Ferran 🐒 on Warpcast

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Ferran 🐒 pfp

1/2 My forecast for 2025 is that the integration of Farcaster’s social layer in Coinbase Wallet will be a spectacular failure. We'll probably see a spike when it comes out of beta (after all, there’s a segment of Coinbase Wallet users who enjoy trying out new things and if they do it well people will try it out) but I predict that by the end of summer, no more than 5% of messages will come from there, and DAUs via Coinbase will be negligible. The reasons? Current Farcaster status quo simply isn’t appealing outside an extremely narrow niche. People don’t want a social layer tied to their wallets. And 99% of people don't give a fuck about financial incentives (basing a significant part of your growth strategy on that is shooting yourself in the foot. It’s a massive trap that could be very difficult to escape from). Continue...

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Tony D’Addeo pfp

thanks for sharing my main response is to point out that every path is risky and likely to fail— the name of the game is taking the right risks! if you aren't willing to take a contrarian bet that seems unlikely to succeed you won't disrupt the established players that have more resources and network effects than you, if the path was obvious they'd already be doing it for ex I can see your point no one is asking for social feeds in their wallets right now, but I also see hundreds of millions of creators generating hundreds of billions of dollars for platforms and seeing a relatively minuscule amount of that returned to them, and they're starting to wake up and say wait why is someone else profiting off my content, and something at the intersection of social + wallet being an answer to that that doesn't mean to current iteration of the CBW app is going to be a huge success or that MM has found the magic answer and won't pivot its strategy ofc but not having PMF is the default and shots much be taken

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I do appreciate you taking to the time to think and think having you + the FC community asking questions and noodling on better positionings for Farcaster is Good

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also want to respond to this: 1) TikTok spent $1b paying creators before it found success 2) there's a risk to appealing to too narrow but there's a risk of trying to boil the ocean and end up competing head-to-head with incumbents that have huge moats in capital and network effects. early growth in social networks almost has to start by appealing strongly to niche commonuities, dominating those niches, and then growing outside of it

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Thanks for engaging @deodad! It makes me happy that there is always room for discussion with the MM team! First, I have a genuine question: What's MM current strategy to attract content creators to Farcaster? I missed Farcon and idk the details. I will extend a bit more my thoughts, answering your comments: My main feeling is that there's a core misalignment in strategy. Farcaster is a decentralized protocol but MM go-to-market feels overly centered on bringing developers inside a kind of technically open but “closed ecosystem” (being the perfect UX/UI client for that Warpcast with miniapps) rather than expanding the protocol itself and its utility. Honestly, that's a risky play Compare this to Bluesky, they're clearly prioritizing protocol adoption. They're integrating diverse projects (e.g. Flipboard) and new apps (e.g.Skylight), with them giving utility to different niches. They also have growth spikes for sure, but their long-term approach feels more solid to me. Continue...

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In contrast, MM heavy bet on Warpcast (which includes jeopardizing other clients and being quite aggressive with closed solutions like the DCs) and tailored mini-apps seems logic, but is 100% limiting for growth. Atm, these mini-apps offer minimal value beyond Warpcast, lack broader network effects, bring almost zero utility to most of the people and don't really help widen the audience. IMO, all this SLOWS DOWN and not accelerate adoption, not because it appeals only a niche (as you said, that could be a good strategy at the beginning) but because there is no way to leave that niche or bring utility to the protocol with that current GtM. Real protocol adoption needs to appeal broadly, enabling multiple niches simultaneously, it makes the protocol more antifragile, knowing that if most of the use cases fail, some will succeed to drive growth. Right now, MM is betting "all-in" in, ofc I'm opinionated, really fragile GtM. Continue...

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Regarding the TikTok comparison, I don't think you can't compare Farcaster with a platform like TikTok. TikTok succeeded via centralized, hyper-focused content strategies, which won’t naturally apply to a decentralized protocol like Farcaster. They're different things. Replicating their playbook won't solve Farcaster’s fundamental strategic misalignment. The core challenge is not niche vs. mass-market (as you said, both are valid strategies, but that's not the problem), it's that Farcaster currently lacks a strong, clear strategy focused on driving broad protocol adoption. Continue...

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IMO, promoting client diversity, (really) open integrations, and protocol-level features would position Farcaster better as a social layer, but I don’t see any of that reflected in current GTM strategy. Not saying it’s the only thing to do, but MM’s lack of focus here is honestly pretty disheartening. And of course, this puts Farcaster’s growth at risk as most people won’t build on a platform that only serves a niche of airdrop hunters, crypto builders that like to experiment, and nerds that enjoy playing with “dumb Facebook miniapps” (read this in a Telegram group some days ago, and I think there is some truth in it) and it's quite limited. Plus, FC also doesn’t offer a compelling UVP for builders/companies/projects outside WC So the real question is: why would anyone want to integrate Farcaster into their social layer today? And more important, is Farcaster objective to become a social layer for the masses? If yes, why this misalignment of incentives? Curious about your thoughts on this!

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Forgot to mention that MM is well-funded, so there’s room to pivot, evolve, or even get acquired. I'm sure it can succeed eventually, just that the current strategy feels a bit too opinionated and abstract tbh, like it’s tackling a problem it hasn’t fully understood yet. IMO, the most important attribute of Silicon Valley founders like Dan is not that they're smart (they are!) but their easy access to capital, networks, and room to fail safely. That makes it a lot easier to experiment until something works. It’s just that the current strategy feels very much a product of a bubble (tech&crypto&usa).

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Tony D’Addeo pfp

sorry, broke the thread on this, reattaching here https://warpcast.com/deodad/0xf72dd175

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Really good points @deodad! Gonna answer but feel free to stop this convo whenever you want (we can also jump into a call another day if you want to hear some stubborn like me giving more opinionated feedback ahaha) I wasn’t referring to the decentralisation of the protocol. How much decentralized is the protocol doesn’t matter much; what matters is the GtM approach. The parts of the layer that projects decide to use it’s not that relevant if they can use some parts of it to bring value to their users and they can take advantage of a user base that is diverse and engaging. That’s why projects are building on top of BS and ATproto. The “rightwingfication” of X is definitely a lever that Bluesky used. But the censorship of X on Brazil is another lever that, in an opinionated way, Merkle decided to skip, even though these are big opportunities in marketing. Continues…

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But the real reason of BS success with users and projects developing on top is that many people found value in Bluesky, regardless of their interests. One always find interesting communities there and the feeds are just amazing. On BS, there’s academia, for example, and you can’t find that on X anymore. At the same time, if I understood well, the push for Farcaster channels (closest feature to Bluesky Feeds) is really dependent on Merkle. I believe they could have been great growth channels, but unfortunately, they’re being abandoned instead of considering pivoting them into other radically different approaches. They could have become fundamental pieces even for Web3 projects (DAOs for example). Continues…

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Besides that, I don’t think Coinbase and Zapper integrations should be showcased as a success of client diversity. I don’t think they will bring anything substantial to the protocol Farcaster (not even quality users), and my bet is that they will contribute to stagnate protocol growth instead of accelerating. I think FC needs other types of clients and needs to appeal to a major audience, including normie devs and companies that could find it useful to add FC to their platforms as a competitive advantage. Quite difficult to achieve with the current allocation of efforts. Recently, I’ve been advising 2 projects (one is really amazing, a crypto platform focused on content creators) to integrate FC on their platforms, but none of these have succeeded because they didn’t find that it was bringing any benefit (and that’s with crypto projects; with non-crypto it probably be even worse). Time will tell, tho! I’m always open to proving myself wrong and happy to see FC shine with the current strategy!

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