Base

Is Farcaster too Base-centric?

A common piece of feedback is "Farcaster is only for people in the Base ecosystem."

Fair / accurate parts of this criticism: most onchain activity for Farcaster users is on Base, there are 3x as many connected Ethereum addresses as Solana addresses on the protocol, Warpcast's wallet does not support Solana. We also do our USDC pay outs on Base.

Misconceptions: Farcaster, the protocol, is 99% offchain—we use a blockchain-like system called Snapchain (previously Hubs)—and the part that is onchain is on OP Mainnet (still part of the Superchain). We support a bunch of other chains via mini apps (frames) and Warpcast wallet: Arbitrum, Polygon, Gnosis, Degen, Zora, Unichain.

The reality is Farcaster users index on 1) Ethereum and 2) apps. And Base is clearly the leader in that category—but entirely based on their own execution.

Relevant casts below:

https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x3c85c5d5
https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x3304f7ab

People see the base mindshare on fc and come to wrong conclusions like: 

“oh it’s because the team’s fav chain is base” or 
“all the early users are ex-coinbase so they push base”

The real reason is much simpler, the base team worked very hard to support fc/frame builders from day 1 and it paid off

Research, economics & memes at dria.co & /swan

I think this is also an important part of base’s general success, they identified fc as a main growth channel for devs and doubled down on it

I literally remember the first weekend frames were released and the base team was doing everything they can to make base the default option in people’s minds