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!

2/ We provide a detailed overview on Cast in our docs, where you can also start building on top of our open-source endpoints!

https://docs.wield.co/farcaster/layer2/overview

To try Cast out today, use: https://far.quest/cast

🚀🚀🚀

Building @farquest, wield.xyz, investing @ miy.com - previously Meta, Coinbase // cryptojcdenton.twitter // FID #251

I expand here: https://docs.wield.co/farcaster/layer2/overview

Social protocol L2s are unexplored! We're referring to the analogy of an L1, Ethereum wasn't called an L1 at launch. For millions of people to learn and try Farcaster, an "L2" with small onboarding fees that has data from the Farcaster "L1" is essential!

Principal at Cobalt Ventures. Write @ TheItinerant.io ; BenErsing.com Host: /venturecapital /finance

Neat!

What do you mean by a “Farcaster L2”? I didn't realize FC is an L1.

product & ux therapy /openux ~~ contemplating /manansh

Building open source via @frames, /open-frames to help Farcaster and decentralized social win. a16z CSX23. Side proj: farcasterchannels.com farcaster.id @search

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

Linking my reply here, realized it's hard to find it!

Linking my reply here, realized it's hard to find it!

https://warpcast.com/jc/0xe402c1f6

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 degencast.xyz /degencast . ex-bitmain, binance
u3.xyz/u/qiaoliang.eth


Cast funnels users into Farcaster IDs/storage when they want to use and post on the L1! Many churn at the high $7-12 fee, considering social media today is normally free.

Think of why free to play games now dominate e.g. Fortnite and Warzone, the cheaper the barrier of entry, the faster an ecosystem will proliferate!

eth l2 pay gas for l1 to host calldata. How does cast benefit farcaster L1?

The open web is dead, long live the open web. ⌐◨-◨

https://gabrielayuso.com

Mentioned elsewhere when we soft launched this in September, Farcaster was invite-only, and we had 100,000 users asking for a client, serving an immediate need :)

Even today, protocol fees aren't guaranteed to be $7 forever. I'm also not sure app unit economics can return $7 immediately, haven't seen that in web2 much

Looking forward to diving deep into this.
Wondering why it would be necessary to have a cheaper L2 for FC instead of having an app layer that can cover the cost of the user's storage units at this stage.

Cast is an open-source, federated hub which we expand here, https://docs.wield.co/farcaster/layer2/overview, powers far.quest/cast

Here's the meat, you can spin up this server and customize your own network, add your own MessageType's, etc: https://github.com/wieldlabs/universe/blob/main/express-routes/farcaster.js

Trying to understand this - is Cast an FC fork where the storage fee is set to be more affordable?

Thank you for the support! I wonder how far.quest can get added to thedapplist.com :)

community @thedapplist exploring modern cryptography and programmable privacy at Fairblock

👨‍💻 @unofficial and /fitness, b4 spotify, peloton

Top 50 on DeBank: FantomKing; Co-Founder OnBlock Ventures; CryptoHolic; ALINIEX.com; Mad Lads, Based Punks

Thank you Lukas, I hope you're enjoying Farcaster a ton!

We explain more here: https://docs.wield.co/farcaster/layer2/overview

Try far.quest/cast yourself - it's the first Farcaster client (and L2) that doesn't explicitly require a FID to cast on or interact with Farcaster data.

Wallets can talk with Farcaster message data, on the Cast network saving lots of fees!

/ted | exploring the onchain frontier | surfing @ venice, ca | eating @ gjusta / gjelina

can someone explain this to me please? i feel dumb but i genuinely don’t get it lol

Discover the best new web3 projects /launchcaster · https://nf.td/launchcaster

This is such a cool idea, congrats on launch!!

Huge congrats on launching this 👏 
I think you’re ahead of the curve on this approach. Leading by example, it will be interesting to see how you and others build upon this concept