fc-oss

Should we have a single address for everything?

1. The average new user doesn't care. They just care if it works. In the near term auth addresses should make "it just work" for mini apps both on web and in other apps, e.g. Recaster or Coinbase wallet

2. There are nice properties for for having different addresses.

a) Creating a new custody address means a pre-existing wallet isn't required to sign up. This especially important in consumer apps and on mobile.

b) Auth addresses remove the need to have users move seed phrases between apps. This is clunky and bad security UX (for most users).

c) Not all users 1) want 2) can be supported for a spending wallet

d) Verified (i.e. connected addresses) allow you to import reputation and other information to Farcaster, e.g. token-gating.

3. In the longer term, I could see the argument for combining custody addresses and spending wallets, esp. once 7702 happens and it's easy to upgrade everything to smart wallets.

The question is rhetorical at this point because a bet was put on a specific design that requires the creation of a wallet.

The app could have used an external wallet for full user control but that ship has sailed.

The real question is why there was no offer of bringing your own wallet.

A lot of decisions have been forced upon the user we won't know how many users were lost because they didn't want to be forced to create yet a new wallet.

Web3 means to authenticate with your own wallet but Farcaster doesn't know if it's Web3 or not, one day it pushes hard on Web3 concepts the next day pushes hard on Web2 concepts, and it says both are important, but not every concept is compatible.

If somebody wanted to be cynical would see a plot unfolding where the reason was to only allow specific wallets, maybe even fees involved, not at all a good medium to create and promote the best UX.

Software developer, open source enthusiast, privacy advocate.

Clear Wallet Open-source privacy focused wallet: https://clear-wallet.flashsoft.eu/


We wouldn’t have any users if we required an existing wallet. It’s not good consumer UX.

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

Absolutely no user?

OpenSea had 2.45 million users in 2022 while requiring a wallet.
I know for sure of a user who would have preferred to use their own wallet, that is me.

Even offered as an option would have been important for some (as we see many users that only want a single address).

The Web3 promise was that I only needed my wallet to log in.

But I get it either this kind of user was seen as a negligible quantity that wasn't worth the effort for such an option, or another unknown reason was present, after all, many people even Vitalik made a new wallet for this network, and some people felt that as a betrayal of Web3 ethos, now we can't know if people like him would have chosen to use a specific wallet.