Title: AICoin
Author: katiewav
Translator: DeepTechFlow
The infrastructure is not yet truly ready to welcome mainstream consumers.
The FarCon conference has stirred up a wave of excitement and optimism. The atmosphere on-site was exhilarating, and using on-chain payments felt truly magical. I was also amazed by the high-quality projects presented at the FarHack judging panel. Clearly, from the native founders of Farcaster to independent developers and media enthusiasts, a variety of talented developers are eager to build on Farcaster, and this enthusiasm is infectious and should not be underestimated.
However, a more subtle viewpoint is that I believe many people left FarCon with more questions than answers. The entire weekend was filled with discussions of familiar ideas and concepts, almost to a painful degree of repetition. An unresolved controversial issue also loomed in the air: can a truly decentralized, positive social network exist while still being largely steered by a team (with good intentions)?
I would like to share some of my initial reflections here—from the most commonly discussed issues I heard, to the content I would like to see emerge from the Farcaster community, to my overall framework for consumer-grade encrypted products.
Is the infrastructure ready?
Personally, I believe the infrastructure is not yet truly ready to welcome mainstream consumers.
Despite the extensive discussions on L2 and L3, using these chains still poses challenges. Checking the transaction status on each respective chain is quite difficult whenever I use L2 or L3— for example, on Zora, the transaction of $ENJOY is still very confusing. Logging into the Farcaster client through "Sign-in with Farcaster" still feels clumsy and, frankly, a bit annoying. Many at Farcon were excited about making purchases on-chain, but they had to wait for over 10 minutes to complete a purchase because they needed to transfer funds to Base.
However, hiding behind the excuse of "we have to wait for the infrastructure to be perfected to build applications" is dangerous and complacent. I established a framework for thinking about the development of infrastructure and applications in two stages during my conversations at FarCon.
Stage 1:
Make it easier for individuals with lower technical expertise, fewer native encryption technologies, and more product/vision orientation (referred to as "Idea Guys") to use tools and iterate on application concepts that may attract mainstream consumers. With the efforts of the Farcaster team, Neynar and other native infrastructure teams of Farcaster, general infrastructure teams like Stack and Privy, and other community developers, we have made significant progress in this area. Utilize encrypted native users as testing grounds for these MVPs and continuously improve without critical infrastructure barriers.
Stage 2: Create first-class applications and product experiences for consumers with various interests, encryption levels, and backgrounds.
I believe the first stage is coming to an end. Over the past few years, we have made remarkable progress in infrastructure, from collaborating with companies like Privy to develop embedded wallets, to reducing costs using L2s/L3s, to improving bridging and chain abstraction through partnerships with companies like Decent, to seamless fiat off-ramp solutions like Ansible, to building the Farcaster protocol itself. This is a monumental feat of complex network engineering. There is still much work to be done to further improve the user experience, but we can finally complete this work while rapidly developing applications and experimenting.
Future Farcaster Client
During FarCon, there were many discussions and debates about the fate of the client (including IRL and URL, but mainly URL). Because the Farcaster team may be motivated to keep Warpcast as the mainstream client—most clients will only serve as material for Warpcast and will soon be assimilated.
Considering the form factors of the client so far, I believe this is a meaningful core point of contention—most clients are some form of rebranding or slicing/slicing of the global Warpcast feed. In my opinion, most potential client concepts I heard about are stuck in this narrow range. My feeling is that this homogenized core desire is attracting and draining the valuable social graph of Farcaster, while paying less attention to other fundamental elements of Farcaster: the Farcaster protocol and its data structure.
Conversations I had with Archetype research consultant Andrew Hong and teams trying to build social networks in the past made me realize that the ability to use out-of-the-box p2p networks and data structures designed to modularize social graphs is a game-changer for application developers. I would love to see the vision for the client break through the support for existing Warpcast users, providing completely new experiences or features that may not be achievable within the scope of a platform like Warpcast with a similar interface to Twitter, or attracting the primary user base of Warpcast who may not be interested in encryption industry topics. Furthermore, from a high-level perspective, the consumer-oriented interface tries to do everything, but actually accomplishes nothing—"no super app, I love you." Channels are a clever effort in this direction, as Warpcast channels targeting specific themes can better provide more niche, differentiated clients for specific communities and allow these clients to emerge more naturally.
The above implies a previous point that the infrastructure/onboarding mechanism has not reached a state where Farcaster/Warpcast can be completely abstracted from the client experience, which may lead us into a state of "meta-feature" clients.
Therefore, another naturally arising question is—if we want to attract non-Warpcast users, why use encrypted infrastructure? In an era rich in information and media, both real and simulated, social management and coordination are crucial. I believe that products entirely coordinated by users can be very powerful, and tokens are a powerful mechanism to facilitate this coordination.
One short-term question that particularly piqued my interest after leaving FarCon is the future of commercial and commercially focused infrastructure/clients on Farcaster. On-site, I know that multiple teams were providing support for different commercial experiences during the conference. This category quickly generated excitement among builders, and I hope to closely monitor developments there in the coming months.
Deconstructing Consumer-Grade Encrypted Products
In summary, the common questions I received at FarCon were what I am most concerned about now regarding consumer-oriented encrypted products and how I view this field more broadly. Today, I roughly divide consumer encryption into two different frameworks:
- ### Ecosystem-first
The encrypted ecosystem is famously tribal (i.e., Ethereum vs. Solana), and this is also true for narrower consumer ecosystems. Observing the interactions between Zora, Base, and Farcaster as intertwined ecosystems has always been interesting. Transactions based on Zora and Base often rely on Warpcast for distribution and discovery, while Farcaster is supported by Zora and Base. I believe the cultures and practices emerging in these ecosystems, whether independent or interrelated, will be central to shaping the near-term future of consumer-grade encrypted product currencies, as builders tend to prefer building in ecosystems with specific user roles.
- ### Use-case-first
As for the product use cases/types I am considering, there are several categories:
Connecting offline/online user data
Brand loyalty
On-chain social
On-chain media/music
These categories intersect, so I will provide a more comprehensive consideration below:
In my previous post "Fast Forward: Building Consumer at Internet Speed," I wrote about how user identity and experience between IRL and URL are fragmented. For the sake of brevity, I will briefly restate it here:
The user's journey online and offline is highly fragmented. As the boundaries between physical and digital planes continue to blur, the ability to form a truly recognizable, representative identity also disintegrates. We are faced with a huge opportunity to create experiences that seamlessly integrate the physical and digital, especially in cases where the social graph can freely move between online and offline.
For individuals/communities: How can my favorite online channels better provide information and establish connections with the people, groups, and places I frequently encounter offline?
For brands: How can brands better understand how consumers who make in-store purchases spend their time online and interact with them on these platforms?
Now is a critical moment to consider the intersection of encryption and media, although I also believe these products will stabilize over a longer time frame than most short-term opportunities. Traditional media and music are experiencing a crisis of existence, and are collapsing in terms of business structures, monetization, and the roles of consumers and artists/critics. As I mentioned before, I believe tokens and broader encryption are powerful tools that can be used to coordinate media networks that are increasingly reliant on user participation, user-generated content, and possibly even user ownership.
I intentionally kept this reflection relatively raw to avoid the temptation of over-intellectualization. Overall, upon leaving FarCon, I feel both excited and concerned about its future. Undoubtedly, star teams and organically formed early ecosystems have laid the foundation. I believe that to elevate the ecosystem to a new level, a diverse community composed of developers, creators, and strong users is needed, and I am very excited to be part of its journey.
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。
