Original author: Wendy, IOSG Ventures
As a decentralized social protocol that has attracted much attention and favor, Farcaster has received US$30 million in financing from first-tier institutions such as A16z. Vitalik and others have personally expressed their love for the project, and fund founders such as Variant have also personally published articles discussing Farcaster’s related investment theories. , on Farcaster, there are many top figures in the technology venture capital circle who are active: fund institutional investors, founders of startup companies, business leaders of exchanges such as Coinbase... It is similar to Clubhouse, which was very popular back then.
Huge amounts of financing, top-tier endorsements, airdrops, etc. made it capture a lot of market attention in the early days of its launch. However, due to its closed nature as the underlying protocol and the high entry threshold (there were few internal beta users in the initial stage, and there was a login fee) , Farcaster failed to achieve a great response in the market for a period of time after the initial enthusiasm of users subsided, and was more used as a niche communication place for professionals in the technology/encryption circle. In recent days, the number of users has suddenly increased by more than ten times. One of the reasons is that a new feature called Frames has appeared in its Warpast client.
https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster
Farcaster protocol introduction
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 is an open social protocol that allows various applications to be built on it. Currently, Warpcast is the only fully functional client on Farcaster.
The Farcaster protocol consists of two key parts: an on-chain registry where users can apply for a unique username and user identities are recorded and owned on-chain, and an off-chain server or host where users save their social profiles Data, i.e. messages and posts, are 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:
Currently Farcaster 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 name. Users can register and use them in all Farcasterapps. The ENSIP-16 and ERC-3668 proposals describe in detail how fnames work.
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.
On July 27, Farcaster announced that it supports ENS usernames and users can connect to ENS domain names. On August 22, it was officially announced that Farcaster would be migrated to OP Mainnet. On October 12, 2023, co-founder Dan Romero announced that Farcaster has become 100% open for use without permission. To log in and register, you need to pay an annual fee of US$5 using legal currency channels (US$3 through an invitation link). After logging in, you will be rewarded with 50 coins. WAPS, currently priced equivalent to US$5, can be used for rewards within the ecosystem.
Farcaster currently has more than 20 developed applications, nearly 80,000 registered users, and more than one million messages published on the platform. Attracted by the launch of Frames new features and the related memecoin hype, Farcasters DAU has recently reached nearly 30,000, and the number of daily interactions has exceeded one million. The total revenue from the agreement is also close to $400,000.
Warpcast function introduction
Warpcast is a client developed by the official team based on Farcaster. It supports desktop/Android/ios. It is a social application similar to Twitter/X. User registration and login do not require a cryptocurrency wallet, and annual fees are paid through Google Pay or Apple Pay.
UIUX is very similar to X/Twitter. Users can comment, like, and reward posts (casts). The Warps points used for rewards can be purchased with legal currency at a price of 0.01 u/warps. In addition to purchases, users can get warps rewards by registering, inviting friends, and winning big rewards. Users can also add specific tags when publishing posts to indicate the channel they belong to, and can view discussions on specific topics in channels.
Frames
Frames are a newly developed feature similar to inline applets that allow developers to embed interactive experiences within Farcaster posts (casts). These interactive experiences can range from voting, minting NFTs to building games, and even integrating instant transaction checkout links directly into social media feeds, eliminating the need to switch platforms. For popular Frames, there is a dedicated information flow on the Warpast homepage to view.
The logic of Frames is very simple. It is embedded in the clients information flow and displays pictures and buttons to the user. After the user clicks, they will jump to the corresponding page. A Frame is an HTML Web application located on a Web server. For the development of Frames, Farcaster official documentation provides detailed tutorials.
Since the launch of Frames, the number of daily active users of Farcaster has surged. Developers have rushed to build cryptographic native applications, such as receiving or minting NFTs, playing games, etc. Most of the functions can be completed on the warpcast page without any signature jump operation. . According to Spindl statistics, nearly a thousand Frames have been released by more than 400 applications since the product was launched nearly a week ago. An early and very popular Frames called cookiecaster implemented the e-commerce shopping function in Warpcast. Users can choose the cookie flavor and pay. In addition to getting physical cookies, they can also get on-chain cookie certificates for free, such as Bitcoin. The Renaissance of Pizza.
Another common application of the Frames function is user incentives. Coinbase’s official Farcaster account Based Institute has launched certification and rewards for active users. Users need to meet specific requirements (such as the number of fans/account duration/posting activity, etc.) to click to claim it. 0.001 ETH and 8453 TYBG, a community token with meme meaning.
At the same time, we have also seen more projects built within the Farcaster ecosystem cleverly utilizing the Frames function. For example, Bountycaster, a task program created by Linda
Paragraph, a creator platform on the Base chain invested by USV, Coinbase Ventures, etc., has also developed and improved the Frames function. The long article preview published on the Paragraph platform in the information flow has three button options: Read Online, Read inline and Subscribe. Read Online has the same design as other platforms and will jump to the long article page of the web page. Read inline can be used in the information. The full text is displayed in the stream using inline page turning.
The hype of memecoin and related NFTs also played an important role in promoting Frames to become a market hot spot. The dozens of times increase in one day and the FDV with over 100 million tokens attracted a lot of attention. Multiple tokens are airdropped and distributed for free to early Farcaster users, and their wealth creation effect also attracts more new users to join Farcaster.
Why Frames is an exciting endeavor
Judging from the proven business path of Web2, personalized recommendation algorithms are a tool for rapid growth. From Twitter to Netflix to Tiktok, all prove the important role of user preferences in building network effects on social media. If we look back at Facebooks growth history, when it was struggling with IPO revenue issues, it tried to provide users with more interactive response options in addition to likes, thereby competing with companies with other business models, such as Spotify and the Washington Post. Reports and other shared users and data. However, the ecological fragmentation of Web2 is still very obvious today. The giants are very aware of the importance of traffic moats. Users often need to log in to other applications to complete the process, and it is very difficult to confirm identity and make payment. Web3 can compress these unnecessary jumps and confirmations into a single inline experience, focusing on intent and user experience, hiding the complex connection process. In Web 2, the multi-party coordination problem required to implement these user stories was insurmountable, but in Web 3 it is almost automatic, and the difficulty of payment, a key step in commercialization, is easily resolved.
Imagine these user scenarios:
The influencer shared a selfie and a link to purchase the clothes in the photo along with a 10% discount coupon. Fans purchase with one click in the information flow: the influencer gets a rebate, the manufacturer sells the product, and you complete the shopping with a discounted price and a silky-smooth experience.
You are reading an announcement about a new protocol and a new token: next to the text is an intuitive purchase interface for one-click purchase. This is a feature not implemented by any existing product.
Someone wrote a long article with useful information and shared a link to the content: with one click, you can see the article you are interested in and pay or reward the author (and you can also get rewards for recommending and sharing). This only costs you a few cents and is a different experience than buying an e-book and paying for it.
Of course, in the Web3 field, there have been many attempts to integrate socialization and financialization, not just the characteristics of Frames. Friend.Tech, which has exploded in popularity in the past year, uses price curves and fee sharing models to deeply combine financial speculation attributes with social interaction, but the transaction object is single (only personal keys can be traded); Telegram bot uses Telegram’s social interaction In the form of dialogue, a more user-friendly dex function is implemented, but the construction of social relationships has not become part of the product; task platforms such as Galx assist user growth and other activities by publishing tasks, but they are strongly dependent on traditional social platforms such as X, and require Multiple authentication jumps, etc.
The segmentation tracks of different products are different, but they all explore the interoperable identity and transaction recording characteristics of blockchain. If we imagine it boldly, the permissionless coupling of consumer experience and on-chain mechanisms is very natural in Web 3. By creating Frames, user-unfriendly operations such as wallet signing are hidden in the background, and seamless handling of money and digital ownership makes it possible to have a true and pervasive picture of user behavior across consumer applications that is even Something that Web2 also failed to achieve in its heyday.
Conclusion
Many big names in the encryption industry have clearly expressed their love and optimism for this seemingly simple Frames function in Farcaster. The founder of ElectricCapital said that when a new social app breaks through on a new platform, it will feed back the growth of this track tenfold. Now the encryption infrastructure is nearly complete. A16Z investors even bluntly said that the energy of Farcaster and Frames is like the impact of Web2s ajax/open web in 2005.
ElectricCapital founder
a16z crypto investor
Institutions and capital are also very keen on this new idea. DWF Labs, Variant and other institutions have also launched the Farcaster Frames Hackathon. Frames has set off a new wave of social dApp innovation in DeSoc. Based on Frame, developers can embed their own application dApp into the Farcaster client, allowing users to achieve various interactive experiences based on Post. The developers in the Farcaster community are proud to call themselves Framers, and hundreds of Framers have developed many wonderful works using Frames.
Decentralized social networking has always been a promising track. Whether it is the underlying data infrastructure, protocol or application layer, many projects have tried it. We believe that the combination of decentralized finance and social networking will bring about great changes and have extremely broad development prospects. Although it is still early days for Frames and many social applications, interest and attention in this direction will remain extremely high.
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