Author: defioasis
Source: 吴说Real
Last week, Vitalik Buterin's Twitter account was hacked and used to post phishing links, resulting in users losing over $690,000. After research, Slowmist Cosine pointed out that the phishing organization behind the hacking of Vitalik's Twitter account is still related to the current hot and crazy PinkDrainer. The hacking method may be SIM hijacking or other possibilities. Two days later, Vitalik stated on the decentralized social media Farcaster that his Twitter account was indeed attacked by SIM card hijacking, possibly due to exposing his phone number when registering for Twitter Blue. He had previously seen advice not to use phone numbers for authentication, but unfortunately did not realize it. Vitalik stated that he has uninstalled Twitter and joined Farcaster, which can be controlled through an Ethereum address for account recovery.
Farcaster is a decentralized protocol for building social applications, which can be used through front-ends such as Opencast and Warpcast. Farcaster received a $30 million investment led by a16z in 2022. This article will briefly analyze this decentralized social protocol favored by Vitalik and a16z.
Core Issues of Social Networks
Social network activities can be simply understood as a group of users interacting, such as sending messages (text, images, and audio) to others, liking, commenting, and sharing posts. In centralized social networks, this group of users can only interact within a specific social application, while in decentralized social networks, a group of users from different applications are allowed to interact across applications.
This also presents challenges, which Farcaster categorizes as four core issues of decentralized social networks: identity, authentication, availability, and consistency. Identity, or username, allows users to switch between different social applications and act as their identity; authentication ensures that when a user receives a message, they must ensure that it is from a trusted source; availability ensures that user data is always available in different applications; consistency ensures that social network rules are supported and enforced by all front-end applications.
Farcaster's Solutions
Farcaster's social network covers three levels: identity layer, data layer, and application layer. The identity layer is based on Ethereum to determine the operations and authorization methods that can be executed on the network, with identity and authentication being core components; the data layer stores information authorized by the identity layer and makes it available; the application layer consumes the information stored in the data layer.
(1) Identity: Farcaster ID (FID)
Farcaster introduces usernames and Farcaster ID (FID) for user social identities, where FID is a unique and tamper-proof identifier introduced by Farcaster to mark user identities. The FID identifier is a string of numbers bound to the user's main address. Although it is decentralized, representing users with a numerical identifier is not appropriate, so users can choose to register a Farcaster name, i.e., a username, and bind it to their FID. Farcaster's usernames are managed in a dedicated place called a namespace, and usernames may be reclaimed, while FID will not.
Usernames and Farcaster ID are reflected on Ethereum in two different contracts, the name registry and the FID registry, which form the basis of Farcaster user identity.
It is worth mentioning that user identity recovery benefits from FID. Users can set another address in advance as a credential to recover their Farcaster identity. This other address can be the user's another wallet address, the address of another known Farcaster user, or even a third-party custodian.
(2) Authentication
Message authentication benefits from Farcaster ID. When a user receives a message, they can verify the sender's FID, look up the corresponding public key (address) on the Ethereum chain, and then check if the signature sender is derived from that address to confirm the true source of the message.
To address the issue of private key handling on devices (private keys need to be loaded onto the device application to generate signatures), Farcaster introduces the concept of Signers. Signers are Ed25519 keys generated off-chain, and users register signers by using the public key to transact with the KeyRegistry, then the private key can be used to sign and publish messages to the network.
(3) Availability: Storage Leasing
In centralized social applications, users store information on servers similar to RSS servers and access all data on the network by indexing all these servers. Farcaster introduces storage hubs for storing data, where when different users interact socially, they download each other's information copies and store them.
To prevent spam information from flooding the hubs, Farcaster charges users for leasing storage on the network, which is also the main source of revenue for Farcaster. Users rent storage space by paying an annual fee to Farcaster, which can suppress spam information and encourage users to clear low-value data. Storage is managed and tracked on-chain by the StorageRegistry contract.
(4) Consistency
Farcaster is not a direct social application but a lower-level social protocol, similar to the relationship between Lens Protocol and Lenster. Currently, applications built on Farcaster mainly include Alphacaster, a Web3 social application supported by DAO; Discove, for creating and sharing; Jam, for on-chain groups and personalized subscriptions; Opencast and Warpcast, open-source Twitter-style front-ends; and Yup, a social aggregator that cross-posts to Twitter and Lens. The Farcaster front-end used by Vitalik is Warpcast. In terms of logic, Warpcast is basically no different from the core logic of Twitter, allowing users to view "world group" posts and interact with posts (threads) from users they follow by commenting, sharing, and liking.
Applications built on Farcaster provide consumption scenarios for data stored on hubs, where application servers communicate with hubs, download all information, organize and categorize it to create applications for different user experiences, and then provide APIs for users on different clients to use.
Applications built on Farcaster need to adhere to rough consensus and run code, serving as Farcaster's governance model. When someone proposes a FIP (Farcaster Improvement Proposal), and it is approved by protocol developers, application developers, and users, and the code is released, changes to Farcaster will occur. Different parties reach consensus through agreement or rejection. Farcaster does not establish binding voting procedures or have an official role with veto power.
Social Ecosystem Partners
By linking Farcaster identity accounts to other applications or communities, including user alerts Alertcaster, Move-to-Earn Blobs, on-chain social event announcements Eventcaster, Farcaster ecosystem metrics tracking Farcaster Network, earning points by completing tasks FarQuest, messaging app Frens, Ethereum on-chain exploration Interface, decentralized hacker news Kiwi News, finding the latest Web3 projects Launchcaster, personalized media source Neynar, publishing and communication Paragraph, finding interesting topics Pincaster, DAO tools created by Nouns Builder Purple DAO, search engine Search via Raycast, searching using API/GUI Searchcaster, Farcaster community content exploration Surveycaster, tipping platform Tipcast, and token-driven real-time streaming Unlonely.
Currently, Farcaster is still in the testing phase, and users can submit a waiting list. Both Farcaster and Lens Protocol serve as underlying protocols for building social networks, but compared to Lens Protocol, Farcaster is further away from the user spotlight, focusing on developers and application creation. As of mid-September, official data showed that Farcaster's total number of users had just exceeded 20,000, with over 3.8 million historical messages on hubs, and efforts were being made to filter out spam messages after migrating to Optimism to open up to more users. Although there is no news about Farcaster's airdrop plan, Farcaster has made the FIP governance module an important part of the protocol, still worth experiencing and interacting with.
Reference
https://www.youtube.com/@farcasterxyz/videos
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