Author: katiewav, crypto KOL; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou
FarCon, held in California from May 1-5, 2024, was a storm of excitement and optimism. The atmosphere was electrifying, and it felt magical to be fully paid for on-chain. I was also blown away by the quality of projects I had the opportunity to review at FarHack. It was clear that talented developers of all types - from Farcaster native founders to freelance developers to media enthusiasts - were eager to build on Farcaster, and this excitement is contagious and should not be underestimated.
On a more subtle note, however, I think many people left FarCon with more questions than answers. Throughout the weekend, we discussed many familiar ideas and concepts, frustratingly repeated over and over again. There was also a contentious question hanging over our heads: Can a truly decentralized, positive-sum social network exist with a single group (with the best of intentions) at the helm?
I wanted to share some of my own initial thoughts here — from the most commonly discussed issues I’ve heard, to the questions I’m interested in from the Farcaster community, to my own general framework for thinking about consumer crypto.
1. Is the infrastructure ready?
Personally, I don't think the infrastructure is ready for mainstream consumer adoption.
Despite all the L2 and L3 discussions we’ve had, these chains are still challenging to use. Whenever I’ve used L2 or L3, it’s been pretty difficult to check the status of transactions on the respective chains — for example, LP ENJOY tokens are still very confusing on Zora. Signing into the Farcaster client via “Sign-in with Farcaster” is still cumbersome and, frankly, a bit annoying. At Farcon, many people who were excited to buy products on the chain had to wait more than 10 minutes to complete their purchases as they first had to bridge their funds to Base.
However, there is danger and complacency behind the excuse that “we have to wait for infrastructure before developing applications.” A framework I developed while discussing with you at FarCon is to think about the development of infrastructure and applications in two phases.
Phase 1: Make infrastructure more accessible to less technical, less crypto-native, and perhaps more product/vision-oriented people (creatives) to use tools and iterate on app concepts that could appeal to mainstream consumers. We’ve made great strides in this area thanks to the work of the Farcaster team, Farcaster-native infrastructure teams like Neynar, general infrastructure teams like Stack and Privy, and other developers in the community. Use crypto-native users as a testing ground for these MVPs and iterate over time without critical infrastructure barriers.
Phase 2: Build great apps and product experiences for crypto-native consumers of all interests and backgrounds.
I think we are at the end of phase 1. We have made amazing progress in infrastructure over the past few years, from working with companies like Privy to develop embedded wallets, to reducing costs through L2/L3, to working with companies like Decent to optimize bridges and chain abstraction, to seamless withdrawal solutions like Ansible, and then the construction of the Farcaster protocol itself, which is a feat of complex network engineering. We still have a lot of work to do to further improve the user experience, but we are finally at the stage where we can do it in parallel with rapid application development and experimentation.
2. The future of Farcaster client
There was a lot of discussion and debate during FarCon about the future of the client, as the Farcaster team may be incentivized to maintain Warpcast as the primary client, and most clients will only be auxiliary to Warpcast, or even quickly swallowed up.
In my opinion, this is a core discussion that makes sense given the form of clients to date - most are some form of rebranding or partial chops of the global Warpcast feed. To me, most of the potential client concepts I've heard of stay within this narrow range. My sense is that this homogeneity stems from a core desire to attract and siphon Farcaster's valuable social graph away from Warpcast, with much less focus on Farcaster's other fundamental elements (the Farcaster protocol and its data architecture).
Having discussed this with Archetype Research Advisor Andrew Hong and a few teams trying to build social networks in the past, I realize that the ability to leverage data structures designed for social graph modularity and a p2p network out of the box is a game changer for application developers. I would love to see clients that go beyond supporting existing Warpcast users to offering entirely new experiences or features that might not make sense on a Twitter-like interface like Warpcast, or that appeal to users who might not be interested in crypto (which is the primary user base for Warpcast). Also, at a high level, I think consumer-facing interfaces that try to do everything don’t actually do anything — “There is no super app, I love you.” channels are a smart effort in that direction, and topic-specific Warpcast channels can better inform specific communities about what a more niche, differentiated client looks like and allow those clients to emerge more naturally.
The above points to the previous point that the infrastructure/login mechanisms are not yet at a state where they fully abstract Farcaster/Warpcast from the client experience, which could leave us stuck with a "meta-functional" client.
A natural question that arises is: if you want to attract non-Warpcast users, why leverage crypto infrastructure? In an age of abundant information and media (both real and simulated), social curation and coordination are essential. I believe that social products that are fully coordinated by users (rather than a monolithic algorithm) can become very powerful, and tokens are a powerful mechanism to facilitate this coordination.
One particularly curious short-term question I left FarCon with was what the future holds for commerce on Farcaster and commerce-focused infrastructure/clients. On site, I saw multiple teams bringing different commerce experiences to the table throughout the conference. This category has quickly sparked interest among builders, and I hope to keep an eye on how this space develops over the next few months.
3. Two major frameworks in the consumer crypto space
A common question I get at FarCon is what I’m most concerned about in the consumer crypto space today and how I think about the space more broadly. Right now, I’m breaking down the consumer crypto space using two frameworks:
(1) Ecology first
Crypto ecosystems are notoriously tribalistic (i.e. Ethereum vs. Solana), and this is also true for more narrow consumer ecosystems. It’s been interesting to see Zora, Base, and Farcaster interact as closely connected ecosystems. Transactions based on Zora and Base often rely on Warpcast for distribution and discovery, while Farcaster relies on Zora and Base to provide products, content, and tokens for community engagement. I believe that the culture and practices that emerge from these ecosystems, both independently and in relation to each other, will be core to shaping the near-term future of consumer crypto, as builders often feel most comfortable building in ecosystems with specific users and excitement.
(2) Use cases first
The types of use cases/products I am considering fall into the following categories:
Bridging off-chain/on-chain user data
Brand loyalty
On-chain social
On-chain media/music
These categories overlap, so I'll describe the more comprehensive ideas below:
The user experience on and off-chain is extremely fragmented. As the lines between the physical and digital worlds blur, the ability to form a truly recognizable, representative identity is disintegrating. The opportunity to create seamless experiences that blend physical and digital is huge, especially as social graphs can move freely between online and offline.
For individuals/communities: How can my favorite online channels better connect me to the people, groups, and places I interact with offline? And vice versa.
For brands: How can brands better understand how consumers who shop in-store spend their time online and engage with them on these platforms?
Now is a critical time to think about the intersection of crypto and media, but I also believe these products will stabilize over a longer timeframe. Traditional media and music are facing an existential crisis and are falling apart in terms of business structure, monetization, and the roles of consumers and artists/critics. I think more broadly, tokens and crypto are powerful tools for coordinating media networks that are increasingly reliant on user participation, user-generated content, and even user ownership.
Overall, I left FarCon more excited and concerned about its future. There is no doubt that the star teams and early ecosystems have emerged organically and they have laid the foundation. I think it will take a diverse community of developers, creatives, and powerful users to take this ecosystem to the next level, and I am very happy to be a part of it.