Original Title: "Social Walletization, Wallet Socialization"
Original Author: 0xLuo, Senior Player of Farcaster
Recently, a post by Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster, regarding the shift in Farcaster's current focus from "social-first" to "wallet-first" has sparked widespread attention and discussion. For active users of Farcaster, it should be evident that since the launch of the built-in wallet feature in the Farcaster App in February, the number of supported chains has been increasing, and the related functionalities have become richer. This statement is somewhat of a reiteration and serves as a summary of the team's direction throughout the year. However, for those who are less familiar with Farcaster, this announcement may come as a surprise, leading many to lament that the "lone sprout of crypto social" and "the hope of SocialFi" has "announced failure," "abandoned social," and "deviated from its original intention." There is disappointment over the "disproof of the social track" and concerns that "Web3 social is not viable," with worries that the community atmosphere is sliding towards "casino-like" conditions, and that the team is "running in the wrong direction."
This divergence arises from different understandings of Farcaster's wallet positioning. In reality, the built-in wallet added to the Farcaster App this year is not a sudden strategic shift but a natural upgrade from the previous experience that required connecting to an external wallet to perform on-chain operations. As Frames gradually evolve into more feature-rich and complex Mini Apps, user demand for seamless on-chain interactions has also increased. The emergence of the built-in wallet is essentially to accommodate new scenarios, completing the foundational capabilities on top of the social network, rather than abandoning the existing social network.
The wallet is incremental, not a replacement; it drives social interaction, not encroaches on it; it expands social interaction, not abandons it; it is a natural progression, not a forced transformation.
The underlying open social protocol remains unchanged, and the diverse client ecosystem is still alive. You can experience pure social interaction with a different client. The original social features of the official Farcaster App are still present, with the addition of a built-in wallet this year, which expands on existing functionalities, allowing seamless integration with Mini Apps, deep integration with identity graphs, and smooth interaction with social information streams.
The team is merely adjusting the focus of their product work, trying to find a path for overall network growth, no longer spending time onboarding users from various industries for network diversification, nor optimizing the Channels community feature, which has yielded minimal results. They have spent enough time creating a small and beautiful "comfortable corner," but the "social-first" strategy has not achieved sufficient product-market fit (PMF), with tens of thousands of daily active users still being a niche. Thus, they pragmatically return to the first principles of crypto applications: serving the flow of value.
On this basis, the combination of wallet and social interaction represents stronger product differentiation, a more realistic growth path, and is closer to the PMF tipping point of crypto social. In fact, this shift in focus for Farcaster this year is also a footnote to the development direction of the entire crypto social application, "social walletization, wallet socialization" is the natural convergence direction for consumer-grade crypto applications. Almost all products that can be considered somewhat social now have wallet functionalities, and wallet applications are also attempting to incorporate social elements, not to mention that there are many applications that have been positioned as social + wallet from the very beginning.
Social Application Walletization
To stand out, all crypto applications must answer what distinguishes them from traditional off-chain counterparts, and of course, crypto social applications must also clarify how they differ from traditional social products. Product manager Yu Jun once proposed a famous formula to measure whether a new product is attractive enough to users:
Product Value = (New Experience - Old Experience) - Migration Cost
Some new products have very low migration costs; for instance, Threads, backed by Instagram's robust social graph, was able to surpass 100 million users in just five days. The luckiest are those who encounter users migrating just for the sake of migrating, as Bluesky capitalized on the point of "Twitter without censorship," attracting the elusive Twitter refugees.
However, the vast majority of crypto applications lack such a foundation and luck. To entice users from more mature traditional social products with larger user bases, they can only focus on enhancing the new experience. Crypto social initially started from a technical perspective, focusing on how to integrate with blockchain at the foundational level to achieve decentralization. However, embedding crypto technology at the base level is imperceptible to most users, failing to provide a new experience, and lacking differentiation when competing with traditional social products, which can even lead to a more cumbersome onboarding process. For example, both Farcaster and Lens utilize blockchain at their core, with Farcaster storing identity data on the OP chain and Lens storing identity and social graphs on the Lens Chain, ensuring "not your private key, not your social account." But most users do not care about the underlying technology; they are concerned about what new experiences the product offers.
The Farcaster team recognized this early on, with their philosophy being "product leads protocol development," hoping to drive the growth of the entire Farcaster network through a benchmark product. If they only aimed to create a social protocol, the team's task would have been largely complete, having implemented many theories of decentralized social from the start, creating a "fully decentralized" protocol that emphasizes openness, programmability, and composability, allowing developers to build various applications based on an open social graph. However, if they let the ecosystem develop like Nostr, ActivityPub, and Lens, users would not migrate just because the underlying technology is different. The content noise from uncontrolled ecosystem growth would further degrade user experience, often resulting in users not wanting to come, and if they do, they won't stay. The Farcaster team's decision to create a client themselves is aimed at attracting users at the product level.
High-quality social circles are a new experience, unique alpha information is a new experience, and the combination of crypto and social is a new experience. Initially, Farcaster achieved the first point by onboarding a group of high-quality users, which served as a rare moat, but growth is limited and it is challenging to attract the vast majority of crypto users characterized by "no profit, no early riser, empty-handed to catch a wolf." Interestingly, Farcaster was once criticized for being too pure; for a long time, discussing token price fluctuations on Farcaster was considered out of place, relegated to the corners of the /DEGEN Channel, highbrow certainly has few followers. It wasn't until early 2024, with the launch of Frames—a crypto-native feature that differs somewhat from traditional social applications—and the emergence of the $DEGEN project in the creator economy that Farcaster's daily active users began to see significant growth, rapidly increasing from around 2,000 daily active users to over ten times that by the end of January 2024. This growth is partly due to product-level innovation and partly due to the already established high-quality community's ability to incubate projects within this open social network.
Early version of Farcaster Mini App, a trading Frame
At that time, Farcaster had already completed the leap from a purely social network's "agricultural era" to the "handicraft era" of initial integration with crypto functionalities: social graph + Frames + external wallet, truly connecting social content flow with on-chain operations for the first time. Solana also attempted to achieve interaction between wallets and crypto mini-apps through the Actions protocol in Twitter's information flow using a browser plugin. Social media × crypto applications × wallet interaction is a direction everyone wants to explore. Through Frames, users can mint NFTs and execute transactions within the social information flow, which is indeed a new experience, but with a maximum of four operation buttons, the screen transitions like a PowerPoint presentation, and both functionality and performance are very limited. Moreover, any time wallet authorization is involved, users must switch to an external wallet, leading to limited functionality and a fragmented experience, which is still not smooth enough. Therefore, from the very first day Frames was launched, the community has been calling for a complete wallet function, which they actually waited a year for.
In the Farcaster Chinese community WeChat group, excitement about the wallet function began as soon as Frames was launched in early 2024.
Later in the year, with the arrival of the memecoin supercycle, from the popularity of PumpFun to the homegrown Clanker from Farcaster, more asset issuance brought about increased trading demand, highlighting the importance of the entire path from discovery to transaction, and wallets naturally became an increasingly critical entry point in this process.
Thus, it is easy to understand that to allow users to interact more naturally with crypto applications within a social media platform, there is a need for:
A higher degree of freedom and performance in the underlying framework to support more powerful mini-applications.
A shift from connecting to external wallets to using built-in wallets to achieve truly seamless on-chain interactions.
This has also been validated in instant messaging social applications like Telegram, where its Mini Apps ecosystem and built-in TON wallet have already sparked a wave of enthusiasm. Therefore, this year, Farcaster has logically completed its upgrade:
Frames → Mini Apps
External Wallet → Built-in Wallet
What can be achieved on the web can also be achieved by Mini Apps, allowing anyone to build without permission and be universally applicable across clients, greatly expanding the functional boundaries within social media applications. Interacting with the built-in wallet does not require switching to an external wallet, thus transitioning from the "handicraft era" with basic crypto functionalities to a more feature-rich "industrial era." This is not a deviation but a natural expansion along the trend; it is not a forced shift but an inevitable evolution in response to market demand.
Integrating a built-in wallet is not the death knell for crypto social media; it is the industrial revolution of crypto social media.
Crypto Apps and Decentralized Social by Linda Xie
With the built-in wallet, there naturally come trading signals based on the social graph. The issuance, dissemination, discovery, trading of assets, and community building can all be completed in a closed loop within the same application, and it can easily interact with Mini Apps, achieving almost all functionalities of crypto applications, including games, videos, live streaming, voice spaces, podcasts, prediction markets, DeFi… The rich Mini Apps ecosystem and the built-in wallet are driving forces working in tandem, integrating on-chain interactions into users' daily social behaviors. Applications like Noice, Bracky, QR, and Harmonybot have also spawned a series of new crypto social interaction scenarios due to the presence of social graph + Mini Apps + built-in wallet, each having its own highlights, and Farcaster's daily active users reached a new high at the end of October in this context.
Trending Mini Apps of Different Categories
These are experiences that users can perceive, use, and unlock new scenarios, and they represent the true differentiation from traditional social products. Even if users initially use only the trading function due to the wallet providing a more convenient entry, lower fees, and a more seamless cross-chain experience, there is still an opportunity to achieve "coming for the tool, staying for the network." This is a step forward compared to the past, where the attraction of the social network alone was relied upon to capture attention from Twitter.
Coincidentally, some instant messaging applications are also proactively adding wallet functionalities based on social interaction. For example, the chat application frens in the Farcaster ecosystem and DeBox allow users to directly send a CA in chat groups to invoke the built-in wallet for transactions. More and more developers are realizing: they should not shy away from mainstream crypto users; the characteristic of crypto social is not to distance from wallets but to embrace them, integrating rather than separating the value layer. Crypto social without a built-in wallet is truly "taking a detour."
frens screenshots
Wallet Applications Socialization
Similarly, crypto wallet applications are also trying to incorporate social elements. Transitioning from a mere container for assets and an entry point for transactions, as user needs and on-chain behaviors become increasingly diverse, they also want to add social signals and interactions based on the social graph.
Both Zapper and Base App were originally wallet applications, but they have now integrated content and social graphs from the Farcaster social protocol, effectively becoming clients of the Farcaster protocol. This reflects the value of Farcaster as an open, programmable, and composable social protocol. The protocol is open, and the interfaces are clear, allowing developers to freely build a client or application based on Farcaster. Whether it is a wallet or another application, they can directly integrate the social layer of Farcaster into their products without permission.
Zapper has added Farcaster network content and on-chain dynamics and trading signals based on the Farcaster social graph on top of the wallet, allowing users to discover trading opportunities directly from the on-chain behaviors of followed users and quickly complete transactions with one click.
Base App, on the other hand, has integrated Farcaster as a social information stream, Zora as a tool for assetizing creator content, and XMTP as the underlying protocol for instant messaging and community chat, all built on the original wallet. This allows Base App to achieve content creation, asset issuance, social discovery, token trading, application interaction, community chat, and interaction with agents, forming a closed loop of content, relationships, and value in the same space.
Zerion has also integrated the social graph to enable social discovery features, building on its previously well-developed function of following wallet addresses, incorporating Twitter, Farcaster, and Lens social identities to better discover users of interest and top traders' trading signals.
Zapper, Base App, Zerion
Centralized trading platforms can also be considered wallets, and they are actively exploring integration with social features. Binance launched Binance Feed in 2022, which was upgraded to Binance Square in 2023. Leveraging the world's largest crypto trading traffic entry, it has built a comprehensive community platform centered around trading, allowing users to follow trader dynamics, access in-depth content information, exchange strategies, and engage in diverse social interactions such as voice and live streaming, enabling users to spend more time on this application.
Similarly, the centralized trading platform Robinhood, which has recently ventured into cryptocurrencies and prediction markets, has announced it is exploring social features, allowing users to discuss strategies, discover signals, and copy trades on the platform.
However, centralized trading platforms often create closed ecosystems for their social features, where user relationship chains, content, and identities remain under the platform's control, which is regrettable as ordinary developers cannot freely build new applications based on their social graphs; all functionalities rely solely on the trading platform team's iterative updates. But as always, users do not care about this; they only look at whether your product is useful and how well it works.
Robinhood is exploring social
For wallets, social interaction is not a decorative feature but a crucial step in upgrading the wallet from a "tool" to a "network." Social interaction provides context for asset behavior, sources for trading decisions, and trajectories for content distribution. By adding social features, wallets can better leverage network effects, transitioning from tools to ecosystems.
Social + Wallet: Trading, Discovery, Creation
Social applications are walletizing, and wallet applications are socializing; the two are increasingly intertwined and converging, which is actually the natural convergence direction for consumer-grade crypto applications. For crypto social, if it does not actively integrate with wallets, it is essentially a passive choice that deviates from mainstream crypto users. Failing to do so will lead to falling behind and being replaced by more complete product forms. Social applications need wallets to complete the puzzle of on-chain interactions, and the core capabilities that constitute the differentiated experience of crypto social, such as the crypto application ecosystem and creator economy, must rely on comprehensive wallet functionalities to be realized. Stacking the value layer on top of the social layer provides a growth lever for the social network.
For wallets, adding social features is like icing on the cake. Users no longer "use and leave" but can stay due to relationships, content, and community. Wallets transform from tools into networks, from entry points into scenarios, and from asset managers into interactive spaces, naturally expanding more application scenarios and network effects.
Of course, some applications have targeted the "social + wallet" route from the very beginning, realizing early on that the two are naturally complementary and can form a value closed loop of content, relationships, and assets.
interface.social: Supports popular token discovery, tracks user on-chain activities, and allows users to express trading opinions (Takes).
0xppl.com: Supports popular token discovery, multi-chain wallet behavior tracking, copy trading, and profit monitoring.
Firefly.social: Firefly itself is an aggregation client for multiple social networks, including X, Farcaster, Lens, and Bluesky, supporting cross-platform one-click posting and uncovering trading opportunities through aggregated friend trading dynamics.
fomo.family: Supports real-time tracking of friends and top traders' on-chain trades, quickly discovering new assets through built-in trading analysis and profit-loss tracking.
Share.xyz: Allows users to share any trade, follow any wallet, receive real-time trade notifications, and supports copy trading while allowing the copied trader to earn profit sharing.
gmgn.ai: Supports rapid discovery of popular assets, tracks smart money and the holdings and trades of followed users, enables second-level on-chain trading, and provides integrated on-chain intelligence and trading tools with automatic copy trading, risk control checks, and real-time alerts.
Vector.fun: Supports on-chain user trading dynamics and asset discovery. It has been acquired by Coinbase and is currently suspended from operation.
Interface, 0xppl, fomo, Share
From start to finish, one can see that they are similar in many functions and interfaces. "Trading, Discovery, Creation" is Farcaster's new slogan, and applying this phrase to other "social + wallet" applications seems fitting, as they all fundamentally focus on discovering trading signals, quickly executing copy trades, and sharing trading strategies.
The difference may lie in how each product chooses to emphasize different aspects. Different applications make trade-offs in functionality, with varying degrees of emphasis and depth. Some emphasize content production, allowing users to clearly articulate "what to buy and why to buy"; others do little content production and instead focus resources on trade execution, data insights, and copy trading efficiency. These trade-offs ultimately shape different product strengths and create significantly different user experiences.
Who can stand out? It may depend on who can specialize enough in a particular aspect.
For example, 0xPPL has become increasingly professional in the area of on-chain graphs, and with many connected social graphs, it has become a tool for quickly identifying the identities of on-chain addresses, which is very useful during new token launches. GMGN has made the entire process of trading—from discovery to analysis to execution—extremely efficient. In terms of multi-chain support, Zapper and Zerion cover a wide range of chains as professional wallets. In terms of actual cross-chain experience, Farcaster Wallet is very smooth, with minimal friction.
The "Takes," "Comment," or "Share" features of Interface, fomo, and Share serve as differentiators, allowing users to articulate their trading logic, hoping their applications can accumulate content creation, but centralized content slightly diminishes network effects. Of course, other applications can directly integrate the Farcaster protocol to enable content creation, allowing produced content to spread across a larger social network.
Additionally, applications based on the Farcaster protocol have the advantage of reusing the hundreds of diverse Farcaster Mini Apps, allowing mini-programs to be directly embedded into social interactions, easily expanding the functional boundaries of the application without reinventing the wheel.
Overview of "Social + Wallet" Crypto Applications
Dan Romero once said, "Adding a wallet to a social network is much easier than adding a social network to a wallet." From a product perspective, expanding wallet capabilities on existing social networks may be somewhat easier for Farcaster. However, other applications can also directly integrate existing social networks, unless they have sufficient confidence in their own user base.
From the overview of "Social + Wallet" crypto applications, it can be seen that if one wants to create a "Social + Wallet" application, Farcaster and X are the most frequently chosen social graphs. Notably, due to differences in openness, when integrating the X social graph, it often only associates wallet addresses with X accounts; however, when integrating the Farcaster social graph, in addition to associating with identities, it can easily import users' existing social relationships and even content produced on the social network, thus obtaining a ready-made social network with one click, rather than starting from scratch to accumulate social content and build relationship graphs.
As more applications adopt Farcaster as their social infrastructure, the value of the entire network will be amplified in reverse, thereby enhancing the network effects of the entire protocol. Looking back over the past four years, the Farcaster team has built a "small but refined" social graph through a restrained development path. Although growth has been limited, the accumulated social relationships, content, and culture are becoming the underlying assets and infrastructure of an open crypto social ecosystem. In the future, this network will continue to be enriched, extended, and adopted.
Conclusion
Farcaster is not dead, crypto social is not dead, and Farcaster as crypto social is not dead. True crypto social does not stop at merely being a social network; it aims to combine social interaction with the flow of value. Therefore, this year, the Farcaster App upgraded from an inconvenient external wallet connection to a fully functional built-in wallet, which is a crucial leap to fill this foundational capability that should have been addressed long ago. This is not abandoning social; it is driving social, providing a new growth engine for social interaction.
The recent "mockery" faced by Farcaster precisely indicates that Farcaster's social graph is still too small, and daily active users are still too limited, leading to some information gaps and interpretive biases among onlookers. At the same time, in the trend of "social walletization and wallet socialization," the Farcaster App also faces ongoing competition, which are current real challenges. It needs to continue relying on Farcaster's "wallet-first" approach on the product side and the continuously emerging Mini Apps in the ecosystem to jointly drive growth, with the value flow capability at the product level continuing to complement the composable ecosystem capability at the protocol level.
What will happen next? No one can guarantee the answer. But perhaps expanding wallet functionalities on existing social media is where crypto social truly begins, allowing value to flow will make the crypto social network more vibrant.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
