Announcing the first Farcaster L2: Cast!

After working 6 years on Meta infra for 3 billion users, I knew Farcaster proliferation had to be cheaper - we built it.

Cast today has ~500,000 messages external to Farcaster, with ~30,000 .cast handles, only costing $0.39/year on OP!

Building far.quest & wield.xyz, angel investing @ miy.com // Previously Meta, Coinbase // cryptojcdenton.twitter // FID #251

I love that this enables more experimentation via Cast's different protocol approach and flexible messages and I think that's net good, but I'm also struggling to see the symbiosis of this as an L2 rather than a Farcaster fork that has a name and logo that is so similar that new people will inevitably confuse the two

Building FOSS via @frames, /open-frames to help decentralized social win. a16z CSX23. farcasterchannels.com farcaster.id

Would love to better understand the funnel of L2 -> L1 or how the network effects are shared, a blog post would help me a lot. Would also love to play around with new message types

I definitely agree that Farcaster's upfront registration cost limit its proliferation and add a lot of friction to onboarding new users

Hey @df, I would try Cast to get a better idea, forks don’t still sync data of what it forked! 

Here’s a thought, if you go to your post, the only way someone new can like your post is to pay $7-12, or 39 cents with Cast (or if FIDs are free, $0):

thanks, trying to understand, have tried it! L2s usually dont sync the L1 data either so its sort of uncharted territory. Fork might not be the right word - this is more like a supernetwork (a network with an L1 within it)

Hey @df, I would try Cast to get a better idea, forks don’t still sync data of what it forked! 

Here’s a thought, if you go to your post, the only way someone new can like your post is to pay $7-12, or 39 cents with Cast (or if FIDs are free, $0):

https://far.quest/df/0xf362430d03183315ccf9a86fe508a93b1fd23fc9