This is my entry to the 2026 Farcaster writing contest, using the prompt "How can crypto social legos create experiences that can’t be found on web2 social networks?"

*Farcaster isn't an actual app, it's the protocol, but for simplicity's sake I am going to refer to both the client I use, Warpcast, and the protocol as Farcaster throughout this piece.

Farcaster is a decentralized social media network built on top of Ethereum in which you fully own your account. It's open source, anyone can build a client for it and users are free to move between clients or use multiple clients. At the surface it looks kind of like Twitter/X, but if you dig a little deeper, you will realize Farcaster is something completely unique. When I started using Farcaster in 2023, I was not in a good place financially. To give you an idea of how broke I was, I seriously considered not signing up simply because you had to pay a few bucks to create an account (I think the price has decreased since then). My utilities and internet were constantly on the verge of getting cut off and all of my Bitcoin was tied up as collateral in loans that were usually on the verge of liquidation. So at the time, every action I took had to be very deliberate; I just couldn't afford to waste any time. If I did waste time, I would suffer from hardcore productivity guilt. So scrolling through social media was definitely not at the top of my to do list. I didn't even like using social media back when I could actually afford to waste a little time here and there. I did occasionally use Twitter, but I don't even have a Facebook or Instagram account. Before 2023, the last time I had really interacted with social media on a regular basis was using MySpace to try and get laid back in the day.

Although, since I first discovered crypto in 2017, I had at least TRIED to use many different crypto native social media apps before Farcaster, but none of them managed to keep me around. I always start out on a new application with the hope that it will be different, that maybe I will be able to build a following because I'm early to the platform and will actually get engagement and enjoy myself. I have a short attention span though, and if I don't start to see progress right away I will usually give up and move on. One after another, Steemit/Hive, friend.tech, Den.Social, and several others that I don't even remember the names of anymore, all failed to retain me as a user.

The only reason I even tried Farcaster during that very broke period in my life, was that I was experimenting with airdrop hunting as a side hustle and wanted to qualify for any potential airdrop they might have. All I wanted to do was copy and paste my tweets into it and click buttons until I got the coveted "Power User Badge", which is no longer even a thing, but at the time I assumed it would guarantee me an airdrop allocation if there was one. Farcaster almost immediately grabbed my attention though, it was still social media, but it felt like something unique. For the first time in my life since Myspace, I was actually opening and checking a social media app on a daily basis. I had been hooked. But why? Why did Farcaster succeed in getting me to give it my time and attention where all the other crypto native social media networks had failed? Well, I believe it's because there were constantly new crypto social "legos" being built on top of Farcaster that worked together to provide me with a plethora of different unique rewarding experiences, with an emphasis on "rewarding". As someone suffering from intense productivity guilt, it was kind of painful when I would spend time crafting quality tweets only to be completely ignored. The vast majority of my tweets on Twitter receive little to no engagement. As someone with a small account with no hope of actual monetization, at the very least I want to know that at least SOMEONE other than bots read the damn tweet, otherwise posting just feels like an Sisyphean exercise.

The experience I had on Farcaster was completely different and using the protocol very quickly became about more than just a potential airdrop. I noticed that I would actually get engagement on some of my posts which was very refreshing. I didn't have to grind for 5 hours a day reply guying just to get my posts noticed by people, the network was still small enough that even someone like me could get engagement and avoid the whole existential crisis that comes on Twitter when you realize that maybe, just maybe, no one is engaging with your tweets not because of the algorithm screwing you, but because nobody actually cares what you have to say.

Regardless of the engagement, it's what happened next that really cemented my status as a daily active user of Farcaster. I began to realize there was more to Farcaster than just posting and engagement, people were building and using applications on top of the protocol. A key moment for me was when I found bountybot.xyz, which someone had built to enable anyone to post paid microtasks that people could try to complete if they wanted. I experimented with it, not thinking I would actually get paid for anything. I proofread someones docs page and found a couple of errors which took me less than ten minutes. I distinctly remember getting the notification that I had received $20 USDC while I was riding the bus home from work. At first I had no idea why I had gotten paid and was confused, I had forgotten about the bounty and was wondering why someone had sent me $20 USDC. When I realized what it was for I just thought it was so cool, I had traded a few minutes of my time for $20, all enabled by this little social media app in my pocket.

The fun didn't stop there though, eventually I found my way to the /politics channel and started posting there occasionally. I remember thinking that maybe I shouldn't bother posting because most of the people seemed to be either liberals or conservatives and I didn't think any of them are going to want to listen to my unconventional views on the government. Luckily, I decided to do some posting anyways. The timing turned out to be impeccable because the owner of /politics, @javabu.eth, was just starting to try a new tactic to grow the channel, he picked a group of regular posters in the channel to be paid political commentators and be rewarded for posting good content. This was a perfect example of how these Farcaster application legos can fit together to create new and unique experiences. He didn't even actually have to pay the commentators out of his own wallet though, he just used his $DEGEN tipping allowance to do it. The Degen project grants every user who locks up a minimum of 10,000 $DEGEN a tipping allowance. Every day your tipping allowance resets and you can spend it as you see fit, all you have to do is reply to a post with an amount and the $DEGEN ticker and it automatically sends $DEGEN to whoever you tipped. Another project, called microsub, enables users to use all or a portion of their allowance to "subscribe" to different users, automatically tipping them on a regular basis. @javabu.eth used microsub to pay the political commentators out of his allowance automatically, incentivizing them to post. Every month he would see who was contributing good content and picked the paid group for the next month. I got picked to be one of these commentators and all of a sudden I was using social media and simultaneously getting paid. I told my wife how awesome I thought it was that I am getting paid to do something I would want to do anyways, talk about politics. She just asked if that meant she didn't have to listen to me rant about the government anymore.

That was just one example of many unique experiences that I have had on Farcaster that were enabled by these various crypto social legos that I have watched evolve in real time since I joined. Not long after I signed up, Farcaster released "frames", which are like little micro apps within posts, allowing users to do various things without ever leaving the feed such as minting NFTs, swapping assets, or displaying context specific data. Another project came along after Degen, called Moxie, which created "channel tokens" which earn a share of the $MOXIE earnings generated by engagement within the channel. So @javabu.eth was able to invest in his own channel through Moxie's channel tokens, which further aligned him with the channel and incentivized him to incentivize us! I also bought some /politics tokens and so I was even more incentivized to contribute good content to the channel, because good content creates engagement. Engagement creates $MOXIE, which then feeds back into the value of the channel tokens. At the same time, $DEGEN tips are flying around as well, separate from the automatic microsub tips. If someone really likes a post I make, then I might earn some extra crypto for it. I remember I once got a $60 tip for a post about immigration from a user named @jeffexcell. I was really struggling financially at the time I got this tip, so it was a big deal to me. Jeff didn't have to pay to tip me, he did it for free through his tipping allowance. HAM / TN100X also have a system of tipping, and I think that regardless of what form it takes, easy tipping on Farcaster is not going away. These kind of crypto market dynamics that have been built on top of the regular ol' fashioned social media experience create a natural filter for content. You are more likely to see quality content in your feed because everyone, both big and small, is incentivized to try and create quality posts because of the potential rewards. I find it interesting that completely unrelated projects on Farcaster can often end up complimenting each other in unique ways, even if they may be technically competing with each other.

Can you begin to see how positive sum relationships develop between these applications, their coins, and the users of Farcaster? It's so much different than engaging on Twitter without earning anything in return. Given the current state of the world and the way inflationary fiat currencies are robbing people of their purchasing power, I'd imagine there are lots of people out there that don't feel they can afford to waste time on social media. I think regular users are fed up with contributing to Web 2 social networks and getting absolutely nothing in return despite them helping these companies make revenue. Time is our most valuable resource, when users put their time into contributing to a social network they deserve to be rewarded in some form or fashion. Farcaster offers that reward potential to contributors instead of the traditional Web 2 dynamics in which users only have value extracted from them without even the benefit of owning their own social graph. This is the reason that Farcaster was able to retain me as a user where so many other platforms failed, because when I use Farcaster I know that there is at least the potential to be rewarded for my time.

The crypto based financialization of social media has been tried again and again, other protocols have also rewarded users, so why should it succeed on Farcaster where it has failed everywhere else? I think one of the main reasons it has a chance is that it is so easy for people to build on top of Farcaster and experiment. One application or reward mechanism can fail without destroying the entire value proposition of the network. Instead of a winner take all environment, different projects have found ways to interoperate with each other leaving room for multiple projects to succeed. New builders see the success of other builders and want to experiment with their own projects.

Aren't people building on top of Twitter as well? Well yes they are, we can look at KaitoAI for a good example of that, but there is something fundamentally different about building on top of a private company's product versus building on top of an open source protocol like Farcaster. When you build on top of something like Twitter or Facebook, you face the very real risk of the company rug pulling you at any time if they decide to change their API or lock you out. Just ask Zynga, the company that used to build games on Facebook before Facebook closed off its API. When you build on Farcaster you don't have to worry about this. Without the top down centralized control of a social media company, Farcaster's decentralization enables a more permissive environment where anyone can flourish and new communities can be born. An example of this is how unlike the Twitter algorithm, I believe none of the Farcaster clients penalize you for sharing an external link. They don't try to trap you in one client, and I think this works in their favor. It's also chain agnostic, so people can build Farcaster applications that work with any EVM (ethereum virtual machine) compatible chain and even Solana if they want to.

All of the legos that I've mentioned so far, such as Degen, Moxie, and Microsub, work together on their own. But when you add the capabilities of frames V2 into the mix it opens up all kinds of possibilities for new and unique experiences on Farcaster. Users in 2025 have very short attention spans, this is a fact and it's not something that's going to change anytime soon. When a user has to leave an app in order to take an action, such as minting an NFT for example, they are much less likely to complete the action. Frames allows users to do all kinds of things within posts without leaving their Farcaster client. Developers have only just begun to utilize this, and frames have the potential to bring a lot of new use cases to Farcaster.

Bull or bear, the strong community of builders in the Farcaster ecosystem are going to continue to build and iterate on new legos that will work with the ones that are already present. Say you have an opinion you want to share but you are scared to say it under your own profile, just use anon.world to post it anonymously. Want to launch a new coin? Use Clankerbot to do it. Want to buy or sell that coin? Tag the bankr bot and tell it what you want it to do for you. Want to support an artist? Mint their NFT within a frame in their feed, and tip the post with some $DEGEN or $HAM. Want to speculate on the future of a creator? Use moxie.xyz to invest in their creator coin. Just want to play a game with one of your friends? Challenge them on Farcade. You can even create your very own annoying AI agent using tinyagents.xyz (mine is called ancappepe if you feel like pumping his sub 50k marketcap for me). There is always something new to do on Farcaster, I have watched first hand the exponential growth in applications. It has also become a hotbed of alpha, there are Clanker token launches happening within posts right there in the feed, there are builders are experimenting, and there are random plebs like me right in the middle of all that activity.

In fact, it's possible that the protocol shouldn't try to grow too fast, because there is something to be said for the advantages of being small. Even if Farcaster never attracts as many users as a traditional Web 2 social media platform, it can still succeed. Right now it still feels more like an exclusive VIP lounge where you can interact with some very smart and successful people (and help test their products), rather than a crowded concert where you will never stick out from the crowd. The signal to noise ratio is much better than on Twitter. Being smaller also has advantages in terms of the ability to innovate quickly. Changing Twitter or Facebook is like trying to turn around an oil tanker, whereas Farcaster is more like a speedboat. You would think that in 2025 your Twitter and Facebook accounts would have at the very least a built in crypto wallet and native crypto tipping built in, but they haven't even done that yet. As crypto gains more adoption around the world, the ability to combine social and crypto seamlessly will become even more attractive to people. Farcaster is currently being integrated into Coinbase wallet, bringing with it a bunch of potential new users. If we want to see these users stick around, we need to make sure the unique experiences available on Farcaster are front and center so that they find out right away that it is not just another Twitter clone. I know that I couldn't of had the experience I've had on Farcaster anywhere else. If the word spreads that it is a place where anyone who has even a basic understanding of crypto can come and actually be rewarded for their time, even as a small account, I think that it will see significant growth. With new users will come new applications, with new applications come new experiences, new experiences attract new users, and we will see the network grow. I believe that with the more permissive building environment enabled by the new administration's pro-crypto policies, these potential rewards and the number of Farcaster compatible applications is going to grow quickly. After all, builders are more likely to experiment if they don't have to worry about going to jail or getting slapped with a massive SEC lawsuit. Farcaster is the perfect sandbox for trying things out, and anyone who is present in the sandbox can and will benefit from this. I think one of the best things the leaders of Farcaster can do to facilitate this growth is focus on marketing to new users and govern from a distance, letting the innovation happen organically. If they get too caught up in minutia and trying to control and optimize everything, this just opens the door for mistakes to be made that hamper growth. Less is probably worth more in the governance of this protocol.

As users we should also be doing our best to help spread the word about Farcaster's unique experiences. I know there are a lot of small accounts on crypto Twitter grinding away in an attempt to be heard amidst the noise. These people are investing a lot of time and energy into social media but aren't really seeing a return on their investment, all we have to do is convince them that their time would be better spent on Farcaster where they actually have a chance of having an impact. How hard is it to convince someone to at least copy and paste their tweets into Farcaster? Why not right? Then when they start to see actual engagement on their casts, they will become more interested and start exploring the ecosystem just like I did. With the right nudges it wouldn't take much to convert someone already in the crypto world to become a daily user of Farcaster. We can worry about getting non-crypto native users later, right now there is still plenty of room to grow with just crypto people. I hope if you also enjoy Farcaster, you will join me in spreading the word. I want to see this protocol continue to grow and foster innovation in the years to come. I can't wait to see what the community builds next!