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 also supporting diverse and flexible client and application development.
In March of this year, the memecoin project Degen within the Farcaster ecosystem gained widespread attention with a more than 20-fold increase 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.
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 by obtaining invitation codes through private messages on Twitter, resulting in a highly "elite" user base for Farcaster.
This approach of setting barriers is aimed at gathering a highly similar user base in the early stages, making Farcaster, to some extent, a more refined version similar to Twitter, allowing early users to enjoy a higher quality posting and interactive experience.
In addition, users with early qualifications are usually influential KOLs, who themselves have high social influence. Experiencing Farcaster early may generate 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 USD 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 bot activity.
As of now, Farcaster has accumulated nearly 1.9 million USD in revenue through registration fees and data storage fees.
Both founders of Farcaster, Dan and Varun, have held important positions at Coinbase, which in a way 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.
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 obtain data through third-party service providers like Neynar.
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 below are introductions to some highlight 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's 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 airdrops 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 Frames feature launched in February. Frames are mini-applications embedded in Warpcast, allowing users to engage in more diverse interactions without leaving Warpcast, such as minting NFTs, content subscriptions, 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 image 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 their cards through the Frame without leaving the Warpcast client.
The introduction of Frames has greatly enriched the playability of Warpcast, allowing Farcaster development to no longer be limited to building a decentralized version of Twitter.
Currently, nearly 40,000 users are using the Frames feature, generating over 150,000 on-chain transactions, with 1624 interactive contracts designed.
In terms of user experience, Frame is similar to the MiniApp in the Ton ecosystem. Although Farcaster currently does not have a large user base like Ton, it is important to pay attention to simple and easy-to-spread Frames games similar to Notacoin on Ton.
Considering the success of the DEGEN project in terms of market value and dissemination capabilities, it is entirely possible for projects on Farcaster to distribute high-yield tokens through Frame mini-programs.
Degen.Game is a website that organizes Frame mini-programs, allowing users to log in with their Farcaster identity, view the latest Frames daily, and interact with them.
Jam
Jam is a creator economy platform based on Farcaster that can turn 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 image below.
Jam's trading volume exceeded 10 million USD within 72 hours of its launch.
The first use of Jam requires consuming 10 warp points, which are given as a gift of 100 when registering on Farcaster.
After binding the Farcaster account, users can view the push flow on the homepage and find tweets worth minting. The Top list includes tweets with the most recent transaction counts and the newest tweets, while the Trades section shows real-time records of tweet transactions.
Unlike Friend.tech, each tweet can only have one holder at a time, so there is no situation of grabbing a bunch at the opening and then selling. However, the profit strategy 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 good at creating viral tweets, they can continuously write tweets to create memes and earn a 5% transaction fee.
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 introduced token-gated casts, requiring users to pay to purchase other users' club tokens in order to unlock and view hidden content on clubcast.xyz or in Frames. Currently, permission from the developer is still 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 image 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 posted bounties, available services, and even job opportunities.
AlfaFrens
AlfaFrens is a creator economy application built on the Base ecosystem and Farcaster protocol, developed by Superfluid, which supports the flow of on-chain assets.
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 use $Degen to subscribe to KOL channels, 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 daily, and each channel will distribute the $ALFA tokens obtained from subscriptions evenly among the subscribing users based on the amount of $Degen received. Therefore, the gameplay involves subscribing to channels with high popularity, earning $ALFA tokens, and then staking them to the channel to earn more $Degen.
$ALFA is currently not a circulating token and does not have a fixed price. In the early stages, it can be exchanged for $Degen, so different participation strategies can be formulated based on income preferences (whether to obtain more existing value in $DEGEN or more undervalued $ALFA).
Summary
As people become increasingly accustomed to "living" on the internet, social graphs have become important personal assets, and the demand for data sovereignty is growing.
Web3 solutions naturally address the pain points of current Web2 social platforms, but decentralized social networking has not been particularly successful.
Many projects have been too focused on decentralization, overlooking the importance of user experience. Dan pointed out in an interview with Bankless that the goal of Web3 social networking is not to replace Web2 social networking, but to improve it, allowing users to have ownership of their data while also participating in more on-chain activities, doing things that Web2 cannot do.
By storing value data on the chain and high-frequency data off-chain, Farcaster significantly improves user interaction fluency.
The team has always emphasized mobile development from the beginning, recognizing that mobile devices are the primary usage scenario for social software.
Therefore, the Warpcast client has a good user experience, full functionality, fast iteration speed, and continuously introduces new features such as long-form content and interactive features (actions), providing developers with more and more capabilities to build new applications.
Although Farcaster is far from perfect and there is still much room for improvement, it is already an application that can attract users and maintain growth. In the future, more excellent products based on Farcaster will definitely emerge. Let's look forward to and pay attention to the development of Farcaster, and participate in it as soon as possible.
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