Author: Biteye, Core Contributor Wilson Lee

*The full text is about 4500 words, with an estimated reading time of 10 minutes

Farcaster is a decentralized social network protocol that uses smart contracts and hybrid storage technology to facilitate social connections, content sharing, and data ownership among users, while supporting diverse and flexible client and application development.

In March of this year, the memecoin project Degen within the Farcaster ecosystem attracted widespread attention with a growth of over 20 times and a market value exceeding 1 billion USD, making the Farcaster ecosystem the focus of attention.

In May, the developer of Farcaster, Merkle Manufactory, announced the completion of a new round of financing, led by Paradigm with a total amount of 1.5 billion USD, raising the company's valuation to 10 billion USD.

According to Dune data, the total number of Farcaster users has reached 540,000, and the daily active users have surged from 2,000 at the beginning of the year to the current 56,000, achieving a growth of over 28 times.

https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster

Farcaster is not a new social project. In the early testing phase, founder Dan invited many well-known OGs, including V God, to join through personal influence and relationships, and screened early users through Twitter private messages to obtain invitation codes, resulting in a highly "elite" concentration of Farcaster users.

This approach of setting up barriers is aimed at gathering a highly similar user base in the early stages, making Farcaster to some extent a refined version similar to Twitter, where early users can enjoy a higher quality posting and interaction experience.

In addition, users with early qualifications are usually influential KOLs, who have high social influence themselves. Early access to Farcaster may create a certain social superiority, and they will also have a stronger motivation to discuss and spread Farcaster on other platforms.

In October of last year, Farcaster opened for registration, but still set a $5 entry barrier, effectively preventing a large number of bot accounts from registering, maintaining a good overall atmosphere for Farcaster, in stark contrast to Nostr, which declined due to rampant bots.

As of now, Farcaster has accumulated nearly 1.9 million USD in revenue through registration fees and data storage fees.

https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster

Both founders of Farcaster, Dan and Varun, have held important positions at Coinbase, which in a sense closely links Farcaster to the Base ecosystem. Jesse, the core person in charge of the Base chain, is also very active on Farcaster.

From another perspective, more than 70% of the on-chain interactions of the top 500 fans on Farcaster occur on the Base chain.

Therefore, for those who are bullish on the Base ecosystem, Farcaster is also seen as a potential treasure trove of Alpha.

https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster

Farcaster protocol data is stored in on-chain and off-chain hubs, and developers can choose to run hub nodes on their own, or they can use third-party service providers like Neynar to access data.

All of this data is permissionless, and based on this available data, developers can build various clients and applications, greatly increasing the richness and innovation space of the Farcaster ecosystem.

Users can track the progress of the ecosystem through the decaster website, and here are some highlights of the projects.

WrapCast

Warpcast is the main application under the Farcaster protocol and the first Farcaster client, developed by a top engineering team led by Dan for over a year.

Its overall architecture is similar to traditional Web2 social software, with a smooth user experience, currently occupying 90% of the Farcaster protocol traffic.

The registration process for Warpcast is simple, and the system will automatically generate a bound wallet for the user. All Warpcast accounts are associated with a Farcaster ID and the generated content is stored in the Farcaster hub.

This design allows even non-cryptocurrency users to easily enter the on-chain world, greatly reducing the cognitive threshold for new users.

For users familiar with on-chain interactions, they can also bind their commonly used cryptocurrency wallets. These adjustments allow Warpcast to provide user-friendly experiences while also playing an important role in promoting the growth and user acceptance of the Farcaster ecosystem.

Warpcast is designed as a social platform similar to Twitter, where users can post tweets (casts), comment, retweet, and follow other users.

In addition to social media functions similar to Twitter, Warpcast also introduces features such as channels and actions, leading to more diverse interaction methods.

For example, DEGEN uses the participation of users in the Farcaster ecosystem to distribute tokens. Users can participate in DEGEN's airdrop by following channels and interacting, and the airdropped tokens can be given as rewards to other users.

Farcaster's significant growth this year is closely related to the introduction of Frames in February. Frames are mini-applications embedded in Warpcast, allowing users to engage in more diverse interactions without leaving Warpcast, such as minting NFTs, subscribing to content, playing games, and receiving tokens.

For example, far.cards is a collectible card project exclusive to Farcaster users, developed based on mint.club. The attributes of each user's card are determined by their level of activity on Farcaster, such as the number of followers, likes, and replies received.

The price of the cards is determined by a bonding curve, and the purchased cards can be collected or traded.

As shown in the figure below, the application of far.cards can be published in the form of a Frame in a tweet, allowing users who see the tweet to directly purchase the cards through the Frame without leaving the Warpcast client.

The introduction of Frames greatly enriches the playability of Warpcast, allowing Farcaster development to no longer be limited to building a decentralized Twitter.

Currently, nearly 40,000 users are using the Frames feature, generating over 150,000 on-chain transactions, with a total of 1624 interactive contracts.

https://dune.com/jhackworth/frames

In terms of user experience, Frame is similar to the MiniApp in the Ton ecosystem. Although Farcaster currently does not have a huge user base like Ton, it is important to pay attention to simple and easily spreadable Frame mini-games similar to Not a coin on Ton.

Referring to the success of the DEGEN project in market value and dissemination capabilities, it is entirely possible for projects on Farcaster to distribute high-return tokens through Frame mini-programs.

Degen.Game is a website that organizes Frame mini-programs, where users can log in with their Farcaster identity to view the latest Frames and interact with them.

https://www.degen.game/frames/new

Jam

Jam is a creator economy platform based on Farcaster, which can convert every tweet on Warpcast into an NFT asset similar to Friend.tech Key. Users can buy/sell each tweet, and the price is determined by the Bonding Curve as shown in the figure below.

Within 72 hours of its launch, Jam's trading volume exceeded 10 million USD.

The first use of Jam requires consuming 10 warp points, which are given as a gift of 100 points when registering on Farcaster.

After binding the Farcaster account, users can view the feed on the homepage, looking for tweets worth minting. The Top list includes tweets with the most recent trading volume and the latest tweets, while the Trades section shows real-time records of tweet transactions.

Unlike Friend.tech, each tweet can only have one owner at a time, so there is no situation of grabbing a bunch at the opening and then selling. However, the profit-making approach is similar, requiring early identification and purchase of tweets with potential for dissemination, including Farcaster core developers, V God, KOLs, etc., to ensure that there will be other buyers in the future.

If the user is a KOL or has a good sense of the internet and is good at tweeting memes, they can also earn a 5% transaction fee by continuously writing tweets to trigger dissemination.

Jam currently does not have tokens, but it has internal points. Considering the overall gameplay, it is very similar to Friend.tech, and there may be potential airdrops.

Clubcast

ClubCast is an application on Farcaster similar to Zhi Shi Xing Qiu (Knowledge Planet), which has launched the token-gated casts feature. Users need to pay to buy other users' club tokens in order to unlock and view hidden content on clubcast.xyz or in Frames. Currently, permission from the developer is required to use it.

BountyCaster

BountyCaster is a task platform built on the Farcaster protocol, founded by Linda Xie (former co-founder of Scalar Capital, Coinbase product manager).

As shown in the figure below, users can send content through clients like Warpcast with the tag @Bountybot to post tasks, and other users can then claim the corresponding tasks and receive rewards.

Similarly, users can also post the services they can provide and their prices. Users need to log in with their Farcaster account on the BountyCaster website to view published bounties, available services, and even job opportunities.

AlfaFrens

AlfaFrens is a creator economy application built on the Base ecosystem and Farcaster protocol, developed with support for on-chain asset flow by Superfluid.

Similar to Friend.tech, users can subscribe to KOL channels and access exclusive chat rooms, and further receive tokens produced by the channels.

The platform has two currencies, $Degen and $ALFA. $Degen is an ERC20 token on the Base chain, while $ALFA is the proprietary token of the AlfaFrens platform, currently only obtainable within the platform and not transferable.

$Degen is the consumption token of the platform. When starting to use AlfaFrens, users need to prepare some $Degen to deposit into the wallet generated by the platform.

Users can subscribe to KOL channels with $Degen, divided into three levels of 500, 1000, and 1500 $Degen per month.

The subscription fee is linearly consumed, and users can cancel the subscription at any time. 70% of the subscription fee is distributed to users who stake $ALFA to the channel based on the staking ratio.

The platform produces $ALFA tokens every day, and each channel will distribute the $ALFA equally to subscribing users based on the amount of $Degen received from subscriptions.

Therefore, in terms of gameplay, users can subscribe to channels with higher popularity, earn $ALFA tokens, and then stake them to the channel to earn more $Degen.

$ALFA is currently not a circulating token and has no pricing. In the early stages, it was obtained by exchanging $Degen for $ALFA, so different participation strategies can be formulated based on profit preferences (whether to obtain more $Degen with existing value or more $ALFA with no pricing yet).

Conclusion

As people become more accustomed to "living" on the internet, the social graph has become an important personal asset, and the demand for data ownership is increasing.

Web3 solutions naturally address the pain points of current Web2 social platforms, but the decentralized social field has not been particularly successful.

Many projects are too focused on decentralization and overlook the importance of user experience. In an interview with Bankless, Dan pointed out that the positioning of Web3 social is not to replace Web2 social, but to improve it, allowing users to have data ownership while adding more on-chain gameplay that cannot be achieved in Web2.

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