As the leading project in the Socialfi track of this cycle, Farcaster has been widely concerned. Rhythm integrated the Farcaster protocol for a month.

As a new Web3 social protocol, many of Farcaster's features are quite different from Web2 products, and it is quite difficult to understand. This article will explain everything that novice users need to know in detail in the form of Q&A, and take you to play Farcaster & Warpcast.

Farcaster & Warpcast Introduction

Q: What is the relationship between Farcaster and Warpcast?

A: Farcaster is a protocol, and the protocol is open and neutral. Warpcast is a client launched by the official Farcaster team. There are also many clients launched by startup teams in the market, including Takocast, Recaster, etc. There are also many other software that integrate some functions of Farcaster, such as the rhythm app.

Farcaster is to Warpcast as the email protocol is to Gmail.

Farcaster is to rhythm as the email protocol is to software that allows you to log in to your account with an email.

Q: What is the founding team of Farcaster like?

A:Farcaster was born from two former Coinbase executives, Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, who began working together in 2020 and came up with an idea called RSS+.

Varun Srinivasan grew up in India, attended Carnegie Mellon University, founded SoundFocus to help people with hearing loss, worked at Microsoft, and then worked as a director at Coinbase, where he built an engineering team to develop products over four years. In addition to working at Coinbase, Dan Romero was also an angel investor in dozens of early-stage technology companies.

Q: Why is the social atmosphere in Warpcast so good?

A:Unlike many Crypto startup teams, the two founders of Farcaster have already become financially independent with the stocks accumulated from their previous work. They started a new business in the hope of building some high-quality social protocols that can develop in the long run in the Crypto world. Money and short-term interests may rank lower in their minds.

Sentiment is only one aspect. Community governance is also very important. In this regard, founder Dan Romero has made an indelible contribution. Almost all of the first 1,000 users of Warpcast came from Dan Romero's 1v1 preaching on Twitter, including ETH founder Vitalik and Base founder Jesse Pollak. Many technical geeks are tired of the impetuous atmosphere of Crypto Twitter and regard Warpcast as a cozy corner where they get together.

Some people commented: Farcaster is a decentralized open protocol, and Warcast is a centralized application - the tension contained in this contradiction has created the unique Farcaster & Warpcast today.

Q: What is the current status of the Farcaster protocol?

A: In March 2024, the Farcaster team received $150 million in Series A funding led by Paradigm. As of August 27, the Farcaster protocol has about 650,000 users, with daily active users at about 1/10, and the total revenue of the protocol is about 750 ETH. All network information is about 150 G, and there are 20,000 off-chain data storage nodes.

For more detailed data, see:

《Where to find Farcaster related data?》

Q: Why do I have to pay to register Farcaster?

A:Purchase 1unit storage units and put your identity on the chain.

Q: What does 1unit storage unit mean?

A:The annual rental fee of 1unit storage unit is about 3 US dollars, which allows you to post 5,000 casts, follow 2,500 people, and have 2,500 interactions.

Note: After the storage unit expires, you must purchase more storage space within the 30-day grace period, otherwise the system will start deleting the posts that expired first.

Q: What does it mean to have your identity on the chain?

A:Different from Nostr, a purely peer-to-peer social protocol where all data is on-chain, and Friend.tech, an almost centralized social application, Farcaster is somewhere in between - it puts user identity data on-chain, and stores other data off-chain.

Identity information includes:

(1) FID: FID is unique, decentralized and stored on-chain, and cannot be changed by anyone. It is given in the order of registration.

(2) Farcaster Names (fnames): Usernames are centrally stored and managed by the official team. They cannot be repeated with others. They can be modified once a week, or replaced with your own ENS names.

Warpcast Function Literacy

Q: What is Wraps?

A:Warpcast's Warps are similar to QQ's Q coins. One Warp stably corresponds to $0.01, which can be used for rewards, minting certain NFTs in Warpcast, or connecting to other Farcaster apps, and paying Farcaster registration fees for friends.

Q: What does "connect to other Farcaster apps" mean?

A:Farcaster allows developers to create different types of applications based on the protocol, and different clients can communicate and interact with each other. Each client has its own independent user system and potential airdrop expectations.

For example, BlockBeats has fully integrated its user system into the Farcaster protocol. Readers can choose to use the Farcaster protocol to log in to the BlockBeats APP, where they can comment on and forward content, and all of this content will be reflected in their Farcaster accounts. BlockBeats has already cooperated with JoJo, a contract trading platform on Base, to launch its first airdrop.

For details, see:

《BlockBeats fully integrates Farcaster protocol, bringing a new Web3 content platform experience》

《Base Ecosystem DEX JOJO launches joint airdrop event with BlockBeats》

Q: What is cast?

A:Warpcast's cast is similar to X's (formerly Twitter's) tweet. You can choose to publish it on your homepage (Home) or send it to the corresponding channel (Channel).

In addition, cast has other tricks: Frame and Action are the first two features of Warpcast, which will definitely make you shine.

Q: What are Frames?

A:Frames can create interactive experiences on Farcaster, similar to WeChat mini-programs. Frames can embed this WeChat mini-program experience into daily cast flows. Developers can create Frames freely.

Frame is a product design that makes the web2 world shine. For more information, see:

《Understand the popular innovation Frames on the Farcaster protocol in one article》

《From the perspective of Web2, how important is Farcaster's new feature Frames? 》

《Explore Farcaster's new feature Frames: Activate new social gameplay and turn tweets into interactive applications》

Q: What are Actions?

A: Actions allows developers to create custom buttons that users can install, similar to browser extensions, but for casts. Developers can create Actions freely.

Q: What is Alt-Client?

A：Similar to the relationship between Bitcoin and Altcoin, at present, other Farcaster clients are Alt-Clients compared to Warpcast.

Just as Altcoin solves many problems that BTC cannot solve, Alt-Clients can also solve many problems that Warpcast cannot solve, such as Takocast makes the Farcaseter ecosystem more friendly to Chinese users, Recaster facilitates multi-account login, allows followers to be classified and casts to be released at a scheduled time, etc.

Q：Which Frames, Actions, and Alt-Clients are fun?

A：The community is creating new Frames, Actions, and Alt-Clients based on the Farcaster underlying protocol all the time.

The Home page of the Warpcast webpage shows people's discussions on the most popular Frames. There are also channels dedicated to discussing Frames and discussing Actions.

There are also some useful aggregation websites: for example, the Frames ranking launched by the Airstack team, and the aggregation website project spontaneously established by Farcaster users.

On mobile phones, you can also see the officially recommended Frames and Actions, as well as some apps that integrate Farcaster:

Supplementary details on the use of Warpcast

Q: Are there any limitations to cast?

A:The maximum length is 1024 characters, but all characters after 320 will be folded

Q: What is the address of my Farcaster account? Do I have a private key? Can the address be changed?

A:Only the mobile phone can view your private key or change your address. As shown in the figure, in the advanced settings, you can view the mnemonic phrase you use to recover your account, or choose to change it yourself.

Q: What if I don’t want to see specific content?

A:As shown in the figure, select the banned word in the settings bar, so that you can block the content containing the word.