Detailed Explanation of Farcaster: Why Is This Time Different?

Written by: ZENECA

Compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow

Recently, Farcaster has become a hot topic in the crypto space. However, the understanding of Farcaster by the outside world is clearly lacking. I am here to attempt to explain what Farcaster is.

I want to state at the outset that I know many of you may feel extremely fatigued by the terms "decentralized social" (DeSo) and "social finance" (SoFi), especially after what happened with Friend Tech in the past few months. As someone who once wrote a 5000-word article on Friend Tech and told you it would almost certainly collapse, I hope I have earned some of your trust and time to try to explain why Farcaster is different.

Friend Tech focuses almost entirely on the financial aspect, with only a slight involvement in social and decentralization. In contrast, Farcaster focuses almost entirely on social and decentralization, with financial aspects only slightly involved.

Farcaster has no native token, no Ponzi scheme; it is simply a good product built by excellent developers.

So, what is Farcaster, what is Warpcast, why is it attracting so much attention now, and how can you get involved?

What is Farcaster?

Farcaster is a fully decentralized social media protocol.

You might ask, what does "fully decentralized" mean?

In the words of co-founder Varun Srinivasan:

• If two users can find each other and communicate, even if other parts of the network want to stop them, the social network can achieve full decentralization.

• This means users can always reach their audience, which is only possible if developers can build many clients on the network. If there is only one client, it can stop communication between users.

Sounds great, right? It really does!

Imagine if Twitter were built on a decentralized protocol. If you have ever been dissatisfied with how things operate: the ads you see, the content you see, the terrible algorithms, the money you pay monthly for Twitter Blue, etc. If someone could create a new client with the same users and content as Twitter but approach ads, content, algorithms, and subscriptions differently, wouldn’t that be great?

Wouldn’t it be great if your account could never be banned?

Or, if you are a developer or someone running a business on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, wouldn’t it be wonderful if companies couldn’t arbitrarily revoke API access or change ad rules, completely ruining your life’s work and leaving you helpless?

Wouldn’t it be great if you were sure you wouldn’t be suddenly abandoned like that?

This is basically how Farcaster works.

Because the protocol is sufficiently decentralized, it means any developer can build applications to interact with the protocol.

If you (as a user) don’t like one, you can try another, and another, or more (I will share some current clients for you to check out below). If you really hate them (but still want to use the protocol), and have enough determination, you can create your own protocol.

The existence of such a product is incredibly important!

Do you know how much power large social media companies have? How they influence our thoughts, opinions, emotions, elections, and everything else by changing what we see in our feeds? This is a big, scary, and dangerous question.

Farcaster offers a solution. It provides a way to return power to the people instead of being held by companies. What it does for social media is akin to what cryptocurrency does for finance (and other things). Unsurprisingly, it uses blockchain as the foundation to achieve all of this.

This is what real, lasting, decentralized social media looks like. Not a Ponzi scheme factory like Friend Tech, but a good technology that can be built upon openly, where anyone can participate and build on it, censorship-resistant and permissionless.

This is what true lasting decentralized social media looks like. Not a Ponzi scheme factory like Friend Tech, but this—good technology, open building, for anyone to participate and build upon. Censorship-resistant, permissionless. All the features we love about cryptocurrency, now applied to social media.

Decentralized social media is the future. It is bound to be important, and it is also better for the end user. Mass adoption will take time, as for most people, all of this is still an overly complex and unfamiliar concept. But this is the future, and Farcaster is poised to be a strong contender to bring decentralized social to the world.

One last note about Farcaster: one of the ways it prevents a lot of spam is by requiring each account to pay a small fee to purchase storage space. The current annual fee is $7. I’ve heard people say, "Since Farcaster is so decentralized, why does Warpcast still require me to pay a fee?" It’s worth noting that Warpcast is currently subsidizing fees for about 20 countries worldwide, allowing many users to use it for free.

What is Warpcast?

If you have heard of Farcaster, you may have also heard of Warpcast. You might also be quite confused about the difference between them.

In simple terms: Farcaster is the decentralized protocol, and Warpcast is the application built on top of it.

Warpcast is just one of many applications built on this protocol, making it easy for people to communicate with each other using the protocol.

Recently, there has been a lot of complaining on Twitter about Farcaster not being decentralized because some people have had difficulty creating accounts on Warpcast.

This is like saying Bitcoin is not decentralized because it’s hard to open an account on Coinbase.

Warpcast is built by the same team that developed Farcaster and is currently the most popular client, so it’s understandable that there is some confusion. But it is still a centralized company, a team of about 12 people, working on software to make it easier for all of us to interact with the underlying decentralized protocol.

As the application gains popularity, they are experiencing some growing pains, which is why some people are having trouble registering accounts with them. I believe things will stabilize soon (but if issues persist, you can always use different applications).

Speaking of which, let’s take a look at some applications you can use right now.

Starting with Warpcast, it is basically a clone of Twitter/X, so it feels familiar and comfortable to many people. Here’s what my profile page looks like:

This is Farcord, a Discord-style application (remember, these all use the same account and all the same content):

This is an application called Flink, a Reddit-style application:

This is Supercast, another Twitter/X-style interface. It features a default feed that displays posts from people you follow in reverse chronological order. It also has a subscription model for more advanced users:

And there are more applications.

It is thriving, and developers are building. And from now on, things will only get better.

You might be thinking, "Okay, this is cool, but it’s really hard to overthrow existing social media platforms."

You’re right; it is. I’m not sure the goal, plan, or even hope in the short to medium term is to overthrow any platform, nor am I sure it’s necessary. Twitter doesn’t have to die for Farcaster to succeed. We can have a world with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Farcaster. But how do we do that?

Again, quoting co-founder Varun Srinivasan:

• Successful social networks are often built around a new communication facility. Facebook has walled gardens, Twitter has 140-character tweets, Snapchat has ephemeral messages. There are enough things that can be done with decentralized identity, blockchain, and zk proofs that there are likely many novel ways waiting to be discovered. Decentralized social networks should explore this to attract users. Providing a product experience that doesn’t exist yet is far more appealing than cloning existing networks.

We are still in the very early stages of Farcaster. If you can’t see how it could surpass X by being a clone of X, your perspective is too small. That might not happen. It hopes to become a social network in its own way and hopes to do so in a novel and unique manner.

As the world increases its adoption of web3, we will see new and exciting ways of decentralized social media.

Why is it so popular now?

Farcaster has been around since 2021. It was launched by Dan Romero and the aforementioned Varun Srinivasan, and has taken a slow and steady growth approach, primarily attracting developers and the most core cryptocurrency and decentralization enthusiasts.

Last week, they launched a feature called "Frames":

• Frames allow people to build small applications within casts.

• They are essentially small, interactive iframes embedded within casts, hence the name. Like casts, handles, and channels, Frames work in any Farcaster client.

• Frames can support anything from video games to polls, blockchain explorers, mints, purchases, and anything for prediction markets.

• Frames are just a canvas; developers will figure out how to paint on it.

If you’re not a developer, this might seem like a small thing, but being able to build small applications within a social media platform/feed is a remarkable thing. It unleashes a lot of creativity and innovative possibilities.

Frames have thus caught the attention of crypto Twitter. Some Frames offer free mints, allowing you to mint directly from your feed with one click. Some Frames offer free token claims, allowing you to claim tokens directly from your feed with one click, sent directly to your connected ETH wallet.

If crypto Twitter likes one thing, it’s airdrops. If there’s anything else they like, it’s making money. Well, Farcaster has sparked attention and activity around both of these things. Early protocol users have been richly rewarded, with many receiving tokens worth five figures simply for being early active users.

This has led to an increase in active users:

As for airdrops, the post below summarizes my feelings. I’m glad to see airdrops finally rewarding real users instead of just those focused on airdrops:

Frames attract developers, and speculation around tokens attracts degens.

Farcaster now has a vibrant community. It’s fun, exciting, and feels really good.

It seems that $DEGEN (a token on the Base Chain) is the token most people choose to speculate on. This is not Farcaster’s official token, nor is it backed by VCs.

It has been fairly distributed to the protocol’s users in a nice "bottom-up" manner. It is a community token that has already been airdropped to users and will continue to be airdropped to users. If you want to know how to get involved, their website has more details.

The beauty of a permissionless protocol is that anyone can choose to integrate the token if they wish. NFT minting, airdrops only to DEGEN holders, DAOs formed around the token, games formed around the token, and so on have already emerged in DEGEN.

Not only DEGEN is experiencing a glorious moment, but it seems the entire Base (L2) ecosystem is thriving due to the adoption of Farcaster. Developers, degens, and creators are all merging in the Farcaster celebration.

Another such grid is Base God ($TYBG), whose first commandment is: you should respect community members, as all $TYBG and Base Gods holders are equal.

Their mission is commendable, and their second commandment is: you should be on-chain. Create content, tweets, on-chain applications, or anything else, and push it on-chain; that’s the way of the Onchain Disciple.

They are educating people on how to transact on-chain and trading through memes. It’s this lighthearted activity that can make something as heavy and complex as decentralized social media fun and accessible to more people (not just developers).

Additionally, if I’ve learned one thing as a crypto trader, it’s that you don’t fight against them. I actually own a substantial amount of TYBG and DEGEN.

However, good things come with bad things. Not everything is airdrops and roses. You can imagine that now countless users are flocking to Farcaster, trying to grab the next airdrop. The protocol now has a lot of spam and more noise. As each client tries to figure out how to best handle this issue, fixes are underway.

At least, Warpcast is better today than it was yesterday, as they have made some adjustments to their algorithms.

If you don’t like it, there are many other clients to try.

How to Get Involved

I think the easiest way to get started is through Warpcast. To create an account (via Warpcast), you need to download the app. Scan the QR code (or click here).

Depending on where you live, you may need to pay a small fee to get started and running. I know this is a barrier to entry, and it’s not trivial for many people around the world.

Once you have an account and are logged in, I recommend going to Settings → Connect Address → Connect, and linking one of your Ethereum addresses to your account. This will allow you to do things like interact with it from Frames to receive NFT mints or token airdrops, as well as allow you to showcase NFTs on your profile, etc.

I also recommend joining some channels and starting to interact with people. Follow your interests and connect with others. Good things usually happen when people do this sincerely. I have a few recommended communities:

• ++ZenAcademy++, make sure to join the Zen community

• ++Farcaster++, a good first channel to join, with lots of activity

• ++Reply Guys++, a friendly community welcoming newcomers from crypto Twitter

• ++Base++, interact with the builder community on Base

• ++The Yellow Collective++, a club that supports and empowers artists and creatives

• ++Degen++, if you like meme coins and being a degen, this is the place for you

As you gradually get used to Farcaster, you can check out some other applications built on Farcaster.

I hope by now you understand. I hope you see why Farcaster is different from most other decentralized social attempts we have seen in the cryptocurrency space so far. Most importantly, Farcaster is not a Ponzi scheme!