Farcaster @farcaster_xyz is a decentralized social networking protocol that uses smart contracts and hybrid storage technology to enable social connections, content sharing, and data ownership among users, while supporting diverse and flexible client and application development.

In May this year, Farcaster's developer Merkle Manufactory announced that it had completed a new round of financing, led by Paradigm, totaling US$150 million, raising the company's valuation to US$1 billion.

Dune data shows that Farcaster's total number of users has reached 570,000, and the number of daily active users has surged from 2k at the beginning of the year to 68k at present, an increase of more than 34 times.


Farcaster is not a new social project. In the early testing phase, founder Dan used his personal influence and connections to invite many well-known OGs, including Vitalik Buterin, to join the project. He also screened early users by getting invitation codes through Twitter private messages, which made Farcaster's user base highly elite.

This threshold-setting approach is designed to gather highly similar user groups in the early stages, making Farcaster a refined version of Twitter to some extent, so that early users can enjoy a better posting and interaction experience.
Last October, Farcaster opened registration but set an entry threshold of $5. This threshold has a certain effect in blocking the registration of a large number of robot accounts and maintaining the overall good atmosphere of Farcaster. It reminds us of Nostr, which once declined due to the proliferation of robots.

To date, Farcaster has accumulated nearly $1.9 million in revenue from registration fees and data storage fees.


Farcaster's two founders, Dan and Varun, have both held important positions at Coinbase, which makes Farcaster closely linked to the Base ecosystem to some extent. Jesse, the core person in charge of the Base chain, is also very active on Farcaster.

Also, from another perspective, among the top 500 users with the most followers on Farcaster, more than 70% of their on-chain interactions occurred on the Base chain.


Farcaster protocol data is stored in hubs on and off the chain. Developers can choose to run the hub node themselves or use third-party service providers like Neynar to obtain data.

All of this data is permissionless, and based on this available data, developers can build various clients and applications, which greatly increases the richness and innovation space of the Farcaster ecosystem.

Let’s talk about a few more applications that may become phenomenal. Warpcast is the main application under the Farcaster protocol and the first Farcaster client. It was developed by a team of top engineers formed by Dan for more than a year.


Its overall architecture is similar to traditional Web2 social software, with a smooth user experience. It currently accounts for 90% of the Farcaster protocol traffic.

The registration process for Warpcast is simple. The system will automatically generate a bound wallet for the user. All Warpcast accounts are associated with a Farcaster ID, and the generated content is stored in the Farcaster hub.

This design allows even non-cryptocurrency users to easily enter the on-chain world, which can be said to greatly lower the cognitive threshold for new users. In layman's terms, it is like directly pointing the water pipe of traffic to your mouth. As long as you have the ability, you can catch it all. Unlike some previous applications, most of the friends outside the circle were discouraged from registering at the beginning.

In addition, users who are familiar with on-chain interactions can also bind their commonly used cryptocurrency wallets. These adjustments make Warpcast not only user-friendly, but also play an important role in promoting the growth of the Farcaster ecosystem and user acceptance.

Warpcast is designed as a social platform similar to Twitter, where users can post tweets, comment, retweet, and follow other users.

In addition to social media features similar to Twitter, Warpcast also introduced features such as channels and actions, which led to more ways of interaction.
For example, DEGEN uses the user participation in the Farcaster ecosystem to distribute tokens. Users can participate in DEGEN's airdrops by following channels and interacting. The airdropped tokens can be given to other users as rewards.

Farcaster’s huge growth this year is closely related to the Frames feature launched in February. Frames is a mini-app in Warpcast that allows for more diverse interactions without leaving Warpcast, such as minting NFTs, content subscriptions, playing mini-games, and receiving tokens.

For example, far.cards is a trading card project developed based on mint.club and exclusively for Farcaster users. The attribute value of each user's card depends on their activity on Farcaster, such as the number of fans, likes and replies received, etc.

The price of the card is determined by the bonding curve. The purchased cards can be collected or traded.


The launch of Frames has greatly enriched the playability of Warpcast, making Farcaster development no longer limited to building a decentralized Twitter.
At present, nearly 40,000 users have used the Frames function, generating more than 150,000 on-chain transactions, and the number of interactive contracts designed has reached 1,624.

Frame is similar to MiniApp in the Ton ecosystem in terms of user experience. Although Farcaster currently has a hard time having a huge user base like Ton, it is also worth paying attention to Frame games that are very simple and easy to spread, such as Not a coin on Ton.

Referring to the success of the DEGEN project in terms of market value and communication capabilities, it is entirely possible that there will be projects on Farcaster that distribute tokens with high returns through the Frame applet.

Degen.Game is a website that organizes Frame applets. Users can log in as Farcaster to view the latest Frame every day and interact with it.

Jam is a creator economy platform from Farcaster that converts every tweet of a user on Warpcast into an NFT asset similar to Friend.tech Key. Users can buy and sell each tweet at a price determined by the Bonding Curve.

Unlike Friend.tech, each tweet can only have one holder at a time, so there is no situation where you rush to open a bunch of shares and then sell them. However, the idea of ​​profit is similar. You need to find and buy tweets that may be contagious as early as possible. The targets of attention include Farcaster core developers, Vitalik Buterin, KOLs, etc., to ensure that there are other buyers to take over later.

If you are a KOL or someone who is good at tweeting and has a good sense of the internet, you can also spread the message by constantly writing tweets and making memes, and you can also earn a 5% transaction fee.

Jam currently does not have tokens, but it has internal points. Considering that the overall gameplay is very similar to Friend.tech, the potential airdrop may be considerable.

As people become more and more accustomed to living on the Internet, social graphs have become important personal assets, and users' demand for data autonomy is also increasing.

Web3's solutions are naturally suited to solving the pain points of current Web2 social platforms, but the decentralized social sector has not achieved particularly great success.

Many projects are too focused on decentralization, but ignore the importance of user experience. Dan pointed out in an interview with Bankless that the purpose of Web3 social networking is not to replace Web2 social networking, but to improve it, so that users can have more on-chain gameplay while owning data, and do things that cannot be done in Web2.

Farcaster significantly improves user interaction fluency by storing value data on-chain and storing high-frequency data off-chain.

The team has attached great importance to mobile development from the very beginning, and they are well aware that mobile devices are the main usage scenario for social software.

Therefore, the Warpcast client has a good user experience, is fully functional, and has a fast iteration speed. It constantly launches new features such as long text and interactive functions, providing developers with more and more capabilities to build new applications.

Although Farcaster is far from perfect and still has a lot of room for improvement, it is already an application that can attract users and maintain growth. More excellent products based on Farcaster will surely emerge in the future. Let us look forward to and pay attention to the development of Farcaster and participate in it as soon as possible.