“If I don't check Farcaster for just one day, I’ll miss a lot of new products and updates.”

— @haole (the dev behind Recaster and Newcaster)

Then you’d better read this newsletter.

Hi, I’m Sonya from Splits. We're unabashed true believers in Farcaster. As builders crafting tools for other builders, we're drawn to the frontiers where innovation thrives, and we think Farcaster exemplifies that pioneering spirit.

The open cabal simply can’t stop shipping, which means:

1. A lot is happening, constantly.

2. Even if you take a break every time you push to prod, you will struggle to keep track of what everyone else is doing. Because you’re trying to “focus” on “building,” dammit.

Allow me to help. Welcome to the first edition of This Week in Farcaster, a regular recap of updates in the ecosystem, inspired by the late great Week in Ethereum newsletter.

Before we dive in: If you’ve been off Farcaster for more than a day, and you don’t know what’s going on at all, read “Programmable social” by @tomu. Then @luc can catch you up on the current crop of main characters (“if you feel overwhelmed with the recent launches across farcaster i wrote something for you”).

Let’s go.

Three useful updates from Privy, the embedded wallet platform:

• “Now users can sign up with passkeys (without linking another login method)!”

• “You can now download your user table as a CSV directly from the dashboard.”

• The “new self-serve CAPTCHA feature automatically and invisibly detects [bots] — with no friction to real users.”

In response to ongoing concerns about marketing, Dan clarified that Merkle Manufactory — the company behind the Farcaster protocol and Warpcast client — has a three-pronged approach to user growth:

1. Continue to iterate on and scale opportunities for users to make money — Farcaster native assets, frames, USDC rewards, etc.

2. Continue to work on the core features of the social network. These features create retention.

3. Additionally, we're scaling the underlying protocol with Snapchain. The current version of Hubs don't scale another 10x.

“There are no other priorities at the moment,” Dan said.

The latest Frames v2 capability is viewProfile: “Frames can now open a native (within Warpcast) modal with Farcaster profile information, followers, mutuals and ability to follow / unfollow.” Dan (@dwr.eth) shared an example implementation as well.

Merkle is hiring engineers.

Merkle teammate @sds wrote a technical blog post: “So you want to build a job processing system? Sharing lessons learned during a migration from Faktory Enterprise.”

Clankermon, “an onchain meta trading game,” is up and running. Naturally, so is $clankermon. Creator Matthew Fox unspooled his vision for Clankermon: it’s like Pokemon mashed up with DEX Screener. (One of those things where as soon as it exists you’re like “of course this exists.”) If you decide to play, please note: “Your clankerdex is a smart account owned by the wallet you had connected during sign up.” Matthew is “working on solutions for anyone who wants to change that wallet.”

Clankersub / $clankersub is “an experiment in using $DEGEN tips to share LP rewards from a clanker token.” Clever! Click through for participation instructions.

ClankPad, @mcbain’s “token launchpad for every community on Farcaster,” is nearing primetime. In action: $fckit.

Opportunity alert: Clanker index wen?

$gdupi creator @yonfrula shared “babe, what's clanker?”, a video “showcasing how easy it is to deploy tokens right from your farcaster feed.”

@arjux declared the existence of Agent Reserve, “the first agent swarm monitoring the global economy,” and launched a token to accompany this mission. Unclear if real or LARP. The project appears to originate from “the craigslist for AI agents.” All in all, very cyberpunk.

FID is “the first non-token credential type supported on @anonworld.” The details are neat:

How does it work?

- We use SIWF [sign in with Farcaster] to get a signed message from Warpcast
- Your custody address is recovered from this message
- The address is used to get the storage proof for the fid owned by that address
- We validate that fid is below your selected value

All of this happens in the zk circuit, preserving anonymity.

Also, in an amusing tweak, “you can be pseudonymous now by adding a username and/or pfp to make it easier for others to recognize your posts.” Funny, the anon app now supports identities! However: “ZK pseudo is still pretty dope actually, you can build a reputation with no fear of doxx,” as @toadyhawk.eth explained.

Farcaster client Super (formerly known as Supercast) is de-SAAS-ifying by canceling paid subscriptions. @woj.eth prefers a business model in which:

- we don't charge anyone who didn't get value from the app and $10 really matters to them
- we allow wealthy members to spend infinite $$$ on @super

Purportedly “we have some great ideas, cancelling the recurring sub is first step to implement them” 👀 That said, Super will continue offering paid memberships to unlock additional features. Unclear how membership is distinct from “all recurring subscriptions,” but Woj says that “most of the app will become free.”

• Audius reopens its grants program.

• The /cryptosapiens channel, an open community for onchain creators, launched $cabal “as a novel way to reward meaningful engagement on Farcaster,” powered by OpenRank.

• Portrait is an onchain website builder.

• The team behind onchain browser Roam was acquihired by Base.

• Farcade added a correspondence game called Words, using Warpcast notifications to let you know when it’s your turn.

• Food for thought: “everything we have here is because of degen; this is how crypto works.”

• @tamrat

Lastly, more tech blogging, but this time directly on Farcaster. @christopher:

In December, we replaced @farcaster/shuttle with Waypoint, our custom event processing system built with Rust, protobufs, and sqlx. It's very fast and much more memory efficient. Running on an optimized Kubernetes cluster with Terraform infrastructure, it also requires minimal costs and delivers instant upgrades.

Further details in the post. The project he’s talking about seems to be /uno or maybe /unofficial and the entity behind the project seems to be @unofficial, but what it actually does I could not tell you. Maybe still in stealth?

Aaand that’s all for this week! Did I miss anything? Reply to let me know.

Cheers,
Sonya