Today we continue to talk about a new project, which has been very popular recently. You can see from dune that the recent DAU has skyrocketed, and the popularity is very explosive. He is farcaster. The current total number of users has exceeded 130,000, and the daily DAU has also exceeded 30000. Farcaster is also a socialFi protocol. In fact, we have talked about many related series before. The project has not issued coins yet, so now we will see if there are any opportunities for this project.
1 Introduction
Farcaster was founded in Silicon Valley in 2021 by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan. Farcaster is a decentralized social network protocol designed to establish direct connections between users, while developers can access public data without permission, support diverse and flexible client and application development, and encourage Innovation and experimentation to provide users with rich social experiences and choices. Farcaster manages user identities on-chain based on Ethereum and OP, but stores messages and posts off-chain in the Hub network to increase speed and reduce costs.
Farcaster allows users to create, own and transfer their own identities and content without relying on any centralized platform or service. Its goal is to create an open, free, diverse and interoperable Web3 social ecosystem. Farcaster is an open social protocol that allows various applications to be built on it.
From the development side, Farcaster recently launched the new feature of Frame, which can turn any cast (you can understand it as Farcaster’s tweet or post) into an interactive application; this new feature brings more to the Farcaster ecosystem Possibilities include an airdrop checker built into the cast and one-click gas-free NFT minting.
In other words, Frame can easily attract encryption developers and pave the way for more interesting encryption business formats.
2.Protocol characteristics
The Farcaster protocol consists of two key parts: one is an on-chain registry where users can apply for a unique username and user identities are recorded and owned on-chain, and the other is an off-chain server or host where users save their social profiles Data, i.e. messages and posts, is stored in a network of off-chain nodes called Hubs.
contract:
Farcaster accounts are kept on-chain by contracts. The main contract deployed on the OP main network consists of the following three parts:
ID registration: The account identity is called Farcaster ID or fid.
Storage: Storage space is leased by charging users an annual fee, and the price fluctuates based on supply and demand.
Key registration: Accounts can interact with apps by registering keys, which can be added or deleted at any time.
Hubs：
Farcaster performs real-time data synchronization and dissemination through Hub nodes. The Hub node is a server that is responsible for verifying, storing and replicating messages created by each account on the Farcaster network. Applications can achieve real-time read and write interaction with Farcaster by running the Hub node.
ENS domain name:
Farcaster currently supports two ENS domain names:
Off-chain ENS name: free, controlled by Farcaster, can be changed every 28 days;
On-chain ENS domain name: requires payment and wallet control.
Fnames (i.e., the first category above) are controlled by the fcast.id subdomain. Users can register and use them in all Farcaster apps. The ENSIP-16 and ERC-3668 proposals describe the working principle of fnames in detail.
3.Team introduction
Farcaster Protocol is a project founded by former Coinbase executives Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan. Dan Romero served as vice president and general manager of Coinbase, responsible for Coinbase Pro, Coinbase Prime, Coinbase Custody and other businesses. Varun Srinivasan previously served as Director of Engineering at Coinbase, responsible for products such as Coinbase Wallet. Both are veterans in the blockchain field and have extensive experience and resources. In addition to its two co-founders, Farcaster also has a team of senior engineers, designers and operations personnel from well-known companies such as Coinbase, Facebook, and Twitter.
4.Farcaster development history
On July 13, 2023, the decentralized social protocol Farcaster announced the completion of US$30 million in financing. This round of financing was led by a16z, with participation from 1confirmation, Coinbase Ventures and other VCs. Vitalik is also often active in Farcaster and has repeatedly expressed his interest in decentralized social networking, saying bluntly that "Farcaster is actually very successful."
Currently, Farcaster has migrated the identity and storage contracts from the Ethereum main network to the Optimism main network, and announced the technical architecture of Farcaster v3 version. The main reason why Farcaster migrated to Optimism is that founder Dan Romero believes that there are currently the most active developers and users based on Optimism and OP stack (OP super chain).
Farcaster currently has more than 20 developed applications, nearly 130,000 registered users, and more than 3 million messages published on the platform. Attracted by the launch of Frames' new features and the related memecoin hype, Farcaster's DAU has recently reached 30,000, and the number of daily interactions has exceeded one million. Total agreement revenue is also close to $600,000.
5 product matrix
1) Warpcast
Warpcast is an application built on Farcaster's decentralized social protocol. It combines the ease of use of traditional social applications with the encryption features of blockchain applications. It is the official client of Farcaster. Warpcast is a client product independently developed by the Farcaster team. It is also the most comprehensive and mature tool in the ecosystem. Its user interface and functions are very similar to Twitter. Users can publish, follow, comment and interact smoothly, which eases the user's learning and The cost. At the same time, Warpcast relies on Farcaster's digital identity system to allow each user to have an open digital ID generated on the chain. At the same time, Warpcast is also completely decentralized. There is no centralized organization. The code and protocol are open source, and users have enhanced control over data. This application also supports on-chain experiences for various cryptoeconomic activities, such as issuing tokens, displaying NFTs, etc. Warpcast plans to implement community governance through DAO and tokens, and is actively attracting more developers to build applications and expand the ecosystem of Farcaster and Warpcast.
Warpcast currently dominates more than 90% of the market share, which has largely contributed to the flourishing development of the Farcaster ecosystem. While building the Farcaster decentralized protocol, the development team is also committed to iterative upgrades with the Warpcast client. In the long term, the team plans to hand over the daily maintenance of the Farcaster protocol to the open community. It is precisely based on the widespread adoption of Warpcast that the Farcaster ecosystem has been fully developed, attracting more applications to be built on it, which is conducive to Farcaster becoming an active and prosperous open social network platform. With the help of community operations at the protocol level, the market position of the client Warpcast will also ensure the continued healthy operation of the Farcaster ecosystem in the long term.
2) Yup
Yup is a social aggregation application that greatly simplifies the user experience of publishing and interacting across platforms. Yup realizes the integration of mainstream social platforms such as Lens, Twitter, Farcaster, and Bluesky through a unified interface. Users only need to publish once in Yup, and then the content can be packaged and pushed to all associated accounts with one click, which greatly improves user efficiency. Release efficiency. At the same time, Yup also aggregates dynamic information reminders from different platforms. You only need to view them on Yup to master the social dynamics of multiple platforms without having to log in to each application repeatedly. This provides users with an unprecedented convenience experience - using only one application to achieve comprehensive management of major social platforms around the world.
3) Eventcaster
This is an activity and event management tool built on the Farcaster protocol. Users can easily organize online and offline activities, publish event information, manage check-ins and ticketing, etc. through it.
4) Searchaster
This is a content search tool that allows users to quickly search for concerned users or topic trends and related content in the Farcaster network, providing users with a new dimension of data experience.
5) Paragraph
This project can automatically aggregate content in the Farcaster network and integrate this content into its own Web3 content publishing platform. The visual editing publishing experience further reduces the user threshold and provides users with a richer content experience.
6) Unlone
Unlone can capture users' real-time dynamic text in Farcaster and automatically publish it as topic articles or products to create more exposure for these contents.
7) Discove
Discove is a development toolkit that makes it easier for developers to create small programs in the Farcaster client Warpcast and enrich the functionality of the client.
It can be seen that the Farcaster ecosystem has begun to take shape. These applications provide more usage scenarios for the Farcaster protocol and provide developers with opportunities to show their creativity, which will help the Farcaster community prosper and develop.
6. The reason for the recent explosion
Because of its flexible client and application creation, developers on it have created many applications. On the user side, many of the token airdrops on Faracaster are clearly meme projects at first glance, but some of them have indeed exploded, spreading the wealth effect further, and more users have begun to speculate because of the early airdrop profits of some people. try. You can see a few examples as follows:
①$Degen: Facaster’s meme leader
As its name suggests, this token has more of a speculative meaning, and it is also the current token leader in the Farcaster ecosystem.
The origin of the token is very simple. As long as users make comments and other active actions in Farcaster's degen channel, they may receive $Degen token rewards.
In essence, Degen is a MEME token that encourages crypto degens to discuss speculative information on Farcaster. But now Degen has also emerged from the crowd of airdrop tokens and has become the focus of the crypto media’s recent attention.
Tokens are generated on the Base chain. The current market value of Degen has reached 100 million US dollars, and the price has experienced a huge increase in the last 24 hours.
Around January 26, the price of Degen was only $0.0002, which had increased nearly 15 times.
In Degen’s token economics, 15% of the total token supply has been airdropped, and about 20% of the airdrops will be generated in the next stage, so there may be opportunities to actively do more active actions in the Degen channel Get more airdrops; as MEME, the current leader of the Farcaster ecosystem, it is also a good choice to directly pay attention to the performance of the Degen secondary market itself.
②$ Frame: A token with the same name as Frame function
The token with the same name as Farcaster's recently launched Frame function currently has a total FDV of US$3 million and has fallen back a lot.
The token was originally created on Base on February 2 as an experiment to test the functionality of Frame on Farcaster, but has since evolved into more of a MEME-related symbol.
NFT related, in addition to MEME, some NFT projects are also worthy of attention.
③FarcasterOG:
The officially released OG NFT has certain airdrop expectations, and the current floor price has reached 2.9E.
④Farcats:
The NFT series featuring cat images, officially described as Farcaster’s mascot, appears in the form of 1,661 unique and collectible NFTs. The current floor price is around 0.7E.
Finally, to summarize this project, we actually know that projects on the socialFi track will definitely rise in the future. We have talked about many socialFi projects before, such as friedtech, Deso, fan tokens in Chz, etc., but we are not sure when SocialFi will It can come out, but we must pay attention to these recently popular projects, because maybe a super big socialFi application will come out in this bull market, and the valuation will be very exaggerated. For example, Facebook is valued at 1 trillion US dollars, and WeChat is also valued at 1 trillion US dollars. 80 billion U.S. dollars, so if one can be auctioned at present, it must be a 100-fold coin series. Currently, this project has not issued coins. We can at least download some applications to play, and maybe we can get airdrops. Of course, some of his applications can also be used. Let’s play around. The above-mentioned secondary market applications have already experienced huge growth, so everyone should enter with caution.
