Farcaster

A sufficiently decentralized social network. farcaster.xyz

For those unaware, I send a bi-weekly email to 5,000 people both within and outside the industry. In these emails, I discuss what's top of mind, highlight interesting developments, and provide insights and analysis to make sense of it all.

This week, I wrote about @farcaster, and thought I would share it here 👇

While many of us here are familiar with the ecosystem, with Farcaster's $150MM fundraising round officially announced, we may want some collateral to share with friends and family

Farcaster: Protocol

Farcaster is a protocol designed to foster the development of new types of social networks, offering users control over their data, and enabling developers to build applications without requiring permission from the network. A key feature is its focus on identity and data control.

As an example, Farcaster ID allows users to take their profile picture, social graph (including followers), owned tokens, channels they've posted in, and liked posts with them to other applications (What’s actually happening here is the Farcaster ID is mapped to linked wallets, allowing for a plethora of use cases).

In addition to Warpcast, we're also seeing growth from @bountycaster, @super, @drakula and @discove as examples of growing clients built on top of Farcaster.

Innovative Feature: Frames

In January '24, Warpcast launched “Frames,” which helped catapult Warpcast's Daily Active Users (DAUs). Frames are an innovation that essentially allows users to interact with apps in their feed, without leaving to do so via a third party.

This novel feature is actually built atop the Open Graph standard, pioneered by Facebook in 2010. It’s a web2 innovation that’s supercharged by the composable data and onchain capabilities mentioned above. 

Think: One-click checkout without ever leaving your timeline.

Advantages of Frames & Farcaster

Creative Freedom - Users scrolling through a feed of casts can now click on a Frame posted by someone they follow, and perform a variety of functions—inc minting NFTs, browsing art gallery, playing games, subscribing to newsletters, and making  purchases—all while staying in feed.

This gives developers a ton of flexibility to create new tools within Warpcast, while leveraging the network effects that are built into the app

ie: create a frame that lets you mint an NFT, but only if you have taken certain actions

ie: create a frame that is token-gated depending on what's inside a wallet

Distribution - It's easier to gain traction and break through the noise compared to launching on X.Channels, open social graphs, early access frames and token-based targeting are just a few of the novel distribution plays emerging on Farcaster

UX — every Farcaster user already has an EdDSA in the app, whether Warpcast, Supercast or something else. Every Farcaster client supports frames under the hood.

Sign in with Farcaster allows users to effortlessly onboard to new applications, bringing their entire social graph with them in one click.

Composability — the key maps to the user's Farcaster ID (FID) make it trivial pull in all the user's social graph context.

My Experience

I am constantly discussing ways to remove jargon from the ecosystem, while solving for use cases. I believe Warpcast's flexibility and ease of distribution are pushing the ecosystem forward. It’s an exciting environment for both developers and users to explore the future 🙏 

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Warpcast: Application

One of the flagship applications built on Farcaster is @warpcast, a social media platform developed by the Farcaster team. Warpcast is akin to X, however, it provides certain decentralized experiences where users can freely interact and share content while maintaining control over their data.