Farcaster: Vitalik praises, a16z invests, why are the big shots' efforts met with a lukewarm response from the community?

Author: bayemon.eth, ChainCatcher

This summer, Friend.tech exploded overnight, with a pair of blue bunny ears quickly landing on the front pages of major media outlets. Community users rushed to join the Friend.tech family, and the phrase "Who has a Friend.tech invitation code?" repeatedly appeared in various communities. Backed by the Layer2 newcomer Base and with leading institution Paradigm participating in the seed round investment, in a general sense, Friend.tech's "wealth and glory" seems to be secured.

However, from a data perspective, Friend.tech, which has excellent innate conditions, seems unable to escape the "three-minute heat" curse of Web3 social. After the announcement of Paradigm's investment, the highest daily trading volume reached 539,800, while yesterday it was only 124,000. Yet, the temporary popularity of Friend.tech has redirected many people's attention back to the long-neglected social track.

There are other social applications backed by major institutions besides Friend.tech. As early as July last year, the decentralized social protocol Farcaster secured $30 million in funding led by a16z. Additionally, Vitalik has recently expressed his interest in decentralized social during discussions with Bankless, stating that "Farcaster is actually very successful." Furthermore, Farcaster's founder, Dan Romero, was a former executive at Coinbase, which gives the founding team a certain "Web3 big factory background."

However, according to Dune data, Farcaster has only 24,202 registered users, with daily interactions at just 13,655. Such a low number of registrations and interactions is clearly not comparable to the viral spread of Friend.tech or even the recent Tip Coin. In the community, Farcaster can even be said to have a lukewarm response. Although social protocols may inherently carry the "can't last three days" trait, why hasn't Farcaster, which Vitalik supports and a16z funds, sparked widespread discussion and adoption in the community?

The Technical Barrier of Being a "Protocol"

In the report "Web3 Social: Road to Mass Adoption" released by Binance in December 2022, the Web3 social ecosystem is divided into four categories: infrastructure, middleware, applications, and tools. Although the article begins by comparing Friend.tech and Farcaster, Farcaster Protocol, as a protocol, is fundamentally different from application-based Friend.tech.

A protocol is essentially a set of logically defined rules for data querying, organizing, and displaying, serving as an intermediary between blockchain infrastructure and applications. Through this logic, users at the application layer can communicate without considering the differences in internal processes, data structures, or program designs. In simple terms, the existence of a protocol allows the builders of the Tower of Babel to communicate without barriers using "the same language." Farcaster creates an intermediary layer that allows developers to create dApps without permission while enabling users to freely migrate their digital identities and social graphs across various dApps. Since most innovations in Web3 are built within existing ecosystems, protocols are particularly important for both infrastructure and applications. This is likely why Vitalik is particularly optimistic about protocols like Farcaster and Lens.

That said, since protocols exist like a "universal language" in the Web3 social ecosystem, why does Farcaster still fail to attract the attention of the majority? Taking HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), another "protocol," as a comparison, even for this protocol OG that has been almost inseparable from people for 40 years, the vast majority of users do not understand or care about the principles of network data transmission, as ordinary users believe that such principles only need to be addressed by developers and network engineers. A seemingly "omnipotent" protocol can easily create the illusion of "boiling the ocean," making ordinary users and even amateur players with some knowledge feel intimidated.

Moreover, the biggest difference between Farcaster and Lens Protocol, both social protocols, is that Lens Protocol stores all information on the Polygon network, while Farcaster adopts an off-chain solution, only storing the most critical basic information like accounts, storage, and keys on Ethereum, while keeping frequently operated information like authentication and registration on off-chain Farcaster Hubs. This means that Hubs need to maintain copies of all node data and update them in real-time based on protocol activity, thus increasing the operational costs of Hubs and requiring relatively high demands on equipment. Although the Farcaster team has stated they are seeking solutions to address storage and bandwidth issues and reduce Hubs costs, until these problems are resolved, Farcaster's high participation costs have deterred a small number of "enthusiastic citizens."

To some extent, as a social protocol, Farcaster's audience is far smaller than that of social applications like Friend.tech, fundamentally failing to generate an overly enthusiastic fan economy effect.

To be crypto-native or not

Temporarily stepping out of the protocol circle and discussing the app, the social application Warpcast built on Farcaster has a front-end interface similar to Twitter, allowing functionalities such as posting, replying, and commenting. Additionally, it can perform wallet linking, on-chain activity tracking, and NFT showcasing, among other crypto-native actions. Although it looks similar and has similar functions, Warpcast and Twitter only share a resemblance without any connection or interaction. In contrast, Friend.tech and Tip Coin clearly relied on Twitter for traffic from the very beginning—Friend.tech invited major Twitter KOLs to join early on, while Tip Coin took a more straightforward approach, exchanging project tokens for tweets with tags. It can be said that Friend.tech and Tip Coin became popular due to their "simple operations," representing a direct monetization of users relying on Web2 social networks, with their only link to Web3 being tokens, lacking any new crypto-native concepts or operations.

On the other hand, dApps like Warpcast built on Farcaster inherently target crypto-native users, which means that the social graph built on Farcaster requires users to start from scratch. Currently, the Web3 social network clearly cannot cover all aspects like Web2. Additionally, users unfamiliar with crypto technology need more time to understand the concept of fully sharing social graphs with third parties and must accept that the control of data belongs to developers and will not be supervised by the users themselves, a characteristic of "decentralization."

While Farcaster is a more authentic Web3 social protocol, the costs of rebuilding the social graph based on it are significant and cannot be ignored until the concept of Web3 is widely recognized and Web3 social truly becomes "omnipresent." However, in the long run, Farcaster, as a protocol layer, is far more interesting than "mandatory" social applications like Friend.tech and Tip Coin that aim to "turn I into E for airdrops." In the future, as the entire Web3 social ecosystem advances, people will see the value increment that Farcaster brings to the social graph through long-term accumulation.

Embracing Optimism, Can Farcaster Turn the Tide?

In August this year, Farcaster chose to migrate its identity and storage contracts to the OP Mainnet and launched permissionless registration. On one hand, permissionless registration replaces the previous invitation model, likely leading to an increase in Farcaster registrations and usage. Choosing a Layer2 network with nearly five times the TPS is indeed an effective way to hedge against future throughput risks.

Additionally, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero directly pointed out that the "most active users and developers" are currently using Optimism or other OP Stack networks (such as Base). If most social applications monetize users' social networks, then social protocols like Farcaster monetize the energy of community developers, which easily explains why Farcaster chose OP in the vast sea of Layer2. For protocols that rely on developers to create diverse social ecosystems, the rapidly established super-chain kingdom after the OP Stack release is indeed too tempting. By actively approaching the source of motivation, Farcaster seems to be signaling that the team has prioritized the large-scale adoption of the protocol.

Currently, Farcaster is still in the beta phase, and users can submit a waiting list, but recently Farcaster has gradually opened registration to some eligible users (donors, certain NFT holders on Ethereum, etc.). This week, Farcaster will further implement permissionless registration, opening it up to more users.