Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized social network. It is an open protocol that can support many clients, just like email. Farcaster was co-founded by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan. Both co-founders have extend experience in the crypto space at Coinbase.
Social protocols are open data graphs where users own the relationship with their audience, and developers can read and build on top of the graph without any limitation. Farcaster is a social protocol, but the team is also building a great product on top of the protocol. Let’s go over a few reasons why I think Farcaster is special:
Product focused
The protocol is the base layer behind the product. But the product is always improving and it is a delight to use. Farcaster started with a desktop app and now there is a mobile app to interact with the protocol. They include features like posting text, image and recasting posts.
They also have some quirky and really cool features that are built for the crypto community. For example, if you write gm or gn at the beginning of a sentence, there will be special buttons with gm and gn. Both the desktop app and the mobile app are easy to use and new features and bug fixes are rolled out almost every week.
Permissionless innovation
Even though the protocol has been in private beta, there are a number of applications being built on top of the graph and the content. None of these apps required an API key. You just need an internet connection, a laptop and a willingness to build something. These apps demonstrate the power of decentralization and how powerful a protocol can be. The more apps are built, the more the protocol becomes valuable, creating more opportunity to new apps to be build on top of it. It is a great flywheel.
As Chris Dixon stated, composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance. Some of the apps that were already built on top of Farcaster:
- Instacaster - All the images built on top of Farcaster are published here.
- Searchcaster - Search for any cast in the platform
- CastRSS - RSS feed for Farcaster
- Configcaster: When a user uses “Connect Wallet” for an app / website, their config is automatically imported and any sensitive data can be requested by the app and approved by the user in a single click
Crypto focused
Farcaster is built on top of Ethereum. Whenever you create your account, you can link your Ethereum address to your account. That allows Farcaster to build a lot of native integrations on top of Ethereum.
For example, a lot of the early users have NFTs linked to their profile picture. NFTs owned are marked with the purple checkmark! The timeline also features any new transactions buying new NFTs or any new collections. The Farcaster app also features the top NFT collections that users in the platform own. There will be more features built on top as the Ethereum community grows.
The community
Farcaster has an amazing early community. The community was chosen with intent by the founders. When you use the app, you can feel the positivity of the early community. That is a breath of fresh air compared to other social media apps that are very toxic. The engagement for a lot of early users is much higher compared to other social apps. For example, in a simple post that I had, I got almost 30 likes and a few comments. On other social apps, it is the norm for me to not get any engagement.
Other users have pointed out that the number of followers that they have in Farcaster already surpassed the number that they have in other social media apps. In my personal experience, I have a lot more engaged followers and the number of followers in Farcaster will surpass the number of followers elsewhere. I’ve spent a lot of time building my presence on other social media apps and started focusing my time more on Farcaster.
Conclusion
Farcaster has the chance to win because it has the technical capabilities, the right community and the right product. Farcaster is special and it is one of the best products coming out of this crypto cycle.