TL;DR
Activity on Farcaster has exploded in recent weeks. This decentralized protocol for social media apps lures in users with airdrops, and more fundamentally with the promise to no longer be a slave of traditional social media companies. Here, you own your account and content. The recent introduction of Farcaster Frames has introduced new possibilities for marketers: have users mint and buy stuff while staying in their timeline.
Farcaster was co-founded by former Coinbase executives Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan. It is an open-source platform built on top of Ethereum for building decentralized social networks. If you have an Ethereum wallet, it’s a very low threshold to sign up.
Farcaster and its Kin
Farcaster will give you a censorship-resistant solution to control your own social media data and transport your ‘social graph’ across apps in its ecosystem. Any Alice or Bob could jump between different apps built on Farcaster while continuing to use their same identity. Your social identity is NOT saved on a central server of a social media company.
A lot of people liked this idea, apparently, and signed up in recent weeks (see graph below). This graph looks spectacular but realize that 40.000 daily users is a few orders of magnitude smaller than let’s say Twitter. Still, though…
On Farcaster, you can send short text message broadcasts called casts. It’s similar to Nostr, in the way both platforms integrate crypto features such as wallet-based logins and transactions. Whereas Nostr is heavily populated by Bitcoin believers, Farcaster caters to Ethereum users.
Another ‘competitor protocol’ is Lens Protocol: also a decentralized social platform – but built on Polygon.
Another recent addition to the Decentralized Social App Ecosystem is Friend.tech. It burst onto the scene with its crypto-native version of super chats: you could buy the keys of your favorite people to get a hotline. It spiked in popularity but has petered out in recent months. You need to own quite a few ETH to get access to your favorite influencers and hence is considered quite elitist.
A Mix of On-chain and Off-chain Data Storage
Farcaster stores data partly on-chain, partly off-chain. It stores user identity information on-chain on Optimism mainnet while storing data on posts and interactions off-chain.
The actions that are executed on-chain are:
- Creating an account
- Paying for your account ($5)
- Adding account keys (or giving permission) to connected apps
Understandably, not all data are stored on-chain. There is no Ethereum-based chain that could store thousands of posts per second.
Instead, the posts, reactions, profile picture, etc are stored on a peer-to-peer network of servers called Hubsthat store user data. The user actions that are performed off-chain include:
Farcaster uses the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) to manage account usernames.
Warpcast: Most Popular App on Farcaster
Farcaster wants you to sign up for the platform using Warpcast. Warpcast is a Twitter-like app built on Farcaster. It’s often confused with Farcaster itself. But remember, Farcaster is the protocol and Warpcast is an app. Warpcast is to Farcaster a bit like what Gmail is to the SMTP protocol.
Here is how you can use Farcaster using Warpcast:
- Download the Warpcast app on the App…
Erik started as a freelance writer around the time Satoshi was brewing on the whitepaper.
As a crypto investor, he is class of 2020. More of a holder than a trader, but never shy to experiment with new protocols.
