Original title: "Can Farcaster, the social leader with a valuation of 1 billion, become a new hot spot in the bull market?"

Original author: Wilson Lee, Biteye

Farcaster is a decentralized social network protocol that uses smart contracts and hybrid storage technology to achieve social connections, content sharing and data ownership between users, while supporting diversified and flexible client and application development.

In March this year, Degen, a memecoin project in the Farcaster ecosystem, attracted widespread attention with a more than 20-fold increase and a market value of more than 1 billion US dollars, making the Farcaster ecosystem the focus of attention.

In May, Merkle Manufactory, the developer of Farcaster, announced the completion of a new round of financing, led by Paradigm, with a total of 150 million US dollars, raising the company's valuation to 1 billion US dollars.

According to Dune data, the total number of Farcaster users has reached 540,000, and the number of daily active users has surged from 2k at the beginning of the year to 56k at present, achieving more than 28 times growth.

https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster

Farcaster is not a new social project. In the early testing phase, founder Dan used his personal influence and connections to invite many well-known OGs including Vitalik Buterin to join, and screened early users by obtaining invitation codes through Twitter private messages, so that Farcaster's user group has a very high "elite" concentration.

This approach of setting a threshold is intended to gather highly similar user groups in the early stage, making Farcaster a refined version of Twitter to some extent, and early users can enjoy a better posting and interactive experience.

In addition, users with early qualifications are usually influential KOLs. These users themselves have high social influence. Being able to experience Farcaster early may generate a certain sense of social superiority, and they will also have a stronger motivation to talk about and spread Farcaster on other platforms.

Last October, Farcaster opened registration, but still set a $5 entry threshold, which effectively blocked the registration of a large number of robot accounts and maintained the overall good atmosphere of Farcaster, which was in sharp contrast to Nostr, which had declined due to the proliferation of robots.

So far, Farcaster has accumulated nearly $1.9 million in revenue through registration fees and data storage fees.

https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster

Both Dan and Varun, the two founders of Farcaster, have held important positions in Coinbase, which makes Farcaster closely linked to the Base ecosystem to some extent. Jesse, the core person in charge of the Base chain, is also very active on Farcaster.

From another perspective, among the top 500 users with the most followers on Farcaster, more than 70% of the on-chain interactions occur on the Base chain.

Therefore, for those who are optimistic about the Base ecosystem, Farcaster is also seen as a potential Alpha treasure base.

https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster

Farcaster protocol data is stored in the hub on and off the chain. Developers can choose to run the hub node themselves or use third-party service providers like Neynar to obtain data.

All of this data is permissionless. Based on this available data, developers can build a variety of clients and applications, which greatly increases the richness and innovation space of the Farcaster ecosystem.

Users can track the progress of the ecosystem through the decaster website. Here are some of the highlight projects.

01 WrapCast

Warpcast is the main application under the Farcaster protocol and the first Farcaster client. It was developed by a team of top engineers formed by Dan for more than a year.

Its overall architecture is similar to traditional Web2 social software, with a smooth user experience, and currently accounts for 90% of Farcaster protocol traffic.

Warpcast has a simple registration process, and the system automatically generates a binding wallet for the user. All Warpcast accounts are associated with a Farcaster ID, and the generated content is stored in the Farcaster hub.

This design makes it easy for even non-cryptocurrency users to enter the on-chain world, greatly reducing the cognitive threshold for new users.

For users who are familiar with on-chain interactions, they can also bind their commonly used cryptocurrency wallets. These adjustments make Warpcast not only user-friendly, but also play an important role in promoting the growth of the Farcaster ecosystem and user acceptance.

Warpcast is designed as a social platform similar to Twitter, where users can post tweets (casts), comment, forward, and follow other users.

In addition to social media features similar to Twitter, Warpcast also introduces features such as channels and actions, which derive more ways of interaction.

For example, DEGEN uses the participation of users in the Farcaster ecosystem to distribute tokens. Users can participate in DEGEN airdrops by following channels and interacting. The airdropped tokens can be given to other users as rewards.

Farcaster's huge growth this year is closely related to the Frames feature launched in February. Frames is a mini-app embedded in Warpcast, which allows users to interact in a more diverse way without leaving Warpcast, such as casting NFTs, content subscriptions, playing mini-games, and receiving tokens.

For example, far.cards is a trading card project developed based on mint.club, which is exclusively for Farcaster users. The attribute value of each user's card depends on their activity on Farcaster, such as the number of fans, likes and replies received.

The price of the card is determined by the bonding curve, and the purchased cards can be collected or traded.

As shown in the figure below, the far.cards application can be published in a tweet in the form of a Frame. Users who see the tweet can directly purchase its cards through the Frame without leaving the Warpcast client.

The launch of Frames has greatly enriched the playability of Warpcast, making Farcaster development no longer limited to building a decentralized Twitter.

Currently, nearly 40,000 users have used the Frames function, generating more than 150,000 on-chain transactions, and the number of interactive contracts has reached 1,624.

https://dune.com/jhackworth/frames

Frame is similar to the MiniApp in the Ton ecosystem in terms of user experience. Although Farcaster currently has a hard time having a large user base like Ton, it also needs to pay attention to the Frame mini-games that are very simple and easy to spread, such as Not a coin on Ton.

Referring to the success of the DEGEN project in terms of market value and communication capabilities, it is entirely possible that projects on Farcaster will distribute tokens with high returns through the Frame mini-program.

Degen.Game is a website that organizes Frame mini-programs. Users can log in as Farcaster to view the latest Frame every day and interact with it.

https://www.degen.game/frames/new

02 Jam

Jam is a creator economy platform based on Farcaster that can convert every tweet of a user on Warpcast into an NFT asset similar to Friend.tech Key. Users can buy/sell each tweet, and the price is determined by the Bonding Curve as shown below.

Jam's trading volume exceeded $10 million within 72 hours of its launch.

The first use of Jam requires 10 warp points, and 100 warp points will be given when registering Farcaster.

After binding the Farcaster account, you can watch the push stream on the homepage to find tweets worth minting. The Top list includes tweets with the most recent transactions and the latest tweets, and the Trades section shows the real-time record of tweet transactions.

Unlike Friend.tech, each tweet can only have one holder at the same time, so there is no situation of grabbing a bunch of openings and then shipping, but the idea of profit is similar. You need to find and buy tweets that may be contagious as soon as possible. The focus includes Farcaster core developers, V God, KOL, etc., to ensure that there are other buyers to take over later.

If you are a KOL or someone who is good at tweeting, you can also earn 5% transaction fees by constantly writing tweets and making memes to spread them.

Jam currently has no tokens, but it has internal points. Considering that the overall gameplay is very similar to Friend.tech, the potential airdrop may be large.

03 Clubcast

ClubCast is an application similar to Knowledge Planet on Farcaster. It has enabled the token-gated casts function. Users need to pay to purchase other users' club tokens before they can unlock and view hidden content in clubcast.xyz or Frame. Currently, developer permission is required for use.

04 BountyCaster

BountyCaster is a task platform built on the Farcaster protocol, founded by Linda Xie (former co-founder of Scalar Capital and product manager of Coinbase).

As shown in the figure below, users can add the tag @Bountybot to post tasks when sending content on clients such as Warpcast, and other users can claim the corresponding tasks and receive corresponding rewards.

Similarly, you can also publish the services and prices that can be provided. Users need to log in through their Farcaster account and view the published Bounties, available services, and even job opportunities on the BountyCaster website.

05 AlfaFrens

AlfaFrens is a creator economy application built on the Base ecosystem and the Farcaster protocol, developed by Superfluid, which supports on-chain asset flows.

Similar to Friend.tech, users can subscribe to KOL channels and visit exclusive chat rooms, and further obtain tokens produced by the channels.

There are two currencies in the platform, $Degen and $ALFA. $Degen is an ERC20 token on the Base chain, and $ALFA is a proprietary token of the AlfaFrens platform. Currently, it can only be obtained within the platform and cannot be transferred.

$Degen is the consumable token of the platform. When starting to use AlfaFrens, users need to prepare some $Degen and deposit it into the wallet generated by the platform.

Users can use $Degen to subscribe to KOL's channels, which are divided into three levels: 500, 1000 and 1500 $Degen/month.

The subscription fee is consumed linearly, and users can cancel their subscription at any time. 70% of the subscription fee is distributed to users who stake $ALFA to the channel according to the pledge ratio.

The platform will generate $ALFA tokens every day, and each channel will distribute the allocated $ALFA to subscribers according to the number of $Degen obtained from the subscription.

Therefore, you can find a popular KOL to subscribe to the channel, and then pledge the $ALFA tokens you get to the channel to earn more $Degen.

$ALFA is not a circulating token yet and has no pricing. In the early days, $Degen was exchanged for $ALFA. Therefore, different participation strategies can be formulated based on the income preference (wanting more valuable $DEGEN or more unpriced $ALFA).

06 Summary

As people become more and more accustomed to "living" on the Internet, social graphs have become important personal assets, and users' demand for data autonomy is also increasing.

Web3's solution is naturally suitable for solving the pain points of the current Web2 social platform, but the decentralized social field has not achieved particularly great success.

Many projects pursue decentralization too much, but ignore the importance of user experience. Dan pointed out in an interview with Bankless that the positioning of Web3 social is not to replace Web2 social, but to improve it, so that users can add more on-chain gameplay while owning data ownership, and do some things that cannot be done in Web2.

Farcaster significantly improves the user's interaction fluency by storing value data on the chain and storing high-frequency data off the chain.

The team has attached great importance to mobile development from the beginning, and they are well aware that mobile devices are the main usage scenario of social software.

Therefore, the Warpcast client has a good user experience, is fully functional, and has a fast iteration speed. It continues to launch new features such as long text and interactive functions (action), providing developers with more and more capabilities to build new applications.

Although Farcaster is far from perfect and still has a lot of room for improvement, it is already an application that can attract users and maintain growth. In the future, more excellent products based on Farcaster will surely emerge. Let us look forward to and pay attention to the development of Farcaster and participate in it as soon as possible.

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