On September 17, FarCon Asia, the first large-scale Farcaster ecosystem offline event in Asia, hosted by Takocast and co-organized by BlockBeats, was successfully concluded. At the conference, Farcaster KOL Ted had an AMM with Farcaster founder Dan. During the conversation, Dan emphasized the difference between Farcaster and Web 2 social platforms and explained why Farcaster encourages users to speak out as individuals rather than create brand accounts. He also shared Farcaster's developer ecosystem and how to provide developers with rich tools and opportunities through permissionless social graphs and content distribution. BlockBeats has organized and edited the text version of the content of this conference, hoping to help social application developers and audiences. The following is the content of the conversation:

Ted: Can you please briefly introduce why you created Farcaster? What is Farcaster? What is Warpcast like on Farcaster? And its development so far, and then we will discuss the next plan in depth.

Dan: I’m Dan Romero, one of the co-founders of Farcaster, and I’ve been working in crypto for ten years this year. I’ve been working on Farcaster for the past four years, and before that I was an early employee at Coinbase and led Coinbase’s international division, so I’ve traveled all over the world, including Singapore.

Farcaster is a decentralized social network, which is an underlying technology system that allows anyone to access the social network without permission. In simple terms, this means that the social graph (who follows whom, what people say, and how people respond) is freely accessible. This is completely different from the Web 2 social network model, such as Twitter or Instagram.

We are also developing Warpcast, which is the initial application based on the Farcaster protocol. I guess many of you are already using Warpcast, or you started with Farcaster from Warpcast and then tried other similar applications. This is what we have been doing for the past four years: the protocol and this initial application.

Dan connected live to the conference

We've had significant growth this year, and this year in particular has been very impressive. We have about 700,000 registered users, and all of them are paying users. Users register on the Ethereum L2 OP mainnet, and the rest of the system runs off-chain. You can think of it this way: once you register, it's like you buy a ticket to participate in this system, you can use the system as you please, and the data is stored on nodes around the world, which are called hubs.

We're focused on two things right now. The first is growing the number of daily active users in the protocol, which is mainly achieved through the initiatives we're doing around the Warpcast application. The second is another set of initiatives around the protocol layer, which is to enable developers to use the system development layer to build any application they want, get access to the social graph, and reach the growing community of Farcaster protocol users. In general, we're trying to make it easier for others to develop applications with social features, all based on crypto APIs and infrastructure.

Ted: Regarding the developers you mentioned, obviously Tacocast is a client built on Farcaster. We just had Jesse talk about frames, can you talk a little more about the developer building blocks, what these "Lego blocks" are, and what you think about the developer ecosystem? Especially with quite a few projects and developers here today who are also building their own projects using these developer building blocks.

Dan:From a developer perspective, Farcaster can actually be divided into three levels. The first level is to get you started with the system, which is a huge permissionless data set that you can access directly, run a hub, or use the services of an API provider.

When a new user signs up with their crypto wallet, you can use these APIs to check the address completely permissionless and get a lot of data. If the user has a "professor" level profile, this makes your sign-up experience really magical. You can pull their personal photos, profiles, and even find out who they follow on the network. More importantly, not just who they follow, but also who they interact with most frequently. This allows you to create an onboarding experience almost immediately to show them their closest friends.

Another perspective is to recommend who they should invite to join the app based on network usage. If you think about Web 2 social networks, an important factor that helps large-scale mobile apps grow is the contact API. For example, when you sign up for a new app, share your contacts, because by matching phone numbers, you can quickly find people who are already on the app and recommend you to follow them.

These apps also have the ability to tell, for example, that 37 people have signed up with Dan's number, and then prompt others to invite Dan, because we already know that he's likely to show up. The most likely reason to continue using an app is that your friends are also using it. So this is the first way to integrate with Farcaster, and it requires almost no special operations. You just build your app and make sure that each Ethereum address at the time of registration can be checked by Farcaster.

The second level of Farcaster's developer experience is to use Farcaster for content distribution. This is very important. Most crypto applications spread through Twitter or other similar social media. Sharing your website link through Twitter, such as minting NFTs or downloading applications, the reality is that Twitter's algorithm now severely limits the spread of tweets with links.

On Farcaster, you will not be restricted in posting links. We have even designed a set of features specifically to enhance the spread of links. You can think of it as the simplest operation, posting a URL. Now, most modern applications, if the URL is a link to a news site, it will use a feature called Open Graph to automatically pull images to make the link preview richer, thereby increasing click-through rates. Farcaster uses the same concept and continues to enhance the functionality of links. You post a link, add images, and then Farcaster will add buttons, and even start transactions directly in the feed, providing some basic input and output operations, which are called "frames", which are actually enhancing the functionality of the link.

I think the third layer of development experience on Farcaster is to further develop more Farcaster data functions after you have permissionless use of social graphs and content distribution. For example, an application like Tacocast allows you to do everything you can do on Warpcast, but you also get a bunch of additional features. They have a great translation feature, if you are not a native English speaker or even do not understand English, you can use this application to automatically translate all the English content on Farcaster.

Project parties are not encouraged to create brand accounts, but to speak directly as individuals

Ted: For everyone here, can you give some advice on how to get started and how to build your own brand?

Dan: I think authenticity is very important on Farcaster. Compared with most social networks, people care more about users they think are sincere. Therefore, some bad habits brought from other social media are not welcome on Farcaster. Some people may feel confused, such as "I use it this way on Twitter, why not on Farcaster?" Or they don't understand the culture here very well.

But in fact, if you are building a project or company, Farcaster usually does not encourage you to create a brand account. It is more about you speaking directly as an individual, as the creator of the project you are building. I rarely use the official Farcaster or Warpcast accounts myself. Whether it is on Farcaster or Twitter, most of the time I speak on my personal account, which makes the interaction between people more personal and resonates more with the early community.

So I think the first point is to be yourself, which is much more important than following those so-called "10 social media tips for building a brand account". Just like when you go to a party, introduce yourself first and then introduce your project, instead of just introducing the project and yourself being irrelevant.

We have a feature called Channels that allows users to show multiple sides of themselves. If you come to Farcaster and only focus on showing one thing and don't care about other content at all, it goes back to the issue of authenticity. People will feel like you are just here to "drop something". So take the time and don't focus too much on being a megaphone, but focus on interacting. Even if you only have 10 people or 100 people following you, it's OK if you actively interact with them.

If you can really start to build a community on Farcaster, it can be very impactful. We have many examples of people who have never been successful on social media in the past, or don't consider themselves to be social media type people, but because they have been authentic and resonated on Farcaster, they have successfully built their own audience.

The last point is that some people may feel that their English is not good enough or that the network is too US-centric. This is true because the core team is in the United States and many of the early users are also. But I would say that first of all, Farcaster is a decentralized network, and now people all over the world are using it, and the number of people is increasing.

Secondly, I don't think everyone needs to interact with everyone else, and some people may misunderstand that Farcaster will be like the "United Nations" where everyone is talking to each other. But it's actually like any other social network, where you'll naturally see subcommunities and different little circles, and people may be completely unaware of what's going on in other circles. It's less like one big group chat and more like a diverse world.

I think that's a shift that we're still going through, especially as the user base grows, where it may have felt more like a group chat in the past, but now, especially with the idea of "cozy corners" that we're about to launch, you don't have to interact with the people with the most followers on the network. You can find a niche or a group of people who have similar interests as you, and they can grow completely independently without having to care about what people in California think, and the network is still there for you.

I think that mindset is important, sometimes people focus too much on the fact that Farcaster used to be a bit biased towards the US, but that was not our goal, and I believe we will make a lot of progress in this regard in the next year or two.

Ted: Speaking of "comfortable corners" and your focus going forward, perhaps slowly moving to a decentralized model, can you give us a brief introduction to the future direction of Channels and where you are focusing your efforts?

Dan:For those who are not familiar with it, there is a concept called "Channels" on Farcaster, which is a bit like a tag today, but the difference is that you can only use one at a time, unlike Twitter or Instagram where you can pile up many tags. And these channels have a certain management mechanism, and someone is responsible for managing the channel and deciding what content is allowed and what is not allowed. Of course, you don't have to post content in a channel, you can only post to your followers, or create a channel yourself.

Channels are curated spaces, where some people might go after work to a topic channel that they're interested in, but they're not willing to spend a lot of time curating content. I think people are less sensitive to content curation, but they're more sensitive to people curation.

This model feels more like a club or a group, where you're a part of it, and you can create a shared identity and really build a community, and I think that's one of the biggest shifts. Of course, we're still working on other features, mainly giving more tools and more control to the administrators of the channel and the people who run the channel.

I think this does naturally create a stronger sense of group identity because you really know fewer people. While channels can get bigger, maybe 1,000 or even 10,000 people in a group, I imagine the average channel size will probably be more compact, with 50, 100 or 200 people who can post content, but the group identity will be very strong.

Live Questions

Question 1: For the next phase of Farcaster, especially in Asia, people are looking forward to seeing growth. In the early days of Farcaster, the $5 registration fee was to prevent robots from joining, and I remember we also saw some robots. So my question is, what do you think about canceling this fee to make it easier for users of other platforms to join Farcaster and participate in social activities?

Dan：We think about this a lot. First of all, if you run a centralized, pre-set software network, then theoretically anyone can register from anywhere through a contract on the chain. If this is free, it could bring the whole system down. Like Ethereum has gas fees, Bitcoin has transaction fees, because if there are no fees, the state of the network will increase significantly, and people may send a large number of transactions to disrupt the network, which will have a huge impact on the ability to remain decentralized in the future.

So we won't completely eliminate fees, but we can consider other ways, such as we currently have about 700,000 users, and maybe 7,000 of them are very trustworthy. These users can get 10 invitations through their on-chain activities or through some kind of "human proof" mechanism. Add new invitations every once in a while, and grow the user base more systematically in this way, while greatly reducing the risk of robots and spam.

I think what we might do is to lower the price, and in fact we have adjusted the price many times. At the protocol level, it's $2 in Ethereum right now, and Warpcast is $5 because it's an in-app purchase. That's working fine for now, but we may drop that price to $4 at some point. If the protocol level fees go down, we can continue to drop the price, but there will always be a certain amount of fees in the system because you have to prevent spam.

Another measure we might consider is to be more aggressive in giving more privileges to some of the high-quality users who have contributed to the system, published a lot of content, and have good interactions with multiple parties, which is also a deliberate decision we will make.

Question 2: There has been a significant drop in the usage of frames recently. How do you think frames will perform in the future? Will their adoption improve?

Dan: Yes, the overall network usage has indeed dropped recently. Initially, due to the introduction of frames, the network usage surged, just like any social network boom period. And most of these bursts are temporary, and then you need to think about how to build on them. I think this is one way to understand the use of frames.

Farcaster protocol DAU/MAU ratio, which can measure user stickiness

Secondly, the current frames function is still relatively basic, just based on pictures, optimizing the experience of operating in dynamics. For example, if you click the "Floppy Caster" button in the middle of the bottom of Warpcast now, you can play a complete game in the app. This is an experiment, and you will see more similar attempts from us. In other words, frames are no longer just simple pictures, but provide users with a richer application operation interface.

Dan:The second use case of frames, which I think is also a relatively high frequency of use and good feedback, is to initiate transactions. For example, posting an on-chain transaction link on Twitter can only display a website preview at most. Users need to click on the link and connect their wallets, and often encounter problems when operating on the mobile terminal.

In frames, you can directly initiate transactions based on the context of social dynamics, whether using NFTs or token exchanges. This allows users to use interactive functions more conveniently in the current environment, which can be a complete small application or guide users to perform on-chain transactions in a safe way. We are optimizing the speed of transactions, making them faster and smoother, reducing the number of steps, and now you only need two or three clicks instead of a cumbersome operation process.

Question 3: What can we do as an Asian audience?

Dan: First of all, thank you very much for hosting the Farcaster Asia Conference. I don’t know if you know that the founders of Tako flew to Los Angeles two weeks ago just for this event and stayed for one day just to introduce me to the Farcaster Asia Conference. I was really shocked by this support.

I think for those who build applications outside the United States, they will have a better understanding of the local market or regional needs. A good example is our translation function, which can serve markets such as China and Japan. So, I think the most important thing is to create some communities on the Internet that are not necessarily geographically centric. Although there will be overlaps and interactions between these communities, ultimately this will have a huge impact on the overall development of Farcaster and service providers.

Question 4: I would like to hear your views and vision on combining social growth with financial applications, because most products focus on building social outputs, and I would like to know how you think about using social data to provide users with more social financial experiences?

Dan: I think when you have a permissionless social network, you can really get cutting-edge data, which has multiple values for developers. Another feature of Farcaster is that everyone can theoretically have an Ethereum account, and even something like Nostr, which uses a slightly different public and private key system.

As far as I know, other decentralized Twitter alternatives don't have such mandatory requirements, except for things like Lens or a few projects. I think this is very underestimated, and we've seen some permissionless features and token uses, such as Degen or Moxie, which have deep crypto integrations that make this possible, and you can do it directly on the social network without complicated operations.

A small example is that we started offering a $5 USDC reward for the top 100 users of the day, which is a bit like Elon's distribution model for Twitter advertising revenue, but we are a small amount of money settled daily. We will release this feature in a few days, and if you think about other payment methods, there may be 100 different problems, and you can only get paid at the end of the month. Or maybe your PayPal account is frozen, unavailable in certain countries, and there are countless other things that can go wrong. With USDC, payments to an Ethereum address you control are fine as long as you don’t lose your keys.

欢迎加入律动 BlockBeats 官方社群：

Telegram 订阅群：https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram 交流群：https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Twitter 官方账号：https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia