Author: Nicky Sap

Translated by: Felix, PANews

On January 22, Dan Romero, CEO and co-founder of Merkle Manufactory, officially announced that Farcaster has been acquired by the infrastructure provider Neynar, which will also take over the Farcaster application (formerly known as Warpcast) and Clanker.

Writing this sentence feels like laying the groundwork for the ensuing chaos.

So it’s no surprise that those outside the Farcaster circle received not clear information, but rather greater confusion.

Many people thought the entire Farcaster project had been completely shut down.

Some even asked who Neynar is, or why a company only one-tenth the size of Farcaster would acquire a unicorn valued at $150 million.

Some even completely misunderstood the architecture of Farcaster.

If you also don’t understand, congratulations, you have just personally experienced the core issue that has always existed with Farcaster: extremely chaotic information transmission.

Undoubtedly, the achievements of Dan and Varun are indeed remarkable. They successfully built an on-chain social protocol without issuing a token, introduced many new primitives, and allowed developers to find product-market fit (PMF) before distribution.

The concept of Frames is indeed innovative, and its protocol architecture is top-notch, with a community formed around it that is genuine and vibrant.

What truly dragged down Farcaster was not its ability to execute its unique vision.

In simple terms, it was a series of unnecessary missteps, pressure from investors to meet Web2 social metrics, a lack of firm belief within the team, and an inability to clearly communicate the vision. These factors collectively led to the gradual decline of Farcaster.

From the very beginning, the chaotic and almost mysterious brand naming sparked public confusion. Merkle Manufactory is the for-profit entity developing Farcaster (an open protocol), while its single client is called Warpcast, which only changed its name to Farcaster a few months before the acquisition.

Every change stirred up waves, but outside the Farcaster ecosystem, these changes almost never brought positive feedback. On the X platform, users often criticized Farcaster for constantly shifting directions.

But rebranding was not the only surprising change.

Its lack of firm belief in any concept continuously attracted negative attention to the platform. Let’s review the timeline.

Farcaster (formerly Warpcast) was initially a decentralized Twitter, primarily used by early adopters, developers, and crypto natives who wanted to escape the noise of other platforms.

In 2024, Frames was launched, creating new social and on-chain primitives, and its focus on "full decentralization" (which later became a point of criticism) attracted a large number of users. Degen, a meme coin that later reached a market cap of $2 billion, was born from these primitives. However, since its vision was not centered around cryptocurrency, Frames overlooked its potential. Degen perished, and users left in droves.

The Farcaster Developer Day in September 2024 reignited excitement. Channels were set to become "first-class citizens," and Moxie was preparing to redefine creator monetization. The slogan at the time was: "Born from the community, here to stay for the network."

But Channels ultimately failed to be incorporated into the protocol, as the owners of Channels lacked belief and there was no meaningful growth to fill Channels. Moxie's dream of innovating creator monetization also collapsed due to poor token design.

At the 2025 Farcon conference: Miniapps were seen as the growth engine. A significant portion of the conference focused on helping more developers gain their first users and monetize on Farcaster.

Later in 2025, there were reports that the main client of Farcaster would be open-sourced.

But by the end of 2025, the direction had completely shifted: from developers to trading, with leadership admitting that decentralized Twitter had failed. This marked the beginning of its decline.

It is worth mentioning that the client has still not been open-sourced.

In October 2025, Clanker, the flagship AI token launcher that acquired Base, was introduced. The financialization route was fully underway. Dan posted a contract address, claiming it was a random address, and whoever aped in was low agency.

From then on, things started to go awry, and Dan found himself in a dilemma, surrounded by difficulties. His mood visibly declined, and his posting frequency sharply decreased. He was exhausted.

Subsequently, the application went completely out of control, inadvertently promoting rug pulls, inducing users to blindly follow and purchase scam tokens, and providing poorly crafted low-quality token listings. They attempted an initial Clanker presale, which was completely bought out by a single wallet. Users were told this was the normal process for presales. The presale was then canceled.

Each incident sparked a wave of discussion, with articles, podcasts, and comments from onlookers pouring in. A good project is not one that requires you to constantly update your understanding to grasp obscure details, but rather one that conveys a unified, coherent message and disseminates it regularly. Users do not need to know about Cook's private life to understand that Apple will release a new phone in September.

If you view all this from an outsider's perspective, you might think that all of this could have been avoided. But from the inside, these changes may have had their rationale in isolation at the time. Merkle was seeking growth, and investors were likely pressuring the team to meet those unreasonable metrics from the very beginning.

Farcaster is not Twitter and never aspired to be the next Facebook. At its peak, it was merely a protocol with 100,000 active users. It should not be seen as a unicorn in the social space. It is more suited to be the social infrastructure in the crypto domain.

This is precisely why this acquisition makes sense for the entire Farcaster network.

Neynar is a leading infrastructure provider in the Farcaster ecosystem. If you have ever developed a Frame or Miniapp, you have certainly used their services. Their API is excellent. They are one of only two Snapchain operators in the "sufficiently decentralized" network. Their vision aligns more closely with the development direction of Farcaster than Merkle's chaotic growth strategy.

Now, the developer-centric leadership may take some necessary steps to expand the network's reach. They finally have the opportunity to open-source the client; lower the difficulty of running Snapchain nodes (even profitably), thereby encouraging more clients and unique primitives to build on this powerful dataset. Neynar is no longer bound by the pressure of venture capital chasing 100x growth and can truly build Farcaster into what it was meant to be.

The timing is also perfect. The current vibe coding meta narrative is at its peak, with various new ideas, applications, skills, and "Claude for xxx" emerging, and everyone just wants to build wildly.

Neynar has already launched a mini-app studio, allowing non-technical users to build and deploy their first concepts on Farcaster in just a few minutes.

Neynar does not need to tell stories. They just need to keep the infrastructure running smoothly. Perhaps that is enough.

The problem has never been with the protocol itself, but with the forced insertion of a story into something that does not need one.

Related: Is decentralized social dead? After five years of exploration, Farcaster transforms into a wallet

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