instant transfer capability to the enjoyment of incredible onchain art - is awesome. This kind of adoption can only happen if we abstract away the technical aspects from people.

Conclusion

I am grateful to have worked with such passionate people to make Farcon happen this year. It was so lovely to see familiar faces, catch up with friends, learn all sorts of new things, and create some beautiful projection art for Blackbird & Stand with Crypto. It's easy to forget just how niche what we are engaging in every day is - a social, crypto-integrated platform, where all of us (maybe?) have conversed with AI at some point. It really feels like like we're in the golden years of Farcaster, where we're all curious minds picking away at this new, open protocol that can do all sorts of interesting and amazing things. Cheers to both the near and distant future 🍻