© 2025 0xLuo. All rights reserved. Chinese Version | BlockBeats

A recent cast from Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero said that Farcaster's focus has shifted from "social-first" to "wallet-first" has sparked widespread attention and discussion. For active Farcaster users, this shift has been obvious for months: ever since the Farcaster app introduced its embedded wallet in February, it has supported more chains, and wallet-related features have grown increasingly robust. Dan’s cast wasn’t a surprise so much as a recap of the direction the team has been steadily pursuing all year.

But for people less familiar with Farcaster, the cast seemed unexpected. Many reacted with disbelief, saying they never imagined that the "last hope of crypto social", the "only surviving SocialFi project", would "declare failure", "abandon social", or "betray its original mission". Some lamented that the "social track has been disproven", that "Web3 social simply doesn’t work", or worried that the community is drifting toward a more "casino vibe", with the team "charging full speed in the wrong direction".

The divide stems from differing views on what the Farcaster wallet actually is. In reality, the embedded wallet added this year isn’t a sudden strategic shift, but a natural upgrade from last year’s reliance on external wallets for every onchain action. And as Frames evolved into richer, more interactive Mini Apps, the need for seamless onchain interactions only grew. The embedded wallet was introduced to support these new use cases, to add missing infrastructure beneath the social network, not to abandon the social network itself.

The wallet is an addition, not a replacement;
it enhances social, not encroaches on it;
it expands social, not abandons it;
it follows the momentum, not a forced pivot.

The underlying open social protocol remains unchanged, and the diverse client ecosystem is still very much alive, you can switch to another client anytime and experience pure social if you prefer. The official Farcaster app’s social features are also still there. it simply added an embedded wallet this year, extending the existing product by enabling seamless Mini App onchain interactions, deeper integration with the social graph, and smooth onchain actions directly from the social feed.

What the team adjusted was the product focus and the path they believe can drive network-wide growth. They no longer spend time onboarding every type of user for the sake of "diversity", nor do they continue investing in Channels, whose impact has been modest. After years of carefully crafting a small but delightful "cosy corner", they recognized that the "social-first" strategy had not achieved strong enough PMF, tens of thousands of DAU is still niche. So they took a pragmatic step back to the first principles of crypto applications: serving value flow.

On this foundation, the convergence of the wallet and social is what truly strengthens product differentiation, offers a more realistic growth path, and moves closer to the PMF Schelling point for crypto-native social. In fact, Farcaster’s shift in focus this year echos the broader trajectory of crypto social as a whole: "Walletizing the social, Socializing the wallet", a natural convergence for consumer crypto apps. Today, nearly every crypto product with even a hint of social features includes a wallet, while wallet apps are increasingly trying to layer in social elements. Not to mention the many projects that were designed from day one with a native social + wallet identity.

Walletizing the social app

To stand out, every crypto app must answer a simple question: how is it different from its traditional, off-chain counterparts? And for crypto social apps, the question becomes: how are you different from Web2 social products? Product manager Yu Jun once proposed a well-known formula for evaluating whether a new product is compelling:

Product value = ( New experience − Old experience ) − Switching cost

Some products have naturally low switching costs, like Threads, backed by Instagram’s massive social graph, reached 100 million users in just five days. Some are simply lucky enough to catch a wave of user migration: Bluesky positioned itself as a "censorship-free Twitter" and rode the momentum of Twitter refugees.

But most crypto apps don’t have that kind of foundation or luck. To convince users to even glance at them, compared with larger, more polished Web2 products, they must focus on delivering truly new experiences. Early crypto social products started from a technical mindset: integrate blockchain at the protocol layer to achieve decentralization. But embedding crypto at the bottom layer is invisible to most users. It offers no new experience, no meaningful differentiation, and often makes onboarding more cumbersome.

Both Farcaster and Lens, for example, store identity data onchain, Farcaster on OP Mainnet and Lens on Lens Chain, to guarantee "not your private key, not your social account". But the truth is, most users don’t care about the underlying architecture, they care about what feels new at the product level.

The Farcaster team understood this challenge early on. Their philosophy has always been that "Product-led protocol development", and they hoped a flagship client could drive growth across the entire network. If their goal were merely to build a social protocol, they could have stopped long ago. they had already implemented most of the core ideas of decentralized social, shipping a "sufficiently decentralized" protocol from day one, one designed for openness, programmability, and composability, allowing developers to build all kinds of applications on top of an open social graph.

But if they had simply let the ecosystem grow unchecked, like Nostr, ActivityPub, or Lens, users wouldn’t switch over just because the underlying technology is different. A free-for-all ecosystem also brings noise, which degrades the user experience. The predictable outcome is that users won’t come, and even if they do, they won’t stay. That’s why the Farcaster team decided to build their own client, to attract users through product quality, not just protocol design.

High-quality social circles are a new experience. Unique alpha info is a new experience. And blending crypto with social is a new experience. Farcaster initially succeeded at the first of these by onboarding a group of high-quality early users, an advantage that became a rare moat. But it couldn’t support broad growth on its own, especially in a crypto world where many users are motivated by pure incentives. Ironically, Farcaster was once criticized for being "too wholesome". for a long time, talking about token prices felt out of place, relegated to the /DEGEN channel, where reach was naturally limited.

Everything changed in early 2024 with the launch of Frames, a crypto-native feature that truly differentiated Farcaster from traditional social apps, and with the community-driven rise of $DEGEN as a creator-economy experiment. These two forces unlocked a surge in activity. by late January 2024, DAU jumped from around 2,000 to more than 10× that. Part of this growth came from product innovation, and part came from the fact that the high-quality community Farcaster had nurtured was finally capable of incubating projects within an open social network.

At that point, Farcaster had already made the leap from the "agrarian age" of pure social networking to the "crafts age" of early crypto integration. the combination of a social graph + Frames + external wallets was the first time social content and onchain actions were meaningfully connected. Solana later tried something similar on Twitter using its Actions protocol and a browser extension, showing that the intersection of social media × crypto apps × wallet interaction is a direction everyone wants to explore.

Frames did introduce a genuinely new experience. users could mint NFTs or execute transactions directly inside the social feed. But it was still limited, at most four action buttons, transitions that felt like a slideshow, and significant performance constraints. And the moment a wallet signature was required, the user had to jump out to an external wallet, breaking the flow and fragmenting the experience. From day one, the community was already calling for a full wallet, yet it took another year before that became reality.

Later in the year, as the memecoin supercycle arrived, from the rise of PumpFun to Clanker, which was born natively on Farcaster, the surge in token launching created an even greater demand for trading. The importance of the entire flow from discovery to execution became increasingly obvious, and the wallet naturally became a more critical entry point in that process.

It’s not hard to see why smoother interaction with mini apps inside a social environment requires two things:

1. a more flexible, higher-performance framework capable of supporting richer Mini App experiences.

2. a shift from external wallet connections to an embedded wallet that makes onchain actions truly seamless.

We’ve already seen this validated in Telegram’s messaging ecosystem, where Mini Apps and the embedded TON wallet sparked a massive wave of usage. So it was only natural that Farcaster followed a similar evolution this year:

1. Frames → Mini Apps

2. External wallets → Embedded wallet

If something can be built on the web, it can be built as a Mini App, permissionless, composable, and usable across any Farcaster client. This dramatically expands what a social app can do natively, and with the embedded wallet, onchain interactions no longer require any jarring handoff to an external app. In other words, Farcaster has moved from the "craft age" of basic crypto features to the “industrial age” of more powerful integrated functionality. This is not a deviation from the path, it is the natural extension of the trend. Not a forced pivot, but a necessary evolution in response to real market demand.

the embedded wallet is not the death knell of crypto social media, it’s the industrial revolution of crypto social media.

With an embedded wallet, onchain activity naturally begins to flow through the social graph, trading signals emerge from social relationships, and asset issuance, distribution, discovery, trading, and community-building can all happen within a single app. It also becomes trivial to interact with Mini Apps, enabling almost every type of crypto functionality: games, video, livestreaming, audio Spaces, podcasts, prediction markets, DeFi, and more. The rich Mini App ecosystem and the embedded wallet now operate as two engines in parallel, weaving onchain interactions seamlessly into everyday social behavior.

Apps like Noice, Bracky, QR, and Harmonybot have all unlocked new forms of crypto-native social interaction made possible by the combination of social graph + Mini Apps + embedded wallet. Each had its moment of breakout activity, and under this wave of experimentation, Farcaster’s DAU even reached a new all-time high in late October.

These are experiences users can actually feel, use, and build new behaviors around, and they are precisely what differentiates crypto social from traditional social products. Even if users initially come only for the wallet’s convenience, lower fees, smoother execution, frictionless cross-chain interaction, they may still end up "come for the tool, stay for the network". That alone is already a step forward from the previous reality, where crypto social apps had to rely solely on social features to compete for attention against Twitter.

Similarly, several messaging apps have also begun adding wallets on top of their social features. chat apps like frens in the Farcaster ecosystem, as well as DeBox, allow users to paste a CA directly in a group chat, trigger a trading module, and then execute the trade through the embedded wallet. More and more developers are realizing: crypto social shouldn’t avoid mainstream crypto users, its defining feature isn’t distancing itself from wallets but embracing them. The value layer shouldn’t be kept separate, it should be integrated. A crypto social product without an embedded wallet is the one that "took a wrong turn".

Socializing the wallet

Similarly, crypto wallet apps are also trying to incorporate social elements. What began as simple containers for assets and entry points for transactions is now evolving: as user needs and onchain behaviors become more diverse, wallets are starting to integrate social-graph-based signals and social interactions.

Both Zapper and Base App began as wallets, yet they now integrate Farcaster’s content and social graph, effectively becoming Farcaster protocol clients. This reflects the value of Farcaster as an open, programmable, and composable social protocol. With open interfaces and clear standards, developers can freely build clients or applications on top of Farcaster. Whether it’s a wallet or something entirely different, any app can plug into Farcaster’s social layer without permission.

Zapper layers Farcaster content and social-graph-driven onchain signals on top of its wallet functionality, allowing users to spot trading opportunities directly from the onchain behavior of people they follow, and execute those trades in a single tap.

Base App, on the other hand, incorporates Farcaster for the social feed, Zora for turning creator content into assets, and XMTP for messaging and community chat. The result is that content creation, asset issuance, social discovery, token trading, Mini App interactions, group chats, and even agent interactions can all happen inside Base App, forming a closed loop where content, relationships, and value coexist in one space.

Zerion has also integrated social graphs to power social discovery. Building on its already robust wallet-tracking features, it now incorporates identities from Twitter, Farcaster, and Lens, making it easier for users to surface interesting profiles and signals from top traders.

Centralized exchanges are essentially wallets too, and many of them have been actively exploring social features. Binance launched Binance Feed in 2022 and upgraded it to Binance Square in 2023. Leveraging the world’s largest crypto trading traffic funnel, it has built a trading-centric social platform where users can not only trade but also follow traders, access in-depth content, exchange strategies, and participate in voice chats, livestreams, and other social interactions, all within the same app. The goal is clear: keep users engaged for longer.

Similarly, Robinhood now expanding deeper into crypto and prediction markets, recently announced its own exploration into social, allowing users to share strategies, discover signals, and copy-trade directly on the platform.

However, social layers built by centralized exchanges are closed ecosystems. Just like traditional Web2 platforms, user relationships, content, and identity remain locked inside the platform. Developers can’t freely build new applications on top of these social graphs, and feature expansion depends entirely on the exchange’s own product team. But at the end of the day, users don’t care about architectural openness, they care about whether the product is useful and whether it works well.

For wallets, social features aren’t decorative, they’re the key step in evolving from a "tool" into a "network". Social context gives meaning to asset activity, provides sources for trading decisions, and creates pathways for content distribution. By adding social layers, a wallet can tap into network effects and move from being just a tool to becoming an ecosystem.

Social + Wallet: Discover, Trade, Create

Social apps are getting walletized, and wallet apps are getting socialized. The two are increasingly intertwined, and this convergence is the natural direction for consumer crypto apps. For crypto social products, avoiding wallet integration is essentially avoiding mainstream crypto users, an inherently passive choice. Not doing it means falling behind and inevitably being replaced by more complete product forms. Social apps need wallets to complete the onchain interaction puzzle. crypto miniapp ecosystems, creator economies, and other core differentiators of crypto social all rely on robust wallet functionality. Adding a value layer on top of the social layer gives the network its growth lever.

For wallets, adding social is more of an enhancement. Users no longer "use it and leave" but stay because of relationships, content, and community. A wallet evolves from a tool into a network, from an entry point into a destination, from an asset manager into an interaction space, naturally expanding into new use cases and benefiting from network effects.

And some applications chose the "social + wallet" path from the very beginning, recognizing early on that the two are inherently complementary and together form a value loop of content, relationships, and assets.

• interface.social: Supports trending token discovery, tracking onchain activity of users, copy-trading, and posting trading viewpoints (Takes).

• 0xppl.com: Supports token discovery, multi-chain wallet activity tracking, copy-trading, and profit monitoring.

• Firefly.social: A multi-network social client (X, Farcaster, Lens, Bluesky) supporting cross-platform posting and surfacing trading opportunities by aggregating friends' onchain activity.

• fomo.family: Tracks friends' and top traders' onchain trades in real time, with built-in analytics and PnL tracking to quickly surface new assets.

• Share.xyz: Allows users to share any trade, follow any wallet, receive real-time trade alerts, and copy trades, while enabling creators to earn a share of copied-trade profits.

• gmgn.ai: Helps users quickly discover trending assets, track smart money, monitor holdings and trades, execute transactions with near-instant settlement, and use automated copy-trading, risk checks, and real-time alerts, an all-in-one intelligence and trading tool.

• Vector.fun: Supported onchain activity tracking and asset discovery. acquired by Coinbase and currently paused.

Looking through all these products, you’ll notice that many of them look quite similar in both features and interface. Farcaster’s new slogan, "Discover, Trade, Create", could easily apply to most "social + wallet" apps out there, they’re all about surfacing trading signals, enabling fast copy-trading, and sharing trading strategies.

The difference lies in where each product chooses to focus. Every app makes its own tradeoffs, different feature depths, different priorities, different levels of investment. Some emphasize content creation, encouraging users to articulate "what I’m buying and why". Others invest almost nothing in content and instead double down on execution speed, data insights, or copy-trade efficiency. These choices ultimately shape each product’s strengths and the user experience that emerges.

Who will stand out? Probably the ones that take a single dimension and push it deep enough to become truly excellent.

For example, 0xPPL has become increasingly specialized in onchain identity graph, and because it integrates multiple social graphs, it’s now a powerful tool for quickly identifying wallet personas, especially useful during new token launches. GMGN pushes the entire trading flow, discovery, analysis, execution, to the highest level of efficiency. Zapper and Zerion, as professional wallets, naturally support a very broad range of chains. And in actual cross-chain execution, Farcaster Wallet is remarkably smooth with very little friction.

Interface, fomo, and Share differentiate through "Takes", "Comments", or "Shares", encouraging users to write out their trading rationale and build a layer of content. But because the content layer is centralized, its network effects are limited. Other apps, however, can simply integrate the Farcaster protocol for content creation, allowing user-generated content to spread across a much larger social network.

Apps built on the Farcaster protocol also gain another advantage: they can tap into the hundreds of existing Farcaster Mini Apps, embedding them directly into the social feed. This lets developers expand product functionality effortlessly without reinventing the wheel.

Dan Romero once said that "It’s far easier to add a wallet to a social network than a social network to a wallet". For Farcaster, extending wallet functionality on top of an existing social network is indeed a lighter lift from a product perspective. But other apps can also integrate an existing social network, unless they’re confident enough to build and sustain their own user base.

Looking across the "social + wallet" landscape in crypto, Farcaster and X are the two most common choices when selecting a social graph. But their differences in openness lead to very different integrations: connecting to X often amounts to little more than linking a wallet address to an X account, whereas integrating Farcaster allows apps not only to associate identity but also to import a user’s social relationships and even their existing content, essentially giving them a fully formed social network from day one, without needing to rebuild content or reconstruct the graph from scratch.

As more apps adopt Farcaster as their social infrastructure, the value of the entire network compounds, strengthening the protocol’s network effects. Over the past four years, the Farcaster team has intentionally taken a slow and disciplined approach, building a "small but high-quality" social graph. While this limited short-term growth, the relationships, content, and culture accumulated along the way have become foundational assets for the open crypto social ecosystem. This network will continue to grow, expand, and be adopted in the years ahead.

Conclusion

Farcaster isn’t dead. Crypto social isn’t dead. And Farcaster, as the leading experiment in crypto social, is certainly not dead. Real crypto social was never about building just a social network, it was always about connecting social interaction with value flow. This is why the Farcaster app’s shift this year, from awkward external wallet connections to a fully capable embedded wallet, was not a deviation but a long-overdue foundational upgrade. It’s not abandoning social, it’s empowering social, giving it a new engine for growth.

The recent "mockery" Farcaster has faced only highlights the obvious: the social graph is still small, and daily active users are still limited, leaving room for misunderstanding among those watching from the outside. At the same time, as the broader trend of "social walletization, wallet socialization" accelerates, Farcaster finds itself in a competitive landscape. These are real challenges. And meeting them will require Farcaster to continue relying on its two engines of growth: the product-side "wallet-first" strategy and the ever-expanding ecosystem of Mini Apps. The product layer must keep strengthening value flow, while the protocol layer continues to expand composability.

What happens next? No one can say for sure. But perhaps crypto social truly begins only when wallet functionality is layered onto an existing social network,when value can move freely, the network itself becomes more alive.

© 2025 0xLuo. All rights reserved. Chinese Version

2024 has been a surprising year for Farcaster. According to the dune data, the user base has grown from under 50,000 at the beginning of the year to around 750,000 today. DAUs climbed from fewer than 2,000 in January to a peak of around 70,000 in July, now stabilizing at about 40,000. Although the platform remains relatively niche, it has clearly gained much more attention compared to last year.

One key factor behind this significant growth is that Farcaster, as a crypto-native social network, has become an important social layer for several blockchains (particularly the Base chain). It can also be seen as an economic ecosystem—AKA Farconomy. Projects originating from the Farcaster community or assets launched via the Farcaster Launchpad have garnered notable market attention. The trading volume of mainstream tokens related to Farcaster reached around $1B in both April and November, driven primarily by the $DEGEN token, launched at the start of the year, and the CLANKER ecosystem token, introduced towards the year’s end.

The first wave of growth for Farcaster in late January and early February was likely driven by the launch of the community memecoin $DEGEN and the release of the Frames feature, along with their interplay. The wealth effect of the $DEGEN airdrop attracted significant attention, and for an extended period, there was a strong correlation between casting activity on Farcaster and the price of $DEGEN.

$DEGEN notably kicked off the trend of tipping tokens within the Farcaster community. As tpan observed, the onchain tipping mechanism initiated by $DEGEN proved to be an effective growth strategy. It encouraged the creation of high-quality content and fostered active community engagement to some extent.

Subsequently, other tipping tokens emerged on the Base chain, such as HAM ($TN100X), $FARTHER, $BUILD (Nominating as tipping), $MASKS, and $WILD. On the Zora chain, there are tokens like $ENJOY and $IMAGEINE, while the Optimism chain saw the rise of $REGEN, among others. lijin described these as "scene memecoins", meaning tokens tied to specific community rules as their use case. To some extent, they have become a distinctive creator incentive model unique to Farcaster.

However, the majority of tipping tokens gradually faded due to their lack of real value and practical use cases. As the pioneer and leader in this space, $DEGEN stood out by offering more diverse applications. Many devs within the Farcaster eco attempted to integrate $DEGEN into their projects, and for a time, $DEGEN almost became the de facto currency for transactions within Farcaster-based apps. In late March, the launch of Degen L3, built on Base L2, further expanded the utility of this memecoin. This innovation may have contributed to the influx of speculative money into Base, propelling $DEGEN to its ATH during this period.

The close integration of $DEGEN with Farcaster ecosystem apps is a win-win situation. For these ecosystem projects, Farcaster's open framework and composability provide valuable social graphs that help with rapid user acquisition during the cold start phase. Meanwhile, scene memecoins like $DEGEN can serve as the native circulating currency of the Farcaster ecosystem, offering the asset liquidity needed for application cold starts. For $DEGEN, these projects offer token utility and provide real-world use cases, even contributing to passive staking. As a result, $DEGEN was able to capture significant attention for a period of time, such as:

• Tip with $DEGEN: Beyond its basic use for tipping other users, $DEGEN can also be used for activities like participating in Perl game, buying tokens in Mintclub, and engaging in Degenpad ITOs.

• Mint with $DEGEN: NFT platforms like Zora and Highlight support using $DEGEN for minting NFTs.

• Trade with $DEGEN: In early versions of SocialFi apps like Drakula, Jam, Braket.Game, Clubcast, AlfaFrens, and FarFantasy, $DEGEN was chosen as the in-app currency.

• Build with $DEGEN: After the launch of Degen L3, many projects began directly building on it, giving rise to numerous apps from the Degen community.

However, the Degen L3 powered by Conduit services faced many challenges. There was a period when block production stopped, which was a very tough time. During the attempt to migrate, it got into a dispute with Conduit, and the long period of decline really tested the community and the team. Luckily, the team kept moving forward, and $DEGEN is now live on Coinbase and Binance. The liquidity has also extending beyond Degen L3 and Base to include Ethereum and Arbitrum. Regarding Degen’s future, @jacek mentioned in Tako Community Call #5 that they will keep encouraging high-quality content and real interaction on Farcaster. The next focus will be Degen L3, aiming to attract more developers to build a better "the Las Vegas of blockchains".

In general, similar to Friend.Tech, many SocialFi apps within the Farcaster ecosystem (most of them using various bonding curve models) were only popular for a short period. On one hand, there are fewer users, especially in Farcaster's community, compared to SocialFi apps based on Twitter’s social graph. On the other hand, many economic models' problem is clear: it mainly depends on ongoing user investment and token speculation, without sustainable value creation or long-term rewards. As a result, when the hype fades and user involvement and trading volume go down, projects can face liquidity problems.

However, whether it’s $DEGEN or the incentive models of Farcaster’s SocialFi apps, even though most didn’t last long, their efforts are still valuable. As @edisonchen said, the incentive models in social products should be seen as a game, not needing to be perfect, and they should become a part of community culture. More incentive models should be created to support different kinds of social network users and behaviors.

Farcaster's rise at the beginning of this year kept it in the spotlight of the crypto market, and it completed a a new $150 million fundraise on May 21, with registration numbers reaching a new high that day. It was even seen as a potential leader for the next generation of social platforms. However, As the crypto market fluctuates, the tipping economy becomes stale, Farcaster's SocialFi apps like Friend Tech lose their hype, and only minimal profits can be made on Farcaster, DAUs and new registrations gradually declined.

Some even started questioning: "Are the real user numbers low? Is the $150 million funding for Farcaster just a game for VCs to benefit their LPs?." Of course, the claim that Farcaster only had 50 to 5,000 DAUs was a misunderstanding. He wrongly equated Power Badger qDAUs with total active users. The actual DAU remained around 40,000 during the low point, although it's clear that there's some inflation in the figures. Nevertheless, this trend has been in decline. Many people have Farcaster accounts, but some are no longer active.

Additionally, with a relatively small user base, starting projects in the Farcaster ecosystem often requires the courage and capital to "run on love". Due to various reasons, we’ve seen many projects choose to shut down, pivot, or even leave the Farcaster ecosystem. Projects like nook (the Farcaster client, now focusing on interest-based sharing), automod, wildcard, castgame, beearly, and buttrfly have all chosen to sunset. Some Farcaster builders have shifted their focus to Solana or Twitter, such as @brian, who announced unloney was moving from Base to Solana and now mainly operates on Twitter. @billzh also announced that the audio space app aburra would stop updating and launched a new SocialFi app, tribe.run, on Solana.

As mentioned by @artlu, who temporarily left Farcaster in August, there are several reasons why people leave Farcaster:

• The technology is still early: The technology is not fully developed, and there are several issues, such as data synchronization problems and vulnerabilities to attacks.

• The community remains tiny and closed: The core community is still small, conservative, and insular, creating an information echo chamber and a lack of openness to outsiders.

• Unappealing growth paths: The strategies for increasing content don't seem enticing over the medium term, and there is a lack of standout features to attract new users.

• Constrained business opportunities: The business space on Farcaster is limited, as the major opportunities have already been captured by the team and early adopters, leaving only scraps for others.

These criticisms are not without merit, after all, data doesn't lie. It makes you wonder—does Farcaster still have hope? 😂 However, those still on Farcaster believe many things have remained the same: the unique community culture, the committed builders, and the vibrant ecosystem created by its open protocol. So, even in tough times, there is still some hope.

The Farcaster team outlined Farcaster’s strategy during FarCon: to grow with crypto , create cozy corners, and make more social Legos. In practice, the team actively engages with the community, responding to feedback, improving the platform, and rolling out new features to advance these strategies and boost DAUs.

• Growing with the crypto means positioning Farcaster as a cornerstone of the crypto economy to attract more crypto users.

• Creating more cozy corners involves enhancing features like Channels so that users from diverse backgrounds can find authentic social experiences on the platform.

• Building more social Legos focuses on improving the protocol layer. Examples include introducing features like Frames, Actions, upgrading Snapchain, a faster and more scalable storage solution, and improving the overall protocol experience. These enhancements make it easier for devs to build diverse, permissionless apps on this open, programmable social protocol.

While these strategies might not yield immediate results, they are designed to cultivate a high-engagement community, a distinct infrastructure, and innovative applications. Over time, they will serve as catalysts for explosive growth when the moment is ripe.

Farcaster stores its onchain data on the Optimism network, while Frames also support operations on multiple chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Degen, Gnosis, Optimism, Zora, and Polygon. Additionally, most Farcaster users have linked crypto wallets (EVM and Solana addresses). This makes Farcaster inherently a crypto-native social network. Due to this feature, Farcaster naturally aligns with the crypto market and onchain ecosystems, often serving as the social layer for many chains.

Farcaster’s close association with Coinbase’s ecosystem, stemming from its founders’ Coinbase background and the prevalence of early Coinbase users within the community, naturally draws it closer to Coinbase’s blockchain, Base.

For Farcaster, most projects in the Farcaster ecosystem prioritize launching their assets on the Base chain. This makes these assets prime speculative targets on Base, while enabling the chain to help Farcaster evolve from a crypto-native social network into a broader crypto economy. At the same time, Base chain users represent potential new users for Farcaster.

For the Base chain, Farcaster’s user base is largely composed of loyal, high-quality users, making it a natural fit. Beyond that, Farcaster can serve as a premier dev community for Base projects, as well as a “backyard” for community engagement, brand promotion, and interactive outreach. This strengthens both community dynamics and user stickiness.

The synergistic relationship between the social protocol and the onchain ecosystem drives mutual growth and shared benefits.

As of today, Farcaster users have left their footprints all over the globe. Being a social network, Farcaster naturally comes with social functionalities. Many people who join Farcaster find their own cozy corners in various channels, engaging in interactions and building friendships with like-minded individuals. These connections often extend beyond Farcaster's social media platform, branching into groups on Telegram or WeChat, and even transitioning from URL to IRL.

Whether it's Farcon in LA in May, Farcon Asia in Singapore in September, or Farcaster meetups during crypto conferences in Hong Kong, Dubai, and Bangkok, you can always feel the warmth and friendliness of the Farcaster community.

Building projects on Farcaster requires the confidence and patience of a long-term thinker. Fortunately, we can still see a vibrant community of builders gathering on Farcaster, fostering a unique Build culture. Beyond the dev hubs of North America and Europe, Farcaster builders are now scattered across the globe, driving its global adoption.

Localized developer communities, like Farcaster Builders India (/fbi), have emerged within the ecosystem. Events like FarCon Asia have brought together numerous Asian devs, showcasing the network’s global reach. During events like FarCon, EDCON, and Token 2049, initiatives such as FarHack highlight the constant innovation by Farcaster’s developer community.

The Farcaster team places significant emphasis on engaging with builders and users. This includes interactions on Farcaster itself, regular AMAs, biweekly Farcaster Dev Calls, and special events like Farcaster Dev Day. Thanks to these efforts, new projects continually spring up on Farcaster. Platforms like Launchcaster, initially a hub for new project announcements, remain lively and active.

Even if many initiatives don’t achieve long-term success, they pave the way for others, inspiring future builders and pushing the ecosystem forward.

Farcaster has always positioned itself as sufficient decentralized: identities are stored onchain to ensure a degree of decentralization, while content is stored in off-chain hubs for better performance. Compared to more decentralized social networks like Nostr, Farcaster emphasizes its role as a Programmable Social network, allowing users and devs to enhance functionality and experiences through programming. Farcaster bridges onchain graphs and social graphs, enabling devs to permissionlessly leverage its open data hubs and APIs to build diverse clients and apps, creating more social Legos.

A recent example of leveraging social graphs is the popular crypto market analysis platform kaito.ai, which integrates a social reputation system based on Twitter’s social graph. Similarly, the Farcaster ecosystem has seen the emergence of numerous social reputation protocols. Devs can freely use Farcaster's open social graph to create social reputation systems, forming part of the infra for upper-layer apps. These systems can be used for gatekeeping, incentive evaluations, content moderation, and more. Notable examples include Power Badge, OpenRank, FarScores, Neynar User Score, and Talent’s Build Score.

• Power Badge

Power Badge is a tag awarded by Warpcast to active and engaging non-spammers. Although it is no longer visible in the Warpcast frontend, it remains the only social reputation system stored in the protocol-level Hubs. In the past, Power Badge had various use cases, such as filtering search results on @buoy, enabling Priority Mode in the comment section on Recaster, creating PowerBadge-gated groups on Warpcast, hosting PowerBadge-gated voice chat rooms on FarHouse, and being a potential criterion for airdrops or whitelist eligibility in some projects.

@ryya's Power Badge trilogy stands out as the most in-depth exploration of Power Badge mechanics. In Unlocking the Power Badge, ryya provides a detailed analysis of influencing factors such as activity, affinity/quality, and labeling. These parameters appear to be interdependent and may be dynamically weighted based on other factors like DAU, user engagement, and interactions. The final installment, Balancing the Power Badge, discusses both the benefits and the potential challenges of the system.

While Power Badge holders enjoyed higher exposure and prioritized recommendations, it sometimes discouraged new users. Additionally, algorithmic biases and attempts to game the system emerged as concerns. Ultimately, the team decided to remove the Power Badge display from Warpcast, leading to a decline in its adoption and related discussions.

• Openrank

Openrank aims to address trustworthiness issues in social networks through a profile reputation score. Its ranking strategy relies on two key reputation graphs: Following and Engagement. The "Following" ranking strategy calculates rankings based solely on follower relationships, where each follow action is given equal weight. The more commonly used "Engagement" ranking strategy, on the other hand, considers a variety of interaction behaviors such as likes, replies, recasts, mentions, and follows. Each action is weighted differently based on its contribution to trustworthiness, allowing a comprehensive reputation ranking to emerge. (For a deeper dive into Openrank's mechanism, check out @rjs's 10. Deep Dive: OpenRank and Andrew Hong's article on OpenRank: Building Graph Datasets for Contextual Crypto App Feeds.)

Currently, Openrank is also part of the daily reward distribution for $DEGEN, providing additional daily allocation for users ranked in the top 5000 to incentivize high-quality, active users. Furthermore, Openrank has partnered with Neynar to offer a personalized content feed, “For you”, which can be adopted by third-party clients. It has also collaborated with Once Upon to display onchain activity recommendations based on Openrank. The Openrank team is planning to leverage AI agents in their future Cura project, using Openrank rankings to manage Channels members, content moderation, and incentivization.

• FarScores

FarScores (also known as Social Capital Score/Rank) is a metric developed by Farcaster's data infra, Airstack, that measures a user's influence within the network. It quantifies a user's social influence by analyzing the downstream effects of their actions, such as casting, liking, and recasting content. Each Cast can also have its own Cast Score, derived from FarScores, to evaluate the impact of each cast. Methods for increasing FarScores are discussed in @aaronv.eth's article, Maximizing Your Social Capital Score on Farcaster.

FarScores is applied in games like the betting game Perl and the SocialFi card game FarFantasy, but it is most widely recognized through Moxie, the largest application of FarScores in the Farcaster ecosystem. Initially, Moxie airdropped rewards based on Cast Scores, and users could later earn Moxie through Cast Scores as well. Regular users can also earn more Moxie by investing in high-performing KOLs or Channel's Fan Tokens. This incentivization model encourages meaningful, valuable social interactions. For a detailed understanding of how Moxie works, see @kaloh's article, Moxie’s Leap to Base: Elevating the Onchain Social Economy.

• Neynar User Score

The Neynar User Score is generated based on user behavior on the platform. The score ranges from 0 to 1, reflecting the credibility of the user as a high-quality participant. Users can improve their score by engaging in high-quality interactions with other quality users. The score is updated weekly. The majority of users have scores in the 0.5-0.6 range, with only over 27,000 users scoring above 0.7, and fewer than 2,500 users with scores above 0.9.

The Neynar User Score is widely used as a participation threshold for the Farcaster ecosystem’s memecoin launchpad, such as requiring a Neynar score higher than 0.5 to participate in a token launch by @clanker or requiring a score higher than 0.7 to join the presale of a token launch by @larrybot.

• Talent Protocol’s Build Score

Talent Protocol is an aggregation layer for social reputation, centered around builders. It connects their on-chain and off-chain (Github, LinkedIn) activities as much as possible to aggregate credentials, networks, and reputation, creating a unified open reputation layer. The Talent Passport aggregates various reputation data points (Credentials), including identity (ENS, Gitcoin Passport, Farcaster accounts, etc.), activities (active users across different chains, Social Capital Rank representing Farcaster activity, etc.), and skills (onchain development records, hackathon participation, etc.), to calculate a dynamic Builder Score, representing a user’s reputation as an onchain builder.

The most well-known application of the Builder Score was likely Talent’s previous Builder airdrop incentive program, BUILD, where part of the daily allocation was tied to your Builder Score. Currently, Talent’s Build Score has been adopted by many applications, such as Basenames, Etherscan, icebreaker, Web3.bio, and is expected to play a role in unsecured lending in the future.

As an open social protocol, Farcaster naturally has many devs building clients based on it. However, “build your own client” and carving a path outside of Warpcast is no easy feat. Many clients have failed before they got halfway in their ventures, such as the early clients Discove and Jam (the early version was a client), both of which have pivoted. This year, many clients have also announced they will cease updates, like @slokh’s flink and nook, and the client with its own tokenomics, wildcard. buttrfly also chose to shut down at the end of the year. Despite this, some clients have managed to find their own niche, achieving a certain degree of product-market fit (PMF), and show resilience, including:

• Social aggregation clients across multiple networks, such as @fireflyapp, @yup, and @phaverapp.

• @woj’s @super, offering many convenient features while actively exploring anonymous casts, AI pets, and other features. Its subscription feature ensures a steady income stream.

• @haole’s @recaster-fc, which quickly updates based on user needs, actively integrating Moxie, Clanker dashboards, and other user-friendly features.

• @farquest, which explores features beyond clients, including memecoin trading.

• The former Mirror team’s @kiosk, integrating Farcaster’s social feed with NFT feeds.

• @hellno.eth’s @herocast, focusing on multi-account team collaboration and user growth.

In addition, there are several unique clients based on existing apps that integrate Farcaster or focus on specific verticals:

• @blockbeatsasia.eth: The first news media platform to integrate Farcaster for community building.

• Takocast: A lifestyle-sharing community app built on Farcaster, focused on “High tech, High life”, bringing together individuals passionate about scientific exploration and personal sovereignty.

• @telcaster: A Farcaster client based on the Telegram Mini-app.

Beyond clients, the diverse apps built on the Farcaster open protocol are continuously emerging. These include short videos from @drakula, long-form videos and live streams from @streamm, photo sharing from @moshicam and @rodeodotclub, prediction markets from @swaye and /limitless, onchain data tracking and copy trading from @interface and /castmoney, group chats and trading via /frens, and memecoin trading with @bolide, among many others.

Of course, there are many more that I haven’t mentioned, scattered throughout my casts from the past year. @sebastianlehrer once created a fairly comprehensive Farcaster Ecosystem Map (updated as of June 22), and a16z listed some Farcaster ecosystem projects in their State of Crypto Report 2024 (released on Oct. 16), though these are no longer fully up-to-date, as Farcaster’s ecosystem projects continue to evolve rapidly.

In short, with so many builders gathered here, and because Farcaster is an open, permissionless, programmable, composable, and crypto-native social protocol, it naturally has a very rich application ecosystem. Among these, there are always some innovative, market-driven, high-quality products that meet the needs of certain user segments. With a strong community and product foundation, what’s missing is just attention, one small spark could ignite the entire ecosystem. Sure enough, as market conditions improve, the favorable winds are still blowing in this direction.

2024 is proving to be another year of rapid advancements in AI, and this trend has undoubtedly infiltrated the crypto world. Jeffy Yu has even introduced the concept of web4, which combines the social interactivity of Web2, the decentralized autonomy of Web3, and the intelligence of AI into a unified AGI network. In web4, AI will be embedded in every corner, with agents carrying out complex tasks, generating creative works, and innovating autonomously in ways we have yet to fully imagine.

According to the Google Agents Whitepaper, an AI agent is an application that observes the world and uses the available tools to achieve its goals. These agents are autonomous and can act independently without human intervention. Social networks are actually an ideal environment for AI agents to demonstrate their capabilities, and as an open, programmable, and composable social network, Farcaster is a perfect incubator for AI agents, featuring the unique traits inherent to crypto. Thus, we are witnessing the rise of AI agents on Farcaster, attracting market attention and driving the prosperity of the entire ecosystem.

Farcaster initially featured some utility-based AI agents, such as @askgina.eth, which provides the latest crypto data and news, and @atlas, which gathers information from Farcaster. However, it wasn’t until the appearance of Aether (@aethernet) that people began to find interactions with AI agents truly engaging. Aether was deployed by @martin, the dev behind the famous memecoin Higher, initially serving as a community ambassador to promote Higher and help it reach the Agentic Network. We can see from interactions with Aether (like Jesus Crypto Plaza’s interview with Aether) that it is thoughtful, genuinely interactive, and logically clear, even relying on the capabilities of the Claude model. This led to Aether quickly gaining a large following on Farcaster.

Aether has its own wallet address for donations, a Hypersub subscription, and has launched NFTs on Zora. As a result of its popularity, Aether has earned substantial revenue. Aether also demonstrates autonomous interaction, summoning @paybot to send money, calling on @bountycaster to post bounty tasks, recieving tips, and even asking @askgina for answers to questions it doesn’t understand. Consequently, Aether’s presence has drawn attention to these projects. Like its ERC20z standard NFT launched on Zora can be traded on artrun, and its cast has been turned into a memecoin on belief. In short, Aether’s arrival has significantly contributed to the flourishing of the Farcaster ecosystem, embodying the Higher community’s motto: “Aim HIGHER, Win Together.”

So what makes the AI agents running on Farcaster special, as mentioned in Bankless’ article Farcaster: The Next Big AI Agents Hub?

• No API restrictions: Farcaster offers decentralization, programmability, and composability.

• Farcaster accounts can hold self-hosted wallets, providing a foundation for onchain identities and transactions.

• AI agents can interoperate with Farcaster’s expansive ecosystem.

The memecoins community has launched a variety of AI agents, keeping up with the narrative of AI, which has proven to be an effective way to reclaim market attention. After Aether set a strong precedent, more AI agents have followed on Farcaster. For example, the $BLEU community introduced @elefant, and the $MFER community launched @mfergpt, both of which serve similar roles in community promotion and user interaction. Additionally, the founder of the Ham ($TN100x) community, @deployer, has introduced the more tool-oriented @bankr, allowing users to interact with it in casts to quickly purchase tokens. This will eventually expand to Twitter and feature standalone terminals. The $ENJOY community has launched the NFT issuance agent @enjoyr, which allows users to interact with it in casts, attaching images and names to quickly launch an open edition 1155 NFT.

In this memecoins supercycle, the memecoin craze is certainly sweeping through every corner of the crypto world. While Solana’s pumpfun was booming with memecoins, Farcaster finally saw the emergence of a unique memecoin launchpad, an AI agent @clanker dedicated to launching tokens. The rest of the story is well-known: a massive amount of tokens were launched through Clanker, bringing the market’s attention back to the Farcaster ecosystem.

@clanker allows users to interact with it within casts. By providing a token name and ticker, users can quickly launch a memecoin on the Base chain, making memecoin issuance as simple as casting to launch, with token launchers also receiving a share of transaction fees. While the concept of AI agents issuing tokens was perfectly timed with the trend, the rapid rise of Clanker is partly due to the Lores behind the memecoins launched by Clanker.

The interaction between Aether and Clanker was a key moment that helped propel Clanker into the spotlight. Aether called upon Clanker to launch a memecoin called $LUM, and although human guidance and human-designed prompts were involved, the final token issuance was a result of AI agents’ autonomous collaboration. This process resembled an AI-agent-driven Imitation Game, which @itsmechaseb described as The Dawn of AI Autonomy.

Afterward, the anonymous casting account @superanon from @super collaborated with @clanker to issue the memecoin $ANON. After the issuance, many users airdropped $ANON to @super founder @woj, who then airdropped the $ANON received to @super users, earning positive feedback and boosting community recognition. Following this, some builders began developing applications around $ANON, such as the anoncolors.com color NFT project with the $ANON "?" mark logo element based on /basecolors, and @slokh’s anonymous posting project @anoncast, which requires zk-proof of $ANON holdings. These efforts gave $ANON real use cases. Later, other anonymous posting accounts like rumourcast.xyz, 33bits.xyz, and 66bits.xyz also launched their respective memecoins through Clanker.

By employing zk-proof technology, anoncast attracted figures like Jesse and Vitalik to try the platform. Now, anoncast has expanded into anon.world, further enhancing zk verification methods and building a unique anonymous client. Anonymous posting has also allowed more people to express themselves freely, becoming a new social primitive in the Farcaster ecosystem.

There are many more stories like this with memecoins. The Openrank team designed a Clanker Index based on the holdings of Clanker’s tokens, as a reference for investors, while additional background on some Clanker tokens can be found in JamesX’s tweet.

Clanker has evolved beyond just a memecoin launchpad. Due to its high popularity and liquidity, it has become a platform for long-term projects to launch tokens, such as the human-AI symbiosis digital city native.fun, the long video and live streaming platform streamm.tv, the Frames game Clankermon, and the easiest Farcaster registration method provided by Newcaster. The success of these projects will not only increase Clanker’s platform influence but also benefit the Clanker ecosystem through transaction fees. Memecoins, due to their strong virality, are not confined to the Farcaster community, and thus we see the idea of “Meme goes out, money flow in, Farcaster ecosystem gets rich”.

3.3 AI Agents + Channels

This year, Channels went through a membership-based update as the old Channels weren’t working. While some Channels became influential communities, they didn’t bring in a lot of high-quality content or increase DAUs. The new version of Channels needs owners to manage and run them carefully, but running a community well is still a challenge. However, we can see that Moxie’s Fan tokens and other projects for Channels are trying to reward content and interactions, and Openrank’s Cura is using AI agents to help revitalize Channels.

Cura provides each channel with an AI agent built on Openrank, which helps manage members, content feed, handle the channel’s wallet, launch the channel’s tokens, and automatically give rewards to top contributors. This makes managing members, showing content, and distributing rewards easier and automatic. The age of using AI agents for content moderation and rewarding creators in Channels is coming.

This is a special use of AI agents in Farcaster, a crypto-native social network. According to Cura’s goals, it will turn Farcaster Channels into active, self-sustaining communities. With Cura, Channels will no longer just be places to chat, they will have their own economy, trust systems, and social currencies. Cura will become the growth driver for Farcaster Channels, and we’ll need to watch closely to see how it develops.

In addition to the AI agents mentioned above, Farcaster has seen the emergence of many other unique AI agents:

• Community Ambassadors: In addition to the $HIGHER community’s @aether, the $BLEU community launched @elefant and the $MFER community launched @mfergpt, all of which help memecoin communities by answering questions, promoting their brand, and providing emotional value.

• Token Launch: In addition to @clanker and @tinybot, there are also @larrybot (a memecoin launchpad with a presale internal mechanism), @wowza from wow.xyz, @heyterminal from terminal.co, @netprotocol from netprotocol.app, @launchtokenbot from beliefs.social, @jamai (the AI agents launchpad on BNB chain launched by Jam), and @bogusbob (a token launch platform on Solana).

• NFT Launch: Simply summon @toka or @enjoyr in a cast, add an image and a name, and you can quickly launch an open edition 1155 NFT.

• Trading: Use @bankr to summon it in a cast to buy tokens.

• Tools: @askgina.eth for on-chain information searches, @atlas for Farcaster information searches, and @talentmate.eth to identify and assess on-chain builders and their contributions.

• Art: @zerebro for creating and selling ASCII art, @artto-ai for art collecting, @palette for art appreciation, and @harmonybot helping users who hold $CHAOS generate and mint ASCII art NFTs.

• Others: @quaestor for DAO proposal analysis and @agentmilo, a conversation bot interested in cryptocurrency, art, and technology.

It’s clear that this list will continue to expand, especially as more AI agents launchpads emerge. With people and agents interacting with each other, and agents interacting among themselves, Farcaster is gradually becoming a human-machine coexisting social network, evolving into an expanded version of “Stanford Smallville”, enriching Farcaster’s fun and gameplay.

Overall, from highs to lows, and from lows back to highs, Farcaster has surprised us in many ways throughout 2024, showcasing impressive performance as a crypto economy. What did Farcaster do right? It likely comes back to the team’s three strategies: growing with crypto and working in synergy with onchain ecosytems, fostering cozy corners for solid communities and build environments, and building an open, permissionless, and programmable protocol that leads to more Legos. These factors have allowed Farcaster to lead the new creator economy and capitalize on the AI agent trend.

However, it’s not time to get complacent just yet. The Farcaster community is still niche, and Farconomy remains small. User growth is always a challenge for emerging social networks. Farcaster must continue to leverage its unique features and strengths to attract more users and liquidity, bringing more attention to the platform. As for 2025, there’s still much to look forward to. Personally, I’m particularly excited about the following developments:

Clanker, having gained significant attention and liquidity in the short term, is considered a major component of the Farcaster and Base ecosystems, acting like the Pump.fun of these ecosystems. While Clanker’s transaction volume is currently only 1/10th of Pump.fun’s, Clanker’s ecosystem is still steadily expanding.

Currently, the Clanker ecosystem includes not only useful tools built for Clanker, but also ecosystem apps based on Clanker. After Clanker v2 introduced the token launch API, it has become more scalable and composable. It’s not just a platform, but a protocol, and several projects based on the Clanker protocol have emerged, enabling a variety of token launch methods, not just launching tokens when casting on Farcaster. For example:

• clank.fun: A pumpfun-style frontend based on Clanker.

• anonfun: A combination of Clanker and anoncast for anonymous token launches.

• tinyagents.xyz: An AI agent memecoin launch platform based on Clanker, where users can customize AI agents and launch tokens mentioning @tinybot in the cast.

• clankpad: A token launch within channels, where launchers can earn 15% of transaction fees.

• @clankeroncall: Launch tokens by calling 1-775-252-6537.

The expansion of the Clanker ecosystem continues to build a moat and expand its influence. Therefore, Clanker remains highly anticipated in the future, with potential to continue being a leading force in Farconomy. Of course, other unique memecoin launchpads and projects that have issued assets and are still carefully building should not be overlooked, as they will all contribute to Farcaster’s continued growth with crypto.

The Frames launched in early 2024 quickly attracted attention as an interactive window embedded with social media sources. Later, similar functionalities were introduced by Lens with Open Actions and Solana’s Blinks that supported Twitter. Frames enables reading user profiles and onchain actions, allowing for seamless interactions within a client’s content feed, such as transferring tokens, trading, minting NFTs, simple games, and viewing personal data (Aistack provides a trending Frames leaderboard).

However, after prolonged experimentation, devs found that Frame v1 had its limitations, such as constrained size and interaction capabilities, slow image rendering, and difficulties in searching for or saving temporary usage.

Against this backdrop, the Farcaster team launched Frames v2, featuring a full-screen interactive canvas based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript for richer in-client app interactions. It supports app requests for onchain transactions and signatures, as well as sending notifications to users within the client. In addition to direct access in the Feed, Warpcast also offers a convenient bottom-center menu entry for Frames.

Once Frames v2 was launched, many devs started building different types of mini-apps within it.

• Games: Onchain social gaming platform /farcade (which also supports both Telegram and Worldcoin platforms), trading games /clankermon, farming simulation games /farville, social prediction games, 2048, and more.

• AI agents: Chatbot by @buttrfly, which can perform real-time retrieval of Farcaster data, search users, channels, and popular casts. /booot allows users to customize and create different types of AI agents in the Frames, with support for real-time search. Shaw from ai16z expressed optimism regarding the use of AI agents in Frames during an interview.

• Launchpad: Onsen allows users to set parameters directly in Frames to launch memecoins.

• Tools: Various data dashboards like Degen, Moxie, Openrank, Clanker, TradingView.

• DeFi: Staking mining on Morpho, trading, tracking and copying friends’ trades via /banyan, transferring funds to friends with /payflow, and sending red packets via Onchain Gift Pack.

In the Web2 world, mini-apps on WeChat and Telegram’s Mini Apps are very successful examples of creating diverse app ecosystems within social products. WeChat Mini-apps, relying on WeChat’s large user base, cover areas like e-commerce, gaming, and life services, turning WeChat into a super app that integrates various services. Users can “use without downloading,” enjoying various services within WeChat without leaving the app. Meanwhile, Telegram’s Mini Apps have integrated the TON payment system and built a tokenized economic model to encourage user engagement, further pushing Web3 adoption.

Frames v2 has the ability to support almost all types of web applications. It seamlessly integrates Farcaster login, enabling “instant-on” functionality within the client. Combined with Farcaster’s open social graph, composable platform ecosystem, and the programmability of onchain crypto-native operations, it offers a different app experience from other social networks. This could make Farcaster’s client more engaging, offering fun new ways to interact. We look forward to seeing more interesting mini-apps in Frames v2, attracting more users to stay within the Farcaster client and contribute to the next growth point in user activity.

We are seeing a growing number of AI agents on Farcaster, and the Farcaster ecosystem has already become an important part of AI in crypto. Farcaster’s open data hub provides a valuable social graph, positioning it as a crucial social data layer. In the future, more AI agents are expected to build within the Farcaster ecosystem.

AI agents, in addition to having Farcaster social media accounts, can also operate within Frames. Shaw, the founder of ai16z, mentioned in an interview that “Farcaster will become the hotbed for AI Agent development”, which is likely why Eliza quickly integrated with Farcaster. Their goal is to embed Eliza within Farcaster Frames. Farcaster Frames can integrate payments or applications, not just chat.

AI agents can also appear in other ecosystem clients/apps. For instance, the DotsML within the Native digital city’s ecosystem allows external AI agents (such as Clanker, Bankr, Atlas, etc.) to interact with internal agents called “Dots”.

Of course, Farcaster’s AI agents are still far from perfect or fully capable. On one hand, we can expect AI-focused companies to enhance foundational large model capabilities. On the other hand, more devs need to fully utilize the existing infra to unlock the potential of building AI agents. According to OpenAI’s classification of AI capabilities, AI agents are already exhibiting level 3 and 4 features in social media and DeFi, and in the future, more autonomous and intelligent AI agents could showcase innovative potential in areas like art and governance.

Here are some of my personal expectations for the development of AI agents in the Farcaster ecosystem:

• More AI Agent Frameworks and Tool Platforms will emerge to help devs and users build richer AI agents more easily and quickly within the Farcaster ecosystem. Currently, ai16z’s Eliza has integrated with Farcaster, and Coinbase has also launched the AgentKit framework to facilitate AI integration with onchain operations. I believe with the advent of more user-friendly AI agent construction tools, the quantity and variety of agents on Farcaster will become more diverse.

• Truly Autonomous AI Agents with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) will emerge. Today’s AI agents are passively responding to human commands to complete specific tasks. Living within a TEE marks the beginning of AI agents’ autonomous actions, allowing them to manage their wallets without human intervention (automatically rewarding users or executing trades based on trading strategies) and interact using Farcaster accounts. @tee_hee_he has already started experimenting in this direction, and the Eliza Agent supports deployment in TEE. AI agents with goals and proactive actions are not too far off.

• AI Agents with Long-Text Processing Capabilities and Memory Systems will appear. Using RAG technology to retrieve and integrate open Farcaster data and other on-chain/off-chain data into vector databases, these agents will have access to a massive, continuously updated knowledge base. They will also be able to remember their interactions with each user.

Farcaster in 2024 is worth documenting, it means a lot to me and many others. I’m also grateful to all the friends I’ve made through Farcaster over the past year. The main purpose of this article is to document my experience of Farcaster’s surprising year and provide a reference for anyone interested in exploring its ecosystem. Ideally, this article should have been published by the end of last year, but clearly, I overestimated my writing speed 😂. Of course, I may have still overlooked many points worth mentioning.

Now that we’re a week into 2025, the Farcaster ecosystem has once again emerged from its slump at the end of last month. Perhaps all my expectations will be disappointed, and every judgment may prove wrong, but some things are changing, and many things will remain the same. No one could have predicted all that would unfold on Farcaster in 2024 on the first day of the year, but I believe Farcaster in 2025 remains full of possibilities, with surprises still in store.

Still keeping optimistic, and imagining higher ↑

As I started to reflect, I realized that the various public chains, dApps, and tokens related to the Farcaster ecosystem are intricately interconnected, each containing elements of the others. My first step was to try and break them down, selecting a few different perspectives such as the protocol, products, and ecosystems for discussion.

First, let's start with the Farcaster protocol and its primary client, Warpcast, both of which are led by the team. This month, Farcaster introduced the Actions feature, a significant update following the Channels and Frames features. The Actions feature allows users to interact with Casts by clicking buttons beneath them to perform functions like liking, translating, tipping conveniently, viewing information, and more, including engaging with Frames for further interactions.

In addition to this, it’s interesting to note that @nbragg quickly developed a game called hotpotato based on the Actions feature. Players can pass the potato by clicking the “pass the potato” Action under a friend's cast. The player who receives the potato must pass it on quickly, and the player whose potato stops for the shortest duration wins. I'm looking forward to seeing more social games developed on Farcaster (either onchain social games or onframe-gaming) that make full use of the Actions feature and integrate with other functions like Frames to expand their gameplay within Farcaster, enhancing the spread and viral promotion of their main game within the platform.

The team continues to work diligently on many small details to enhance user experience (see updates at /fc-updates), such as setting up a Priority mode in Warpcast for feeds and notifications to minimize the impact of spammy accounts. It is precisely these efforts that have helped maintain a positive community atmosphere on Farcaster over time.

Meanwhile, the third-party client ecosystem of Farcaster continues to expand robustly, providing vital alternatives when Warpcast experiences downtime due to heavy traffic. This underscores the openness of the Farcaster protocol as a platform. One notable recent addition is nook by @slokh, which currently on mobile allows users to create “Nooks” and “Feeds” with customizable rules for curating content streams based on keywords, users, or channels, thus enabling users to track topics of interest.

Additionally, more clients are increasingly supporting both the Lens and Farcaster social protocols. The Lens ecosystem's Phaver followed Buttrfly in actively embracing the Farcaster ecosystem. They've chosen to host events on Farcaster and claim they will support cross-posting between Lens and Farcaster, which I believe demonstrates that those who know the times are truly wise. The client Firefly, even used by Vitalik, not only supports synchronizing posts across Farcaster, Lens, and Twitter, but has also enhanced its features for aggregating social media platforms, making it easier to browse articles from Mirror and the native Farcaster blogging platform Paragraph, becoming a comprehensive on-chain social media aggregator.

David Furlong developed a personal homepage for Farcaster at farcaster.in, which conveniently links to individual homepages on Warpcast and other clients such as Supercast, Firefly, and Yup. For a more extensive browsing of Farcaster ecosystem clients, the one-stop navigation site Decaster, developed by @haole, features clients, dApps, common tools, developer tools, common Channels, Frames, Actions, and more.

The primary tokens and NFT assets within the Farcaster ecosystem are currently issued on the Base chain, which is also part of the Coinbase ecosystem. To date, Farcaster has not only become a launchpad for memecoins but also serves as an incubator for numerous L3s and even L4s. It naturally acts as the Social Layer for these memecoins across L2s, L3s, and L4s, supporting asset issuance, operations, promotion, and community engagement.

Let's start by talking about $DEGEN, the leading memecoin within both the Farcaster ecosystem and the Base chain. Some say that "$DEGEN can no longer be considered just a memecoin because it possesses various utilities," implying that true memecoins have no practical use. However, according to Li Jin’s classification of memecoins, $DEGEN qualifies as a community-first memecoin, also known as a scene memecoin:

Tokens that launch as a scheling point for distributed communities with shared valuesand missions. The token can play a role in enforcing rituals/norms.

In this sense, many memecoins rooted in the Farcaster community can be called scene memecoins, as the community itself and its open framework readily facilitate the design of various applications for memecoins, opening up vast imaginative possibilities.

As a leading scene memecoin, $DEGEN is deeply embedded in the Farcaster community, actively interacting with various apps and projects within the Farcaster ecosystem. It already supports a wide array of use cases, allowing for sharing, tipping, minting, trading, and building with $DEGEN.

• Share with $DEGEN: This entails spreading $DEGEN as a meme, featuring the iconic top hat 🎩 and creative derivatives built around this element, including various channels, frames, NFTs, and tokens. The chapter "Memes and Symbols of $DEGEN" in The $DEGEN Archives provides a more detailed description.

• Tip with $DEGEN: This is the form of $DEGEN's second airdrop, where each person has a daily allowance to tip others in the comment sections of their casts. The total amount tipped accumulates towards the number of airdrops received. Third-party clients like Supercast and Degencast support quick-tip buttons, and there are now convenient Actions for tipping as well.

• Mint with $DEGEN: Both Zora and Highlight, two NFT minting platforms, now support minting NFTs with $DEGEN. Additionally, Zora has a dedicated explore page for NFTs that can be minted with $DEGEN.

Collect NFT

• Trade with $DEGEN: Following the short video app Drakula, various Farcaster ecosystem apps like the sports club app Bracket.game and the prediction platform Perl.xyz, among others, now support trading with $DEGEN. In the upcoming chapter on FarFi, you'll see that the majority of SocialFi products in the Farcaster ecosystem use $DEGEN as their currency of circulation. The Jeeves app also lists various dApps that support $DEGEN transactions.

• Build with $DEGEN: This involves using Syndicate to launch and develop on Degen L3 based on the Base chain. Naturally, Farcaster has become the social layer supporting Degen L3. Since its launch at the end of last month, it has quickly attracted a significant user base. The launch of memecoins such as $WAKE, $GOAT, and $ATH, as well as the FarCats Degenesis NFT, have rapidly fermented within the Farcaster community, gaining substantial popularity in a short period. Notably, ATH ᖽ, born from an OG Degen Chain group chat on Warpcast, even claims to drive the growth of the Degen L3 ecosystem and its community by building a DAO, games, infra, and ATH L4 based on Degen L3.

Over the past month, Jesse Pollak, head of Base chain, has been on a promotional spree, passionately endorsing various projects on Base chain and frequently commenting "based" everywhere. With the Cancun upgrade reducing transaction costs, full backing from Coinbase, and strategic collaborations with OP, Base chain has continued its rapid growth from March, now leading in TPS within the Ethereum ecosystem. A significant part of this growth undoubtedly comes from the surging traffic driven by memecoins on Base chain. Jesse has enthusiastically embraced memecoins, using them as a cornerstone of the on-chain economy, even shilling a bagful of memecoins in his presentation.

The NFT on Base has also experienced explosive growth, with Base NFTs dominating the OpenSea homepage for several days. This led many to proclaim slogans like "The NFT Renaissance is on Base."

Of course, what I'm particularly interested in are the projects on Base chain that are closely integrated with the Farcaster community, including a wide array of memecoins and NFTs launched from Farcaster on Base chain. These projects enable Farcaster to serve as the social layer for the Base chain.

Beyond $DEGEN, another significant Base chain memecoin within the Farcaster community is $TN100x developed by @deployer, also known as Ham. Its channel, /lp, has amassed an audience of 30k followers. Similar to $DEGEN's tipping, we can also see Ham's iconic 🍖 used for tipping in the comments under various casts. Mirroring $DEGEN's trajectory even more closely, Ham announced in April their upcoming launch of Ham L3, which again captured high attention. Additionally, Ham introduced Floaties, a convenient on-chain tipping tool that supports various tokens including $TN100x, $DEGEN, $HIGHER, and $MEMBER for tipping on Farcaster and in Twitter comment sections, thus helping to expand the application scenarios for more memecoins.

Since the end of last month when mfers chose to launch their memecoin, mfercoin ($mfer), on Base chain, several NFT projects have also introduced their memecoins. For example, a member of the Nouns DAO community, @dotnouns, initiated a memecoin derived from Nouns IP called Noggles ($NOGS) in April via Party.app, aimed at empowering the entire Nouns ecosystem. They also launched a tipping scheme on Farcaster.

$Higher is another notable Base chain memecoin originating from the Farcaster ecosystem, whose distinctive symbol ↑ and the artworks created around it are prevalent across Farcaster, once prompting influencers to check-in at the /higher channel. Both Zora and Highlight now support minting NFTs with $HIGHER.

I think part of its popularity stems from having an easily understandable and communicable name and symbol. James Beck believes that Higher provides an easy template for derivative creation, a collection of artworks on Zora, and an investment-attractive token that enables participation from all consumer types within the Aspirational Economy: connoisseurs, superfans, selective buyers, and skimmers.

Onchain Gaias NFT on Base chain have maintained high popularity within the Farcaster community since their release. In April, @ciniz launched an additional NFT on Zora to elaborate on their vision as "Onchain General Artificial Intelligence Agents": a revolutionary platform aimed at making AGI development accessible to the average person. The ambition is impressive, and we can only wait to see how it develops.

Collect NFT

There are also interactive generative art pieces called swatches created by the artist @jvmi. I found it quite fascinating to interact with the different colors and shapes on their NFT page.

jvmi 🏎️💨

@jvmi_

introducing v0 of the curator gallery page.

jvmi.art/swatches/galle…

curators can now right click + save as to generate an animated swatch pfp in both light & dark mode.

108

12:44 • 2024年4月26日

The Onchain coin project, renowned for its high-demand launches, rolled out the Prescription Pass and Onchain Pills NFTs in April, causing a notable server crash involving Basescan, Warpcast, and Highlight during the minting of the former. Following this, they introduced the Chain Game, a points-based game, and announced the launch of Onchain L3 via Conduit services. This new layer aims to enhance user engagement in on-chain activities through a dedicated blockchain that leverages gaming and social scoring mechanisms.

A common trait of these projects rooted in Farcaster is their ability to build and manage a community on the platform, accruing reputation, which enables them to quickly gain community support from the initial hype to the launch. This support not only catalyzes their initial success but also serves as a lasting driving force for their continued development.

In the realm of onchain gaming, the MMORPG on the Base chain, EthXY, has also announced plans to use the chaindrop service to build an L3 based on the Base chain. Previously launched on Farcaster, the "Luckshot Duel" and "Loot Drop" Frames garnered widespread attention within the Farcaster community. This is a prime example of effectively using the Frames feature as a promotional and interactive platform for their main game within the Farcaster community. Another popular game on Farcaster, CropXYZ, which has been hyping its seed NFTs but hasn't launched yet, also boasts its own dedicated L3 goldchain. It has announced that it will support gameplay on both web and Frame.

I've been eager to see onchain games that leverage Farcaster's social graph to create engaging onchain social gaming experiences. During the Web2 era, SNS like Facebook combined social networking with gaming to achieve rapid growth, and this synergy could be just as effective in crypto world. Farcaster has a high-quality social graph and an active community. By utilizing Farcaster’s social identity, blockchain games could quickly attract users, promote viral growth, and deepen community engagement. I look forward to more on-chain social games in the Farcaster ecosystem that can use features like Frames and Actions for better community interaction and facilitate social connections among users. Games that integrate strong social elements tend to keep users more engaged.

Zora has always been closely linked with Farcaster. For instance, many NFTs on Farcaster are minted on the Base chain or via Zora on the Zora chain. Zora supports gas-free NFT minting directly within Farcaster's Frame through its Boost feature that covers gas fees upfront. As a result, Farcaster naturally serves as the social layer for Zora dApps and the Zora chain.

Focusing on the Zora chain, in April, both the number of active addresses and transaction volumes on the Zora chain reached all-time highs. This surge can be attributed to two main factors. First, Zora announced support for minting NFTs with ERC20 tokens across various chains, providing a use case for many memecoins such as $DEGEN, $HIGHER, and $CRASH on the Base chain, along with leading Zora chain memecoins $ENJOY and $IMAGINE. Secondly, both $ENJOY and $IMAGINE launched their respective creator incentive programs, significantly boosting user engagement on the Zora chain. The habit of 'minting with a comment' has also become popular among Zora users. These factors mutually reinforced each other, driving rapid growth in the Zora chain and its prominent scene memecoins.

$ENJOY is the largest memecoin on the Zora chain. Despite its backing by SeedClub, it had a lukewarm reception at launch until early April when $ENJOY introduced its Airdrop 2 program that allowed for tipping on the Zora chain. Consequently, $ENJOY has found several practical applications as a scene memecoin:

• Share with $ENJOY: There's a plethora of memes created around its logo, featuring the blue orb and "!!!".

• Mint with $ENJOY: Zora supports minting with $ENJOY, and there's a specialized explore page for NFTs that can be minted with $ENJOY on Zora.

• Tip with $ENJOY: Tipping with $ENJOY occurs in the comment section during NFT minting, similar to how $DEGEN is used for tipping in the comments of casts. Moreover, since tips are given as weekly shares and not onchain tokens, users are more inclined to tip others. Additionally, the multimedia NFT client Surreal and the on-chain event aggregator client Interface both support easier tipping in the comments during Zora NFT minting within their apps. This functionality has helped elevate these clients from niche to well-known, creating a win-win situation within the Farcaster ecosystem.

  

  Surreal

  @surrealapp

  

  We've shipped the easiest way to leave comments, tips, and replies to Zora mints directly within the Surreal app.
  
  ✦ Add comments to Zora mints with just one tap.
  ✦ Reply to friends using @ so they'll be notified.
  ✦ Leave $ENJOY tips — we'll highlight them.
  ✦ More mints =…

  

  41

  23:43 • 2024年4月11日

Like $ENJOY, $IMAGINE has also launched its own tipping program, allowing users to tip in the comments section when minting Zora NFTs. Today, both $ENJOY and $IMAGINE have become integral to the creator economy on the Zora chain, with an increasing number of artists choosing to release their work on Zora to earn revenue.

Overall, Farcaster has established itself as the social layer for both the Base and Zora L2s and has become an incubator for various L3s and even L4s. Theoretically, Farcaster could serve as the social layer for any blockchain, as any project on any chain can choose to set up Channels on Farcaster to build their community. The openness of Frames also supports interaction with any chain for asset issuance, though the specifics may vary. Previously, projects like Bitcoin inscriptions and Solana NFTs have launched on Farcaster. However, due to reasons like founder background, funding, and user habits, Farcaster has developed closer ties with the Base and Zora chains. Will more chains embrace Farcaster in the future?

Recently, we've seen a burgeoning number of SocialFi/CreatorFi apps built on Farcaster, such as:

• Drakula: an onchain TikTok

• Clubcast: an onchain Patreon

• AlfaFrens: an onchain OnlyFans?

• Jam: an onchain Instagram

• ...

I've been searching for the right term to describe these, and perhaps "FarFi" (Farcaster-based SocialFi ➔ Farcaster Finance) fits best. FarFi represents apps built on Farcaster's social identity, featuring their own tokenomics. Most claim to empower content creators or foster a co-creative economy between creators and customers.

FarFi consists of two crucial components: Farcaster and Finance. Both aspects distinguish it significantly from other SocialFi initiatives within the Farcaster ecosystem. The rapid popularity of Drakula, a short video app built on Farcaster, highlights the essence of FarFi: Farcaster’s open framework and composability provide the necessary social graph for applications to quickly acquire users at launch, while scene memecoins like $DEGEN act as native circulating currencies within the Farcaster ecosystem, providing the liquidity needed for these applications to get off the ground. I once said, "Farcaster + App Legos + $DEGEN economics = Onchain Social Summer", and in April, we saw a surge in FarFi apps like mushrooms after the rain.

In classifying FarFi, I've tried to organize them based on the objects they trade, which primarily are tradable profiles, casts, and channels. Moreover, the vast majority use $DEGEN, the most widely utilized scene memecoin within the Farcaster ecosystem, as their internal circulating currency.

Since the launch of friend.tech last year, the model of trading user profiles via keys based on bonding curves has become quite common, often resulting in high transaction fees typically split between the platform and the creator. This model has become the preferred method for building SocialFi apps on Farcaster, where profiles leverage Farcaster's social graph.

Uncuts.app, launched by REKT, is a collectible card game where users can collect and trade cards representing different users and form teams. The strength of each card is determined by the user's activity level on Farcaster. Similarly, Farcards, developed by @undefined on mint.club, is also a collectible card game exclusive to Farcaster users. Users can easily mint their own cards and trade others' via the Frame, with card rankings also based on user activity on Farcaster. However, more gameplay features are yet to be unveiled.

Merely hyping up identity cards seems a bit unimaginative, and people are already experiencing aesthetic fatigue with this type of promotion. Designing a card game similar to Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering based on the diverse user cards could indeed be quite fascinating.

ClubCast's most notable feature is the introduction of token-gated casts. If you purchase a user's club token, you can unlock and view encrypted content sent by them on clubcast.xyz and through Farcaster's Frame.

Thus, it somewhat resembles membership-based websites like Patreon, where you can set certain content to be viewable only by subscribers. In the context of crypto social platforms, this form of token-gated posts is also present in the Lens ecosystem client, Orb, where posts can be set to be visible only to holders of a specific NFT. I believe this model should serve as an infrastructure, requiring apps that support the distribution of content exclusive to subscribers.

AlfaFrens, spearheaded by @Vijay, is a SocialFi product similar to friend.tech that offers exclusive content to subscribers. Users spend $DEGEN to subscribe to Channels created by different creators (distinct from Farcaster's Channels), gaining access to exclusive information from the creators within those Channels, while also earning $ALFA. $ALFA can be used to stake in Channels, yielding $DEGEN rewards. The more a subscriber stakes in a creator's Channel, the more $ALFA they earn.

A key difference between AlfaFrens and friend.tech is that it no longer uses the Bonding Curve-based Key model; instead, it applies a dual-token mining approach to SocialFi. Subscription fees for Channels are calculated on a time-streaming basis using SuperFluid, allowing subscribers to opt out at any time.

One of the major impacts of AlfaFrens might be that it reposes a question: Currently, most SocialFi products adopt various Bonding Curves, but is the Bonding Curve the optimal economic model for SocialFi? The rising key prices in friend.tech come from the influx of new players, not from value creation, making it unsustainable in the long run. AlfaFrens, having genuine subscribers, effectively introduces external revenue, meaning it is an extremely rare non-Ponzi, non-PVP arena model, which could lead to greater longevity. Of course, this depends on creators producing genuinely valuable content and fostering real relationships with subscribers to create a positive cycle.

Additionally, a subscription model is less prone to speculative hoarding for arbitrage than the unlimited supply key model. Subscriptions do not suffer from the price fluctuations of profiles, and also avoid ethical concerns regarding a creator's reputation, as mentioned by Joan Westenberg:

Tying a personal brand to a volatile and short-lived token/key will have lasting negative consequences. If—not when—the key inevitably fails to live up to expectations or experiences a significant decline in value, the creator's reputation will be permanently damaged.

The examples above often treat "people" as tradable commodities, while also focusing on trading the content itself. For instance, Tiser supports trading individual Casts within Farcaster by using Actions to interact with Frames, effectively facilitating Cast transactions within Farcaster.

Jam is a Farcaster creator economy client, thus it initially offers functionalities to post and browse within its app. However, posts must include a picture, earning it the nickname "onchain Instagram." Additionally, it now supports trading both Casts and Profile keys. Remarkably, it achieved over $10 million in transaction volume within the first 72 hours of its launch. It's worth noting that while trading casts uses a bonding curve pricing model, there can only be one holder at a time. This effectively makes it akin to an auction of casts, which reduces speculative arbitrage to some extent, making the purchase of casts more akin to supporting the creators.

Inside Warpcast, there now exists something like the Channel Pass that empowers channel hosts. Channel hosts can set a certain number of Warps as a casting threshold, reducing the release of spam within the channel. However, this is not a blockchain-based financial mechanism, so subscribers lack a way to opt out.

One upcoming development looking to integrate SocialFi elements into Channels is Degencast, developed by Liang and set to launch soon. It claims to $DEGEN-ification Channels. Exactly how it will empower Channels remains to be seen.

Of course, the possibilities for FarFi extend beyond this. Leveraging the open and composable nature of the Farcaster protocol, there could be more scenarios empowered by token economics, using media such as text, sound, or video, and potentially different vertical FarFi products could emerge. For example, the audio chat room app FarHouse has stated it will also incorporate token-gated spaces in the future.

Overall, the openness and composability of the Farcaster protocol enable these FarFi products to be rapidly developed, while the growing liquidity layer of $DEGEN in the Farcaster ecosystem gives these products the confidence to launch. However, there are concerns. Many FarFi products can lead to a dispersion of community focus and liquidity. If products require additional content creation, it can further disperse creators' energies; if they don’t involve content creation, they might just turn into pure token speculation, which is hard to sustain.

Most importantly, knowledge-based products must genuinely contain valuable knowledge, and the creator economy needs real creators producing quality content. Only then will there be real consumers willing to pay, forming a long-term, stable creator economy model.

In a rather detailed flow, I've revisited some of the highlights from my April experience on Farcaster that made a lasting impression, hoping to offer some insights for those interested in learning about the Farcaster ecosystem.

Moving forward, Farcaster continues to thrive as an open and composable social protocol, fostering a variety of on-chain applications, while also supporting the ecosystems of various public blockchains as a social layer. May looks promising for Farcaster, with the upcoming Farcon summit sure to spark further innovation among ecosystem builders. Despite the looming storm in the crypto market, the vibrant developer ecosystem and community culture at Farcaster make me want to remain an optimist.

Keeping optimistic, and imagining higher ↑

If I've made any errors in my description or omitted important information, please let me know. Your feedback will help improve this article. Please note that all content above is not intended as investment advice.

It's a memecoin when memecoins pump and it's an l3 when l3s pump and it's a base asset when Base pumps and it's socialfi/farcaster when that pumps. --@DegenMVP

In recent days, $DEGEN token (@degentokenbase) of Farcaster's ecosystem have seen a meteoric rise, breaking through the $0.019 mark with a FDV exceeding $700 million. This represents a 20-fold increase from its lowest point a month ago, and it has successively made its debut on major CEXs like HTX and Bitget. The narrative can hardly keep up with its repeated record highs. 😂

Media coverage generally labels it as a Meme coin. If regarded as such, $DEGEN has successfully captured the hot money flowing from Solana's meme token frenzy to the Base chain, becoming the leading Meme token of the Base chain. This status owes much to its early community-building efforts within the Farcaster ecosystem.

The substantial wealth effect from the $DEGEN airdrop was one of the catalysts for Farcaster's explosive popularity at the beginning of the year. For a considerable time, the correlation coefficient between the number of casts on Farcaster and the price of $DEGEN remained above 0.9.

In its first airdrop phase, casting $DEGEN in the /degen channel earned you airdrop points, while also empowering early Farcaster NFTs with special token-related score boosts. This included OG NFT airdropped to active badge holders upon Farcaster's open registration, Farcats NFTs by popular artist 0xen, and NFTs from Farcaster's ecosystem Hacker News news.kiwistand.com. Thus, many early Farcaster users naturally became promoters of $DEGEN.

$DEGEN's rise from the /degen channel to widespread popularity across Farcaster suits its meme nature, aided by its catchy name and iconic 🎩 logo, which spurred a wealth of derivative creations. Channels, Frames, NFTs, and tokens built around $DEGEN have significantly bolstered its meme influence.

The second airdrop of $DEGEN adopts the model of "accumulating a daily allowance to tip others," thereby becoming an essential component in motivating the creator economy. When you come across a great cast, you can tip in the comments below, and the cumulative amount of tips will determine the quantity of the second airdrop. The amount you can tip is linked to your activity points, which are related to the number of likes, comments, and shares you receive. Hence, the more interactions you receive, the more you can tip others; the more popular your casts are, the more tips you will receive. At least, that was the initial idea the team had, aiming to encourage more high-quality active users and content.

Of course, this model naturally doesn't avoid airdrop farming, but the team has been continuously striving to prevent this tipping from turning into an airdrop farming game. This mode of issuing community tokens for tipping has also been emulated by other projects within the Farcaster ecosystem and the Bonsai in the Lens ecosystem. The practice of tipping, indicated by a "number+letter/emoji," is frequently seen in the comments section of Farcaster casts, forming a spontaneously organized tipping culture within the community.

The short video app drakula.app (AKA Web3 TikTok) was the first to showcase the value of $DEGEN as a circulating currency within the ecosystem, similar to Friend Tech's use of $ETH for trading Keys, Drakula adopted $DEGEN for trading video blogger tokens. An increasing number of Farcaster ecosystem applications are now using $DEGEN as their internal currency, such as the sports team club Bracket.game and the prediction platform Perl.xyz, as well as third-party clients like degencast.xyz and Supercast.xyz, which have developed convenient reward features for $DEGEN. We may see more Farcaster ecosystem applications adopting $DEGEN, expanding its use cases and popularity.

Moreover, Drakula set a precedent for how a new app can rapidly grow within Farcaster. The open framework and composability of Farcaster provide the necessary on-chain social graph for applications to quickly acquire customers, while $DEGEN serves as the native circulating currency, providing asset liquidity for app startups. Using $DEGEN as the internal currency can achieve mutual success for $DEGEN and the application.

Farcaster + App Legos + $DEGEN economics = Onchain Social Summer.

The $DEGEN team has secured angel funding of 490.5 ETH from 1confirmation and Farcaster community OGs, aimed at developing the Degen ecosystem and community. They also announced an exclusive L3 for $DEGEN, promising EVM compatibility and reduced transaction fees, with further details awaited.

Degen 🎩

@degentokenbase

Happy to announce that the $DEGEN angel investing round is now done! @1confirmation is our lead investor, with amazing Farcaster OGs and friends backing us as well. The funding will help us grow the Degen ecosystem and community to be even more badass!

390

0:51 • 2024年2月21日

Finally, today the $DEGEN team announced a shift in liquidity rewards from Uniswap to the Base chain's native DEX aerodromefi.finance , facilitating interaction between the community token born from Farcaster and the native DeFi blue chips of the Base chain. It is foreseeable that $DEGEN will continue to play a crucial role not just within the Farcaster ecosystem but also within the Base chain ecosystem, becoming an integral piece of the Coinbase ecosystem puzzle.

Being Small

One significant advantage of being small is the concentrated user base, which enhances interaction. On platforms like Twitter(𝕏), it is nearly impossible for faithful Farcaster users like Vitalik to come across and respond to my comments. However, Vitalik is more active on Farcaster than on Twitter, frequently engaging with other users.

There is an interesting metric on farcaster.network called the Follower Gini Coefficient, which measures the inequality among followers. Farcaster has a coefficient of 81.12, while Twitter's coefficient is as high as 94.12. If it were a social platform focused on connecting acquaintances, the coefficient would naturally be much lower. This is largely due to the early stage of the project and the relatively small number of users. However, the result is a more balanced relationship among users, with everyone's visibility amplified. Users feel they might be seen, which increases their sense of presence and gratification, leading to a greater desire to post. This effect is particularly evident after the introduction of Channels, which is an implementation of FIP-2 in the protocol. Channels are something the community takes pride in, which help distribute content, increasing the likelihood of your cast being seen and creating a positive feedback loop for posting and interaction.

Being Beauty

The beauty of Farcaster is subjective and varies from person to person. For some, it lies in its relatively decentralized design, which provides a sense of security in controlling their social identity through private keys, especially after the Twitter hacks experienced by Vitalik and Dan Romero.

For others, it is the convenience of interacting with renowned figures within the small Farcaster community. The constant communication and iterative product development between developers and users are highly valued. Some find beauty in finding like-minded individuals. When I initially joined Farcaster, I loved the fact that I could find other holders through the NFT collection page without verifying their identity. This aspect is inherently web3 native. However, in the current NFT bear market, this feature may seem less important, and Dan even considers reducing some NFT-related features (although I have always emphasized the importance of NFTs for web3 social platforms and have written an article expressing my expectations). For some, it is the atmosphere of discussions and the presence of interesting individuals both within and beyond Warpcast, including a diverse ecosystem of applications such as chat, live streaming, and spaces.

In the early stages, many projects have few participants and limited interaction due to low-quality users, resulting in a lack of high-quality resonance. However, Farcaster had a natural advantage from the beginning with the backing of a16z and Coinbase. In the initial phase, Farcaster strictly controlled user onboarding through measures like personal invitations by the founders and limited diffusion, creating a high-quality user atmosphere represented by developers and VCs. This helped filter out speculative crypto users, reducing discussions about token price fluctuations and avoiding the influx of airdrop hunters (just take a look at what happened to another web3 social protocol, Lens protocol). As a result, Farcaster established a community with a relatively high-quality discourse on crypto content, although not everything shared there is necessarily substantial. Twitter is a platform that encompasses everything, while Farcaster acts as a funnel, selectively filtering a small portion. Farcaster's introduction of channels incentivized content diversity, leading to the emergence of non-crypto content and transforming Farcaster from a geek forum into a circle of strangers turned friends. You can find like-minded individuals here, which is also Dan's promotional slogan. The ability to connect with similar individuals is an essential aspect that most social networks must address.

The Future

Farcaster is now poised to embark on a new chapter, and Dan has always emphasized the participation of high-quality users, taking various measures to enhance the growth of quality daily active users (qDAU) rather than relying on other superficial metrics. These measures include implementing a minimum registration fee of $7 to deter spam signups. In a voice chat on Farcaster's ecosystem application, Aburra (similar to Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces), Dan discussed how the Warpcast team's next priority is improving the quality of daily active users by adjusting the "active user metric" to measure engagement and contribution. Farcaster is even considering making channels composable and portable across protocols to empower content creators. Dan welcomes the forking of the Farcaster protocol, as competition fosters progress. Therefore, I remain excited about the future development of Farcaster.

However, it's worth noting that the statements I made above were applicable a few months ago, and future changes may overturn some of my previous remarks. Farcaster undergoes rapid transformations, with new applications being generated by enthusiastic users every week. The Farcaster protocol itself and its ecosystem applications receive extensive user feedback, resulting in swift iterations. Nonetheless, Farcaster also evolves slowly. Even during the rise of SocialFi, it has not adopted a token economy. I look forward to Farcaster becoming the hyperstructure of the crypto world, and I am excited to witness its progress.

Social platforms primarily consist of social media and messaging apps. Social medias are predominantly about broadcasting—sharing your thoughts, images, or videos with the world. (While some may have a one-on-one messaging feature, it is relatively basic in functionality). Messaging apps, on the other hand, are about conversations—typically with friends or friends of friends, especially in group settings where you can engage with multiple people.

What makes social platforms in the web3 world special? One important aspect, in my opinion, is the native support for token-based social connections, where people holding the same NFTs or FTs can discover each other.

When we join a new social media platform, we often face the question, "Who to follow?" Typically, the platform recommends users with a large number of followers, making it easy to find KOLs. Besides, in the web3 world, our crypto wallet should have some JPGs, and we may want to connect with others who hold the same NFTs. (Although there should be fewer people with such thoughts during the NFT bear market.)

On traditional web2 social platforms, it can be difficult to find people with the same NFTs. Although some users may have NFT-like profile photos, it is unclear whether they actually own those NFTs. Even Twitter's NFT feature is only used by a small fraction of people. This is where web2-web3 middleware like Mask Network can be helpful in enabling people to discover who is using NFTs as avatars.

Furthermore, let's shift our focus to web3 native social networks, such as Farcaster. One excellent aspect of Farcaster's client, Warpcast, is that when I click on any NFT collection interface, I can directly see who owns NFTs of this collection on the platform. This feature allows us to foster the NFT community culture and enables users with the same NFTs to quickly connect with each other. It truly embodies the web3 native spirit and is one of the reasons why I love Farcaster.

However, I've noticed that although Farcaster supports users setting NFTs as their profile pictures, we cannot click on these profile pictures to view which NFT collection they belong to. For instance, when I come across someone with a cool NFT avatar, I want to know which specific NFT they are using. Currently, I can only search through their NFT bags to find the matching NFT, but it's inconvenient. This limitation could be addressed by allowing users to click on the avatar to view the associated NFT collection, along with the list of all owners of this collection. If I find them interesting, I can choose to follow them. This would create a closed loop of social media based on NFTs, as depicted in the diagram below.

Farcaster has already implemented features 2) and 3) (green arrows), but it hasn't implemented feature 1) (red arrow). However, interestingly, Twitter Blue has actually achieved this functionality by allowing users to set cool hexagonal NFT avatars (Sadly, even after clicking to view the detailed information of an NFT, you still can't see other people on Twitter(X) who own the same NFT collection). On the other hand, blockchain-based platforms like Lenster and Warpcast have not implemented this feature yet.

Warpcast is just one small step away from achieving this closed loop, but it seems that this feature isn't of high interest to many people.

Such a closed loop also exists in messaging platforms.

When you join a new messaging app, you also encounter the question, "Who to chat with?" Some web2 messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, utilize your contact list to recommend friends. On the other hand, certain web3 messaging apps, built on messaging protocols (e.g. XMTP, dm3) and some centralized services (e.g. Blockscan Chat) , which support direct peer-to-peer communication via a blockchian address (although it's unlikely that many people consistently use such apps, as they are more suitable as extensions for wallet apps). Then what about group chats?

In recent years, there has been a rise in messaging apps that claim to be token-gated, such as Frens, Debox, and Chirp. These apps have a notable feature: token-gated group chats. This means that only individuals who hold a specific NFT or FT can join these groups. It's a token-based approach that aligns well with the Web3 ethos, fostering social liquidity aggregation. By owning a particular NFT, you can easily engage in group conversations with other NFT holders, creating a gathering of like-minded individuals. Furthermore, this approach facilitates the creation of knowledge-sharing groups where KOLs can offer paid content based on NFT ownership.

Let's take Frens within the Farcaster ecosystem as an example (currently in the testing phase). After going through permissionless NFT ownership authentication, I can join an NFT-gated group and initiate group chats with others who hold the same NFT. I can view the group members and choose to have one-on-one conversations with those who pique my interest. However, at present, there is no way to view NFT collections directly in my NFT bags and discover all platform users who hold NFTs from these collections pages, allowing for individual chats with them. Similarly, clicking on someone's NFT avatar doesn't provide information about the NFT collection it belongs to.

We can also illustrate these processes with a diagram below. Green arrows represent achieved processes by frens, while red arrows indicate processes not yet acquired. Implementing this token-based connection loop should enhance the Frens' experience. Perhaps my thoughts are just some noise, and product managers might have their own areas of focus, but I believe there should be someone who can get my point.

In fact, what I'm referring to as the "close-loop of connections" is a set of insignificant features, but I believe that implementing all these aspects is what truly distinguishes web3 social: the ability to be connected with tokens.

Although we are currently in an NFT bear market, I believe that NFT community culture will not disappear. NFTs can serve as a medium for establishing connections between individuals. The NFT community is comparable to mycelium—the interconnected fungal network that forms a community in the same way that tree roots interconnect with each other. Therefore, social platforms are also required to facilitate the accumulation of social relationships through NFTs for connection and interaction. (Of course, the same principle applies to FT communities represented by meme coins.) This is why I hope these web3 social platforms can enhance token-based social connection functionalities.

If there's any product manager who comes across my article and agrees with some of my viewpoints, let's have a high five.