How are planning to make Farcaster sign ups free?

1. At the protocol, there will always be some amount of cost. Truly free would mean you can spin up an infinite number of spam accounts and fill up the network with junk, making Snapchain unusable. If you allow accounts to be deleted / removed at the protocol, you remove decentralization / introduce a backdoor for censorship.

2. Today the protocol fee is $2 per sign up. We're reducing that $0.20 in the next few weeks. And then there's a path reducing it to $0.10 or $0.05.

3. Warpcast is experimenting with offering a free sign up if you connect a qualifying X / Twitter account. We hope we can offer other methods like phone number verification, proof of human credentials, etc. in the future. Important: we're still paying the protocol fee under the hood. So we're effectively "underwriting" new users. Any app can take this approach.

Continued in next cast...

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