Original Title: "Farcaster in 2024"

Original Author: @0xLuo, Farcaster Pioneer

2024 was a significant year for Farcaster. In terms of data, the user base grew from less than 50,000 at the beginning of the year to around 750,000 currently. The daily active users increased from less than 2,000 at the start of the year to a peak of around 70,000 in July, now stabilizing at around 40,000. Although the scale is still relatively small, Farcaster has clearly gained more attention compared to the previous year.

Farcaster 2024 Daily Active Users Change https://messari.io/report/the-crypto-theses-2025

One of the key reasons for such significant growth is that Farcaster, as a crypto-native social network, has become an essential Social Layer for some blockchains (especially the Base Layer) and can also be seen as an economic body, AKA Farconomy. Projects born from the Farcaster community or assets launched through Farcaster's Launchpad have gained market attention. The trading volume of mainstream tokens associated with Farcaster reached around $1 billion in April and November, with a significant portion coming from the early-year $DEGEN and the end-of-year CLANKER ecosystem token.

Farconomy - Farcaster Tokens Trading Volume https://dune.com/queries/4076475/6864083

1 $DEGEN and the Creator Economy

In late January and early February of this year, the first wave of Farcaster's growth was perhaps the interaction between the community memecoin $DEGEN's emergence and the launch of the Frames feature. The wealth effect of the $DEGEN airdrop attracted many individuals, and for a long time, the posting activity on Farcaster resonated with the price movements of $DEGEN. $DEGEN was the catalyst for the on-chain tipping trend within the Farcaster community. As tpan mentioned, the on-chain tipping model initiated by $DEGEN was an effective growth strategy that encouraged users to create high-quality content and actively engage in community interactions.

Onchain Tipping as a Growth Strategy https://tpan.substack.com/p/284-tipping-as-a-growth-strategy

Subsequently, there are other tipping tokens on Base such as HAM ($TN100X), $FARTHER, $BUILD (Nominated as tipping), $MASKS, $WILD, $ENJOY, $IMAGEINE on the Zora chain, and $REGEN on the Optimism chain. Lijin described these as a type of scene memecoins, wherein they serve as their application scene through certain community rules. To some extent, these have also become a distinctive creator incentive model within the Farcaster ecosystem.

However, the vast majority of tipping tokens have gradually declined in relevance due to the lack of real value and application scene for the tokens. As the originator and flagship token, $DEGEN has more application scenes compared to other tipping tokens. Many developers in the Farcaster ecosystem have tried to incorporate $DEGEN into their projects, and $DEGEN almost became the circulating currency of Farcaster ecosystem applications for a while. Furthermore, at the end of March, Degen L3 based on Base L2 was launched, expanding the utility of a memecoin to a larger extent. This influx of hot money into Base at the end of March may also be the reason why $DEGEN reached its all-time high.

The close integration of $DEGEN with Farcaster ecosystem applications is a win-win situation. For these ecosystem projects, Farcaster's open framework and composability from a technical standpoint provided valuable on-chain social graphs for rapid user acquisition through application cold starts. On the other hand, memecoins like $DEGEN could act as the native circulating currency of the Farcaster ecosystem, providing asset liquidity for application cold starts. For $DEGEN, these projects offer token utility, actual application scenes, and even passive lockups. Thus, they were able to attract attention for a certain period, for example:

· Tip with $DEGEN: In addition to the basic application scenario of tipping other users, you can also participate in Perl guessing games, purchase tokens in Mintclub, participate in Degenpad ITOs, etc.

· Mint with $DEGEN: Zora and Highlight support minting NFTs with $DEGEN.

· Trade with $DEGEN: In the initial versions of SocialFi applications such as Drakula, Jam, Braket.Game, Clubcast, AlfaFrens, and FarFantasy, $DEGEN was chosen as the currency.

· Build with $DEGEN: After the launch of L3 by $DEGEN, many projects directly built on Degen L3, giving rise to many applications within the Degen community.

The Degen Ecosystem Map (5/8/2024) https://warpcast.com/farmedia.eth/0x8f5c5358

However, the Degen L3 utilizing Conduit services has faced a tumultuous journey, experiencing block halts and even reaching its darkest moment. During an attempted migration, disputes with Conduit arose, and a prolonged downward trend posed a significant challenge to the community and the team. Fortunately, the team has been proactive, and $DEGEN has recently been listed on Coinbase and Binance. Liquidity has also expanded from Degen L3 and Base to Ethereum and Arbitrum. Regarding the future of Degen, @jacek mentioned during Tako Community Call #5 that the focus will continue to be on incentivizing quality content and genuine interaction on Farcaster. In the next phase, the team will concentrate on Degen L3 to attract more developers to collectively build a better "on-chain Las Vegas."

Overall, similar to Friend.Tech's fate, many SocialFi applications within the Farcaster ecosystem (most of which also adopt various types of Bonding curve models) have only experienced a brief period of hype. This is partly due to a small user base, especially in the Farcaster ecosystem, in comparison to SocialFi applications based on the Twitter social graph. Additionally, the unsustainability of the economic model, mostly relying on continuous user engagement and token speculation without sustainable value creation or long-term incentive mechanisms, contributes to the issue. Therefore, when the hype fades, user engagement and transaction volume decrease, leading projects to face liquidity depletion.

However, whether it's $DEGEN or the Farcaster ecosystem's SocialFi app incentive model for creators, even though most have not been able to sustain their popularity in the long run, their attempts are worthwhile. As @edisonchen puts it, the incentive model in social products should be seen as a game, not requiring a perfect mechanism, and should become a community culture. There should be more incentive models to support different types of social network users and behaviors.

2 Farcaster is Dead? Long live Farcaster!

Farcaster made a splash earlier this year, keeping a certain level of attention in the crypto market. On May 21st, it raised $150 million and reached a new high in registered users on that day, once considered the leader of the new generation of social networks. However, after the peak, the stark reality is that when the entire crypto market is volatile, when the tipping economy is no longer novel, when SocialFi on Farcaster is no longer as hot as Friend Tech, when there's little profit to be made on Farcaster, it seems that everyone has forgotten about it, and daily active users and new registered users are gradually declining.

Some even began to question, "With a dismal number of real users, was the $150 million funding for Farcaster a setup by VCs for LPs?" Of course, at that time, when he said that Farcaster had only 50 to 5000 DAU, it was a misunderstanding that high-quality active users who received Power Badger were equivalent to the overall active users. The actual DAU remained around 40,000 at the low point. However, there was definitely some padding in this number, but the trend was indeed downward. Many people have Farcaster accounts, but some are no longer active.

Furthermore, in the case of a relatively small user base, most projects in the Farcaster ecosystem require the courage and capital to "work for love." For various reasons, we have seen many projects choose to terminate, start anew, or even leave the Farcaster ecosystem. Projects like nook (Farcaster's client version, pivoting to become a client for sharing interests such as books, movies, and music), automod, wildcard, castgame, beearly, and buttrfly have chosen to shut down. Some Farcaster builders have shifted their focus more toward Solana and Twitter, like @brian announcing that unloney migrated from Base to Solana and mainly operates on Twitter. @billzh announced that the audio-space-type app aburra has ceased updates and launched a new SocialFi app, tribe.run, on Solana.

As @artlu, who briefly left Farcaster in August, mentioned, people leave Farcaster for the following reasons:

· Immature Technology: The technology is still imperfect, with many issues such as data synchronization problems and a network prone to attacks.

· Closed Community: The core community is small, conservative in thinking, exhibits an echo chamber phenomenon, and is not very welcoming to newcomers.

· Dim Growth Prospects: The growth strategy, which lacks more engaging content, is not attractive, lacking highlights to draw in new users.

· Limited Business Opportunities: Projects on Farcaster only receive meager benefits since the main market has already been claimed by the team itself and early joiners.

These criticisms are not unfounded, as data does not lie. It is natural to wonder, is there still hope for Farcaster? Nevertheless, those still on Farcaster continue to believe in many enduring aspects of Farcaster: its unique community culture, steadfast builders, and the rich ecosystem brought by the open protocol. Even in difficult times, some hope can still be glimpsed.

2.1 The team is keep building

During FarCon, the team outlined Farcaster's general strategy to grow together with the crypto world, create more cozy corners, and build more social Lego. In fact, the team has actively engaged in community dialogues, continuously improving or launching new features in response to community feedback, committed to advancing according to the established strategy to enhance daily activity.

Growing together with the crypto world involves making Farcaster an attractive destination for crypto users;

Creating more cozy corners involves enhancing features like Channels so that different users can experience genuine social interactions here;

Building more social Lego entails enhancing protocol-level features, such as introducing Frames, Actions, and upgrading Snapchain, a faster, more scalable storage solution, to improve the protocol's user experience, enabling developers to non-permissively build various applications on this open, programmable social protocol.

These strategies may not yield immediate results, but given time, they can generate a highly cohesive community, distinctive infrastructure, and upper-layer applications. When the time is right, it will serve as a catalyst for rapid growth.

The path to 1 million daily active users https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x778b9e01

2.2 Grow with Crypto → Synergy with Public Chains

Farcaster's on-chain data is stored on the Optimism chain, and Frames also support operations on the Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Degen, Gnosis, Optimism, Zora, and Polygon chains. Additionally, most Farcaster users have linked a crypto wallet (including EVM and Sonala addresses), making Farcaster a naturally crypto-native social network. Due to this characteristic, Farcaster is inherently connected to the crypto market and various public chain ecosystems, serving as a social layer for many public chains.

Possibly due to Farcaster's founder's Coinbase background and the presence of many early Coinbase ecosystem users in the community, there is a natural affinity with Coinbase's own public chain, Base. For Farcaster, the majority of projects in the Farcaster ecosystem prioritize the Base chain when issuing assets, making them targets for speculation on the Base chain. The Base chain can help Farcaster grow as a crypto-native social network into a crypto economy, and Base chain users can also become potential users of the Farcaster social platform. For the Base chain, most of Farcaster's users are loyal, high-quality Base chain users. Furthermore, Farcaster can not only be a high-quality Base chain project developer community but also a backyard for many Base chain projects to engage in community operations, brand promotion, and community vitality enhancement. The synergistic interaction between the social protocol and public chain ecosystem can facilitate mutual growth and benefits.

2.3 Create Cozy Corners → A Larger Community

Friends map in Supercast.xyz https://www.supercast.xyz/map

Today, Farcaster people's footprint has spread worldwide. Farcaster is a social network, so it naturally has social features. Many people who join Farcaster may have found their cozy corners in various channels, interacted with like-minded friends, and expanded these connections from Farcaster's social media to some Telegram/WeChat groups and from online to offline interactions. Whether it's Farcon in Los Angeles in May, Farcon Asia in Singapore in September, or Farcaster meetups at various crypto conferences in places like Hong Kong, Dubai, Bangkok, you can feel the warmth and friendliness of the Farcaster community.

Fireside Chat ft. Dan at Farcon Asia in Singapore https://x.com/TakoProtocol/status/1838807434032484800

Building on Farcaster requires the confidence and patience of long-term thinkers. Fortunately, we can still see a large number of Builders gathering on Farcaster, forming a unique Build culture. In addition to the developer communities in North America and Europe, Farcaster's Builders are also spread across the world, driving global adoption of Farcaster. We can see locally distinctive developer communities like Farcaster Builders India (/fbi) shining in the Farcaster ecosystem, with numerous Asian developers coming together at FarCon Asia. During FarCon, EDCON, and the FarHack at Token 2049, Farcaster developers have been creating new things. The Farcaster team also places great value on ecosystem builders' and users' feedback, engaging in activities such as interactions on Farcaster, frequent AMAs, biweekly Farcaster Dev Calls, and hosting Farcaster Dev Day events. Consequently, we continue to see new projects emerge on Farcaster, and the former project launch platform Launchcaster has always been lively. Even though many are attempts that have not gone far, they have at least paved the way for others.

2.4 Make more Legos → Build Programmable Social

Farcaster has always claimed to be fully decentralized, with identity stored on-chain maintaining a certain level of decentralization, while content exists off-chain for higher performance. In fact, compared to even more decentralized social networks (such as Nostr), Farcaster emphasizes itself as a programmable social platform, allowing users and developers to extend its functionality and experience through programming. Farcaster can connect on-chain graph and social graph, and developers can utilize its open database Hub and APIs permissionlessly to build various clients and diverse applications, creating more social Legos.

From Open Social Graph to Social Reputation Systems

Recently, the analysis platform for the crypto market on Twitter, kaito.ai, has gained significant popularity, which has also built a social reputation system based on the Twitter social graph. In the Farcaster ecosystem, there are also many social reputation protocols where any developer can build a social reputation system based on Farcaster's open social graph, serving as one of the infrastructures for upper-layer applications, used for threshold filtering, incentive evaluation, content filtering, etc. Some representative examples include Power Badge, Openrank, FarScores, Neynar user score, and Talent's Build Score.

Social Reputation Systems in the Farcaster Ecosystem

· Power Badge

Power Badge is a label given by Warpcast to active and interesting non-spam information senders. Although it is no longer displayed on the Warpcast frontend, it is still the only social reputation system stored in the protocol-level Hub database. The Power Badge has had many applications, including filtering search results in @buoy, enabling Priority Mode in Recaster to filter the comment section, creating PowerBadge-gated groups on Warpcast, creating PowerBadge-gated voice chat rooms on FarHouse, and some projects may prioritize Power Badge users when distributing airdrops or whitelisting.

The Power Badge Trilogy by @ryya is considered the most in-depth series of articles on Power Badge research. In Unlocking the Power Badge, the article deeply analyzes the influencing factors of the Power Badge, including activity, quality, affinity, and tags. These parameters may be interdependent and may be dynamically weighted based on other dynamic factors such as DAU, user engagement, and interaction. The final article, Balancing the Power Badge, also highlights the positive effects and potential issues of the current Power Badge system. Users with the Power Badge can receive priority recommendations and higher exposure, which may discourage new users. Additionally, the algorithm may exhibit bias, and users may attempt to manipulate the system. Ultimately, the team no longer displays the Power Badge in Warpcast, and discussions related to it have gradually decreased.

· Openrank

Openrank aims to address credibility issues in social networks through a profile reputation score. Openrank's ranking strategy is based on two reputation graphs: "Followership" and "Engagement." The "Followership" ranking strategy calculates based solely on the follow relationships between users, where each follow action carries the same weight. The commonly used "Engagement" ranking strategy considers likes, replies, shares, mentions, and follows, among other interactive behaviors. Each behavior is assigned a different weight based on its contribution to trustworthiness to measure and inherit trustworthiness, thus forming a comprehensive reputation ranking. (For a deeper dive into the OpenRank mechanism, refer to @rjs's 10. Deep Dive: OpenRank and Andrew Hong's OpenRank: Building Graph Datasets for Contextual Crypto App Feeds).

Currently, in the daily tipping allocation of $DEGEN, additional daily shares are given to the top 5000 users in Openrank ranking to reward high-quality active users. Openrank has also collaborated with Neynar to introduce a personalized information feed "For you" based on Openrank ranking, which can be adopted by some third-party clients. Openrank has also partnered with Once Upon to view blockchain activity recommendations based on Openrank. The Openrank team will leverage an AI agent based on Openrank ranking for Channels member management, content governance, and incentives in the future Cura project.

· FarScores

FarScores (also known as Social Capital Score/Rank) is a metric developed by the Farcaster data infrastructure Airstack to measure a user's influence in the network. It quantifies a user's social influence by analyzing downstream effects of user actions such as posting, liking, and sharing content. Each Cast can also calculate Cast Scores based on FarScores to assess the impact of each post. @aaronv.eth's article Maximizing Your Social Capital Score on Farcaster discusses methods to enhance FarScores.

FarScores have been applied in prediction games Perl, the SocialFi card game FarFantasy, but most people have become familiar with FarScores through Moxie, an incentive project within the Farcaster ecosystem and the primary use case for FarScores. Initially, Moxie distributed tokens to users based on their Cast Scores, and later users could earn Moxie based on their Cast Scores. Regular users can also acquire more Moxie rewards by investing in Fan Tokens of high-earning KOLs or Channels. This incentive model aims to encourage more genuine and valuable social interactions. For more details on Moxie's gameplay, you can refer to @kaloh's article Moxie's Leap to Base: Elevating the Onchain Social Economy.

· Neynar User Score

The Neynar user score is generated based on a user's behavior on the platform. The score ranges from 0 to 1 and reflects the credibility of a user as a high-quality user. Users can increase their score by engaging in high-quality interactions with other premium users. Scores are updated weekly. The majority of users fall in the range of 0.5-0.6, with only over 27,000 users scoring above 0.7 and just over 2,500 users scoring above 0.9.

The Neynar user score is widely used as a participation requirement in the subsequent Farcaster ecosystem memecoin launchpads. For example, @clanker's token launch required a Neynar score above 0.5, and participation in @larrybot's presale required a Neynar score above 0.7, and so forth.

· Talent Protocol's Build Score

The Talent Protocol is a social reputation aggregation layer centered around builders, aiming to connect their various on-chain and off-chain (Github, LinkedIn) activities as comprehensively as possible to aggregate qualifications, connections, and reputation, creating a unified open reputation layer. The Talent Passport aggregates various reputation data points (Credentials), categorized into identity (ENS, Gitcoin Passport, Farcaster account, etc.), activity (active users on different chains, Social Capital Rank representing Farcaster activity, etc.), and skills (on-chain development records, hackathon activity records, etc.), to dynamically calculate a Builder Score representing a user's reputation level as an on-chain Builder.

One of the initial known applications of the Builder Score was perhaps the Talent team's previous Builder airdrop incentive project BUILD, where a portion of the daily nominatable score was linked to your Builder Score. Currently, the Talent Build Score has also been adopted by many applications such as Basenames, Etherscan, icebreaker, Web3.bio, etc., and is expected to play a role in unsecured lending in the future.

From Diversified Clients to a Comprehensive Application Ecosystem

As an open social protocol, Farcaster naturally has many developers building client applications based on it. However, breaking through "build your own client" beyond warpcast is not an easy task. Many clients have "failed before they even started," such as many early clients like Discove and Jam (early versions were regular clients) that have already pivoted. This year, many clients have also announced the cessation of updates, such as @slokh's flink and nook, clients with their own tokenomics like wildcard, and buttrfly, which also chose to shut down by the end of the year. However, some have still found their own ecological niche, a certain degree of PMF, and relatively resilient clients. For example:

· Social aggregation clients for multiple social networks @fireflyapp, @yup, @phaverapp.

· @woj's @super, with many convenient features for easy use, while actively exploring anonymous posting, AI pets, and other features, the subscription model usage ensures a certain income.

· @haole's @recaster-fc, very quickly updates and iterates based on user needs, actively integrates Moxie, Clanker data dashboards, and other user-friendly features.

· @farquest, actively explores meme coin trading and other features outside the client.

· Former mirror team's @kiosk, integrating Farcaster social feed and NFT feed.

· @hellno.eth's @herocast, focusing on team collaboration across multiple accounts and user growth.

In addition, there are also some clients with their original websites integrated with Farcaster or specialized in vertical domains.

· @blockbeatsasia.eth: The first to integrate Farcaster to build a community-driven news media platform.

· Takocast: A Farcaster-based client focusing on "High tech, High life," gathering a community of forward-thinking individuals passionate about scientific exploration and personal sovereignty.

· @telcaster: A Farcaster client based on the Telegram Mini-app.

Outside the client, a variety of applications built on the open Farcaster protocol have emerged, such as short video @drakula, long-form video and live streaming @streamm, image sharing @moshicam, @rodeodotclub, prediction markets @swaye, /limitless, on-chain information tracking and direct trade replication @interface, /castmoney, group chat and transactions /frens, meme coin trading @bolide...

Of course, there are many more that I haven't mentioned, scattered throughout my casts over the past year. @sebastianlehrer once created a comprehensive Farcaster Ecosystem Map (updated as of June 22), and a16z listed some Farcaster ecosystem projects in the State of Crypto Report 2024 (released on October 16), but now it's not very comprehensive, after all, Farcaster ecosystem projects are also ever-changing.

Farcaster ecosystem projects (by a16zcrypto, Oct. 16, 2024) https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/state-of-crypto-report-2024/

In short, due to the large number of builders congregating here, and because Farcaster is an open, permissionless, programmable, composable, cryptonative social protocol, naturally, Farcaster has a very rich application ecosystem. Among them, there are always some innovative, market-following, high-quality products that meet the needs of some users. With a community and product foundation in place, all that's missing is attention, just a small spark to ignite the entire ecosystem. Indeed, as the market sentiment gradually turns bullish, the east wind still blows here.

3 AI is The Antidote for DeSoc

2024 was still a year of rapid advances in AI, and this trend naturally swept into the crypto world. Jeffy Yu even proposed the concept of the future as web4, which combines the social interactivity of Web2, the decentralized autonomy of Web3, and the smart capabilities of AI in an AGI network. In web4, AI will be embedded in every corner, where agents can perform complex tasks, generate creative works, and autonomously innovate in ways we have not fully imagined.

According to the definition in the Google Agents Whitepaper, AI agents are applications that observe the world and use the tools available to achieve goals. They are autonomous and can act independently without human intervention. Social networks are actually a great space for AI agents to show their skills, so Farcaster, as an open, programmable, composable social network, is a perfect breeding ground for AI agents and has unique cryptonative features. Therefore, we see AI agents starting to shine on Farcaster, drawing the market's attention back here and driving the prosperity of the entire ecosystem.

3.1 Memecoins + AI Agents

Initially, Farcaster had some utility AI agents, such as @askgina.eth, who could fetch the latest crypto data and news, and @atlas, who could fetch Farcaster information. However, it wasn't until the emergence of Aether (@aethernet) that people began to find interacting with AI agents interesting. Aether was deployed by the developer of the feature memecoin Higher, @martin, as @aethernet, initially serving as a promotional ambassador for the Higher community to help Higher move toward the Agentic Network. We can see from interactions with it, such as the Jesus Crypto Plaza interview with Aether, that Aether is reasonable, interacts sincerely, and has clear logic, even though this is dependent on Claude model capabilities. As a result, Aether quickly amassed a large following on Farcaster.

Aether has its own wallet address, can receive donations, has its own Hypersub membership subscription, issued an NFT on Zora, and has therefore earned a significant amount of revenue based on its popularity. At the same time, it also has autonomous interactive capabilities, summoning @paybot to give people money, summoning @bountycaster to post bounty tasks, accepting others' tips, and summoning @askgina to answer questions when encountering something unfamiliar. Therefore, Aether's emergence has also brought attention to these projects. In addition, its ERC20z standard NFT issued on Zora can be traded on artrun, and cast has also been turned into a memecoin by belief. It can be said that Aether's emergence has effectively driven the prosperity of the Farcaster ecosystem, which also embodies the Higher community's philosophy of "Aim HIGHER, Win Together."

So what exactly makes AI agents running on Farcaster special, as mentioned in Bankless' "Can Farcaster Rise Again with AI Agents? Three Ecosystem Trends to Watch" article?

· No API restrictions, Farcaster has decentralization, programmability, and composability;

· Farcaster accounts can have self-hosted wallets, providing the basis for on-chain identity and transactions;

· AI agents can interoperate with Farcaster's extensive ecosystem.

The memecoins community has introduced various AI agents, catching up with the AI narrative, which is an effective way to regain market attention. After Aether set a good example, more AI agents have emerged on Farcaster. For example, the $BLEU community launched @elefant, the $MFER community launched @mfergpt, both playing roles similar to community outreach ambassadors interacting with users. In addition, the founder of Ham ($TN100x) community @deployer introduced a more utility-focused @bankr, which allows quick token purchases within cast and will also expand to Twitter and have an independent terminal in the future. The $ENJOY community introduced the NFT issuance Agent @enjoyr, which interacts with it on cast, attaching an image and name, enabling quick launch of an open edition 1155 NFT.

3.2 AI Agents → Memecoins

During this memecoin supercycle, the trend of memecoins naturally spread to every corner of the crypto world. As Solana's pumpfun led the way in memecoin issuance, a distinctive memecoin launchpad finally appeared on Farcaster—an AI agent specifically designed for coin launches named @clanker. The rest of the story is well known; a large amount of assets were issued through Clanker, redirecting the market's attention back to the Farcaster economy.

@clanker allows users to interact with it within the cast, simply informing it of the token's name and symbol to quickly issue a memecoin on the Base chain. This streamlined memecoin issuance process only requires a cast to launch, and issuers also receive a portion of the transaction fees. The concept of AI agent coin issuance happened to be at the right place at the right time, but what quickly propelled Clanker to fame was, in part, the legendary lore behind the memecoins issued by Clanker.

The interaction between Aether and Clanker was a key moment that quickly brought Clanker into the limelight. Aether summoned Clanker itself to issue a memecoin called $LUM. Although there was human guidance and human-designed prompts, the final coin issuance stage was created through AI agents' autonomous collaboration. This was a kind of "mimicking game" where AI agents interact autonomously like humans, described by @itsmechaseb as the "dawn of AI autonomy."

Aether ↑ × Clanker → LUM ↑ https://warpcast.com/aethernet/0x9b64c883

Subsequently, through the anonymous posting account @superanon linked to @clanker, the memecoin $ANON was issued. After the issuance, many users airdropped $ANON to @super founder @woj, who then airdropped the received $ANON to @super users, garnering praise and increasing community approval. Following this, builders began to develop applications around $ANON, such as the color NFT project anoncolors.com based on /basecolors, featuring a $ANON question mark logo element, and @slokh's development of the anonymous posting project @anoncast, which requires $ANON holdings verification using zk proofs, giving $ANON practical use cases. Subsequently, some other anonymous posting accounts such as rumourcast.xyz, 33bits.xyz, 66bits.xyz also issued their respective memecoins through Clanker.

Thanks to the utilization of zk-proof technology, it has also attracted Jesse and Vitalik to try out anoncast. Today, anoncast has further expanded into anon.world, enhancing the way zk verification is done to create a unique anonymous client. Anonymous posting has enabled more people to express themselves freely, becoming a new social primitive in the Farcaster ecosystem.

The $ANON story https://x.com/0xLuo/status/1858954728191004761

There are many more stories of such memecoins, with the Openrank team also creating a Clanker Index for the Clanker coin based on Openrank's token holder design, serving as a reference for investors holding the coin. Additionally, for some background on certain Clanker tokens, you can refer to JamesX's tweet.

Clanker is no longer just a memecoin launchpad, as it once had high popularity and liquidity, becoming the coin issuance platform for projects built for the long term, such as the human-machine symbiotic digital city native.fun, the long-video and live-streaming platform streamm.tv, the Frames game Clankermon, and Newcaster providing the most convenient way to register for Farcaster. The success of these projects will not only increase the influence of the Clanker platform but also contribute back to the Clanker ecosystem through transaction fees. Memecoins, due to their excellent viral nature, are not limited to the Farcaster community, leading to the phenomenon of "Meme goes out, funds flow in, and the Farcaster ecosystem prospers."

Clanker Tokens ranked by Clanker Scores https://dune.com/queries/4355256/7310627

3.3 AI Agents + Channels

This year, Channels underwent a membership-based restructuring due to the past Channel format not working well. Although some Channels became influential communities, they did not bring substantial high-quality content or increase daily active users. The new version of Channels requires the founders to actively manage and operate the Channels, but effectively running a community is still no easy task. However, we can see attempts to incentivize Channel content and interaction, such as Moxie's introduction of Fan tokens for Channels. Additionally, Openrank's Cura aims to leverage AI agents to revitalize Channels.

Cura can provide an AI agent built on Openrank for each channel to control members, curate the information flow, manage the channel's wallet, launch the channel's token, and automatically distribute rewards to top contributors, thereby achieving automated member management, information display, and reward distribution for the channel. The era of using AI agents for content governance and creator incentives in Channels is approaching.

This is actually a featured application of AI agents in an encrypted native social network like Farcaster. According to Cura's goals, it will transform Farcaster Channels into thriving and self-sustaining communities. With Cura, Channels are no longer just spaces for conversation but dynamic collectives with their own economic systems, trust mechanisms, and social currencies. Cura will be the growth engine of Farcaster Channels, and we eagerly await its development.

AI agents for Channels

3.4 AI Agents + everything

In addition to the AI agents mentioned above, Farcaster has seen the emergence of other distinctive AI agents:

· Community Ambassadors: In addition to @aether from the $HIGHER community, @elefant has been introduced by the $BLEU community, and @mfergpt has been introduced by the $MFER community. These ambassadors can help memecoins communities with Q&A, brand promotion, and provide emotional value.

· Token Launch: In addition to @clanker and @tinybot, there are also @larrybot (a memecoins launchpad with a presale whitelist mechanism), @wowza from wow.xyz, @heyterminal from terminal.co, @netprotocol from netprotocol.app, @launchtokenbot from beliefs.social, @jamai (an AI agents launchpad on the BNB chain launched by Jam), and @bogusbob (launching on Solana).

· NFT Launch: Summon @toka or @enjoyr in cast, attach an image and name, and you can quickly launch an open edition 1155 NFT.

· Trade: Summon @bankr in cast to purchase tokens.

· Tools: @askgina.eth for on-chain information search, @atlas Farcaster for information search, @talentmate.eth to identify and assess on-chain builders and their contributions.

· Art: @zerebro for creating and selling ASCII art, @artto-ai for art collecting, @palette for art appreciation, @harmonybot to help users holding $CHAOS generate and mint ASCII art NFTs.

· Others: @quaestor DAO proposal analysis, @agentmilo a conversational bot interested in cryptocurrency, art, and technology.

It is evident that this list will continue to expand, especially now that there are more AI agents launchpads, enabling interaction between humans and agents, as well as among agents. Farcaster has gradually evolved into a symbiotic social network where humans and machines coexist, resembling an extended version of "Stanford Village," enriching Farcaster's fun and gameplay.

4 Summary and Outlook

Overall, from climax to trough and from trough to climax, Farcaster has brought us many surprises in 2024, showcasing remarkable performance as a crypto economy. What did Farcaster do right? Perhaps it can still be attributed to the team's three strategies: growing together with the crypto world and the synergy with public chains, a strong community and development environment, and the rich ecosystem brought by open, permissionless, and programmable protocols. This has enabled Farcaster to lead the new creator economy at one point and catch the wave of AI agents.

However, we are not yet qualified to be complacent. The Farcaster community is still a niche community, and Farconomy is still very small in scale. User growth is always a challenge faced by all emerging social networks. We need to continue to leverage Farcaster's features and strengths to attract more users and liquidity attention here. Looking ahead to 2025, we can still maintain our expectations. Personally, I am looking forward to the following developments:

4.1 Will Farconomy Continue to Thrive?

Clanker, due to its rapid acquisition of a large amount of attention and liquidity in the short term, is considered the Pump.fun of Farcaster and even the Base ecosystem, becoming an important part of both ecosystems. Although Clanker's transaction volume is currently only 1/10 compared to Pump.fun, fortunately, Clanker's ecosystem footprint continues to expand.

Clanker v.s. Pump Fun https://dune.com/queries/4351277 https://dune.com/clanker_protection_team/clanker-vs-others

The Clanker ecosystem currently not only has practical tools made for Clanker but also has ecosystem applications built on Clanker. After Clanker v2 provided a minting interface, it has higher scalability and composability. It is not just a platform but a protocol, and there are also multiple projects based on the Clanker protocol, enabling various minting methods not only when casting on Farcaster. For example:

· clank.fun: Pump.fun-style frontend based on Clanker.

· anonfun: Anoncast for anonymous minting based on Clanker.

· tinyagents.xyz: AI agent memecoin minting platform based on Clanker, customize AI agents and mint using @tinybot in the cast.

· clankpad: Mint within channels, where owners also receive 15% of transaction fees.

· @clankeroncall: Call 1-775-252-6537 to mint.

The expansion of the Clanker ecosystem can continue to build moats and expand influence, so Clanker remains promising in the future, expected to remain a key force leading Farconomy. Of course, other distinctive memecoins launchpads and projects that have issued assets are also noteworthy for their dedicated efforts, as they will continue to grow together with Farcaster in the crypto world.

4.2 Frame v2 Mini Apps, the Next Growth Point?

Framess launched in early 2024 once attracted a lot of attention as an interactive window embedded in social media feeds. Later, actions like Open Actions launched by Lens and Blinks supporting Twitter launched by Solana also have similar functionalities. Through Frames supporting reading user profiles and on-chain operations, simple interactions can be easily carried out in the client-side information flow, such as transfers, transactions, minting of NFTs, simple games, viewing personal data, etc. (Aistack provides a popular Frames leaderboard). However, after extensive experimentation, developers found that Frame v1 was limited in its suitability, had limitations such as limited size and interactivity, slow image rendering speed, and could only be temporarily used and difficult to search for and save.

In this context, the Farcaster team introduced Frames v2, featuring a full-screen interactive canvas based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript to achieve more sophisticated client-side application interaction, supporting application-requested on-chain transactions and signatures, as well as sending notifications to users from the client-side. In addition to being directly accessible in the Feed, Warpcast also provides Frames with a conveniently accessible bottom-center menu entry point.

Frames tab https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0xeadeeaef

Upon its launch, Frames v2 immediately saw many developers building different types of mini-apps.

· Games: On-chain social gaming platform /farcade (also supporting Telegram and Worldcoin platforms simultaneously), trading game /clankermon, farm management game /farville, social prediction game, 2048, etc.

· AI Agents: A chatbot launched by @buttrfly that can perform real-time searches on Farcaster data based on RAG, able to look up users, channels, and hot casts. /booot supports the custom creation of different types of AI agents within Frames, and also allows real-time networked searches. Shaw from ai16z expressed optimism about the application of AI agents in Frames during an interview.

· Launchpad: onsen can directly issue memecoins with different parameters in Frames.

· Tools: Various data dashboards such as Degen, Moxie, Openrank, Clanker, TradingView, etc.

· DeFi: Stake mining on Morpho, trading, tracking and replicating friend's trades through /banyan, transferring funds to friends through /payflow, and sending Onchain Gift Packs.

WeChat's Mini Programs in web2 and Telegram's Mini Apps are both successful examples of social products that internally build a multi-application ecosystem. WeChat Mini Programs leverage WeChat's large user base, covering various fields such as e-commerce, gaming, and lifestyle services, making WeChat a super app that integrates multiple services. Users can enjoy various services conveniently without leaving WeChat, as they are "instantly accessible without the need to download." On the other hand, Telegram's Mini Apps utilize the TON payment system to create a tokenomic model, encouraging user participation and app usage, providing economic incentives for Mini Apps, and further promoting the adoption of web3.

Frames v2 already has the capability to host almost all types of web applications, making it easy to support Farcaster login within Frames, providing instant access within the client. Combining the open social graph of Farcaster, a composable platform ecosystem, and the on-chain programmability of native encryption, it can offer a unique application experience different from other social networks and enrich the gameplay of the Farcaster client. Looking forward to seeing more interesting Mini-apps in Frames v2, attracting more users to stay within the Farcaster client, rather than just observing from a distance, thus becoming the next growth point in user engagement.

4.3 "Will Farcaster Become a Hotbed for AI Agent Development"?

We have seen an increasing number of AI agents on Farcaster, and the Farcaster ecosystem has now become a key part of AI in crypto. Farcaster's open database provides valuable social graphs, serving as a crucial social data layer, with more AI agents set to join the Farcaster ecosystem in the future.

Decentralised AI agent stack https://www.pmayr.xyz/the-decentralised-ai-agent-stack/

In addition to having Farcaster social media accounts, AI agents can also be present in Frames. a16z co-founder Shaw mentioned in an interview, "Farcaster will become a fertile ground for AI Agent development," which is why Eliza quickly integrated with Farcaster. Their aim is to integrate Eliza into Farcaster Frames. Farcaster Frames can embed payments or applications, not just chat.

AI agents can also appear in other ecosystem applications. For example, in the digital city native ecosystem, DotsML enables external AI agents (such as Clanker, Bankr, Atlas, etc.) to interact with internal Agents "Dots."

Of course, the Farcaster ecosystem's AI agents are not perfect yet or have limited capabilities. On the one hand, this requires specialized AI companies to improve their capabilities in large-scale model infrastructure, and on the other hand, more developers need to fully utilize existing infrastructure to unleash the potential of building AI agents. According to OpenAI's classification of AI capabilities, current AI agents have shown Level 3 and Level 4 features in social media and DeFi. In the future, more independent and intelligent AI agents will demonstrate innovative potential in fields such as art and governance.

Below are some of my personal expectations for the development of AI agents in the Farcaster ecosystem:

1. More AI agents frameworks and tool platforms will emerge to help developers and end users easily and quickly build a richer set of AI agents within the Farcaster ecosystem. Currently, ai16z's Eliza has integrated with Farcaster, and Coinbase has also introduced AgentKit, a framework that facilitates AI integration for on-chain operations. With the belief that having more convenient AI agent building tools in the future, the number and variety of AI agents on Farcaster will become even more diverse.

2. Truly autonomous AI agents with Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) capabilities will emerge. Current AI agents passively respond to human instructions to perform specific tasks. Living within a TEE marks the beginning of autonomous action for AI agents, allowing them to manage their own wallets (automatically tip users or execute transactions based on trading strategies) and interact using a Farcaster account without the need for human intervention. @tee_hee_he has already made attempts in this area, and Eliza Agent also supports deployment in a TEE environment. Autonomous AI agents with goals and proactive behavior should not be too far off.

3. AI agents with true long-text processing capabilities and memory systems will emerge. Through RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) technology, real-time retrieval from the integrated open Farcaster database and other on-chain/off-chain data vector databases will enable agents to have a larger and up-to-date knowledge base. They will be able to remember interactions with each user during engagement.

Epilogue

The year 2024 was significant for me and many others in the Farcaster community. I am grateful for all the friends I've made through Farcaster. The main purpose of this article remains a record of my surprising year with Farcaster, which can also serve as a reference for anyone interested in the Farcaster ecosystem. This article was supposed to be published at the end of last year, but clearly, I overestimated my writing speed. Nevertheless, I may still have overlooked many points worth mentioning. Now, a week has passed in 2025, and the Farcaster ecosystem has recovered from the slump at the end of last month. Maybe all my expectations have been dashed, and all assessments have failed, but some things are changing, and many things will remain the same. On the first day of 2024, no one could imagine everything that would happen on Farcaster throughout the year. I believe that 2025 Farcaster is still worth looking forward to, with unexpected surprises just around the corner.

still keeping optimistic, and imagining higher ↑

Original Article Link

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