Farcaster is open for registration, what are the differences compared to Lens Protocol?

Farcaster is now accepting registrations - how does it differ from Lens Protocol?

Author: Albiverse

Compiled by: Felix, LianGuaiNews

Recently, the decentralized social protocol Farcaster no longer requires whitelist permission, and anyone can register without an invitation. Developers can also build applications, register users, and read/write Hub data without any third-party involvement. Last year, the social protocol Farcaster, which raised $30 million in funding led by a16z, differs from Lens Protocol. The author compares and analyzes Farcaster and Lens Protocol from three aspects of Web3 protocols: the protocol itself, project ecosystem, and community, interpreting their strengths and weaknesses.

Farcaster: A Decentralized Social Built by Silicon Valley

Farcaster was founded by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan in Silicon Valley, both of whom previously held senior positions at Coinbase.

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Protocol Layer: Pragmatic Decentralization

The founders’ cultural roots are reflected in their choices of protocol architecture and their practical philosophy about decentralization, which their CTO refers to as “decentralized enough.” He points out that two users in the Farcaster network should always be able to communicate with each other, which means:

1. They have their own identities
2. They can publish and read network information in an uncensored manner

Let’s see how this is achieved.

The Farcaster architecture is described at https://docs.farcaster.xyz/protocol/architecture.html

At a higher level, user identities are recorded and owned on the blockchain, while messages and posts are stored in an off-chain network called Hub, which allows for faster and cheaper storage of user data compared to a fully on-chain solution. In many ways, Lens is moving towards a more off-chain approach with its new L3 Momoka.

However, Farcaster currently does not provide new on-chain functionalities at the protocol level. Instead, the FC team focuses on creating a set of more traditional social media features for posting, commenting, etc. So, one question is whether this partially off-chain and conservative protocol design will limit developers’ creativity and create a thriving ecosystem?

Perhaps mitigating this “drawback” is the emergence of third-party services in the Farcaster ecosystem:

• Indexers and data providers like Airstack and Neynar bypass the need for an on-chain social graph
• Tools like Mint can compensate for the tokenization shortcomings of the post system
• SDKs like Discove can replace Open Actions, allowing developers to create mini-applications directly within Warpcast

One thing is certain, there is currently no way to collect posts, transaction records, and other social assets on Farcaster.

When it comes to developer experience, simplicity is an advantage for Farcaster.

Several important concepts in the Farcaster protocol

FC Business Model: Users will pay an annual fee to the center to store their data. This is handled by storage contracts, and the price depends on supply and demand.

FC Governance: Farcaster adopts rough consensus and running code as its governance model. Changes occur when someone proposes, gains support, and releases running code.

Clients and Applications: Developers unleash their creativity

Here is a non-exhaustive list of projects built by the Farcaster community.

Projects based on Farcaster

Warpcast is the primary client of Farcaster, currently occupying over 90% of the market share. Warpcast is built by the Farcaster team themselves and is the most comprehensive product in the entire FC ecosystem. While the FC team is building the Farcaster protocol, they also plan to hand over the maintenance work to the community in the long run.

One advantage is having a high-quality client that everyone can use as an entry point to the FC community. On the other hand, a major drawback is that this may impact the enthusiasm of other projects in the ecosystem, especially considering Warpcast’s huge market share and first-mover advantage. However, Warpcast may still be the protagonist in the Farcaster ecosystem and become a super app, somewhat like how Twitter has third-party applications built around it.

This article categorizes projects in the FC ecosystem into two types:

1. Projects that enhance the Warpcast application: Examples include Eventcaster for creating events, Searchaster and Findcaster for searching posts or people, Launcaster for discovering projects, Discove for embedding small applications in the Warpcast feed, Weponder for creating surveys on Warpcast, and more.
2. Projects loosely integrated with Farcaster, extracting specific types of data: For example, Fabric.xyz displays Farcaster profiles with checkboxes on its platform. Unlone publishes live-text logs as threads on Warpcast. LianGuairagraph has directly integrated the FC social graph and comments into its Web3 platform.

LianGuairagraph recommends subscribing to your FC followers

Community Level: Slow and Cohesive Growth

On October 10th, Farcaster opened to the public. This may bring significant changes to the community dynamics.

Lens metrics as of October 12, 2023 - https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster

Farcaster‘s community is closely connected. The early community emerged during the previous cryptocurrency crash, described by the author as a group of “smart and optimistic builders.” Led by developers and founders, some create content and livestream on unlonely.

Developers often play and share new experiments with each other. The current application ecosystem reflects this, with social incentives that truly reward those brave creators.

To this day, Dan Romero has been Farcaster’s primary user source, with user invitations coming in second. This gradual manual joining has two benefits: it slowly solidifies the community culture and prevents robots from entering the platform, thus maintaining cohesion and quality in conversations and content.

Some members are indeed very committed, as evident from their number of fans. Most of them have significantly fewer followers on Twitter. A few truly active users dominate most conversations on the platform.

https://warpcast.com/ccarella.eth/0xa4bd4f

What will happen after Farcaster opens is a pending question and should face the same challenges as Lens, namely, bots and spam.

Lens Protocol, Applications, and Community

Lens, created by the Aave team, embodies the web3-native culture rooted in DeFi.

Protocol: On-chain and “Asset First”

On one hand, the initial design of the Lens protocol records all followers and publications on-chain as NFTs, forming an on-chain social graph. By tokenizing content and profiles, one can say that Lens is an “asset-first” social media (created by the Variant Fund team). This allows Lens social media assets, such as profiles and content, to be traded and combined with other protocols in the Ethereum ecosystem. This leverages the unique properties of blockchain. For example, users can use valuable content as collateral for loans to fuel new creations.

Creators can set their own posts as bookmarkable and add bookmark conditions

Another example of the power of the blockchain is the MadFinance application, which allows brands and KOLs to conduct business around sponsored posts without intermediaries, directly on the blockchain. Brands provide a bounty for the posts they want to see and put the money in escrow contracts. Then, creators create a post, sign it, and submit it for brand review. If the brand is satisfied, the post will be automatically published and the creator will be paid.

Given that most activities on Lens are recorded on the blockchain, it is possible to achieve clearer and more systematic value distribution through smart contracts. For example, multiple stakeholders in the social media value chain, such as recommenders, promoters, and creators, may receive partial compensation from the NFTs purchased by end users. In Web2, value distribution is often opaque, and many stakeholders do not even receive compensation.

In addition, the Lens team will soon release Lens V2 with concepts such as Open Actions and ERC-6551 Profile NFTs, which will enhance the composability of Lens. Open Actions allow builders to embed other Web3 applications directly into the Lens client’s feed (such as hey.xyz). Profile NFTs are the most fundamental and core objects in Lens, allowing users to control all their content, and when combined with virtual avatars developed by Sonar, a company acquired by the Lens team, interesting use cases can arise (related reading: Understanding NFT mobile game Sonar in one minute: Why AAVE is its first acquisition?)

Airstack Founder Jason Goldberg praises Open Actions

However, the advantages mentioned earlier are just speculation, and the prospects of the protocol after the release of Lens V2 still need to be observed. Additionally, there may be some significant shortcomings in the “assets first” and highly on-chain nature.

Firstly, it is difficult to predict what will happen after the financialization of all social media assets, such as one’s own profile. Imagine an open market for Twitter/X accounts where all TikTok posts can be bookmarked and traded. While there may be benign speculation, it can also lead to fraudulent behavior. The author also believes that while monetization increases revenue for creators, financialization is not the primary intention for most people to join social media.

In addition, Lens has had some scalability issues in the past. This is the cost of tokenizing a large number of publications on Polygon. The team has been seeking to alleviate this issue by moving social activities from publications to a new Optimistic Layer3 called Momoka. For non-technical users, the question is whether this design can scale to millions of daily active users.

A curated list of Lens concepts. The list is not exhaustive. You can access the Lens documentation here.

Here’s a brief introduction to Lens protocol governance and revenue model.

Lens Governance: Currently, Lens is being tested in a closed environment with the core team in control of everything. The testing is gradually being opened up, allowing the community to propose improvements under a governance model similar to EIP.

Funding and Business Model: Lens has raised over $17 million in funding from companies like IDEO and General Catalyst. It is still unclear how the protocol will sustain itself in the future, but it may adopt a fee-based model, similar to Zora and Mirror, by taking a cut from some fund flow on the platform.

Lens Project Ecosystem: Exploring On-chain Media

Below is a non-exhaustive overview of applications and tools built on top of Lens.

Below are the usage statistics of different applications and clients on Zurf.social in the past few months.

Statistics on posting, commenting, and mirroring on Zurf.social from April 10th to October 10th

The three largest applications in the Lens ecosystem are clients with social media feeds. According to the chart, Hey.xyz (formerly known as Lenster) is a Twitter-like client created during the 2022 March Lens hackathon and now dominates the market. Phaver, which recently raised $7 million in funding, is second, and Orb, which recently raised $2.3 million, is third.

The experience on Hey and Orb is similar to Twitter/X, except that they allow post gating and collectibles. Phaver allows users to stake on each other’s posts to govern and earn rewards.

These are observations prior to the launch of Open Actions, which enables more complex applications to be embedded in the feed. The deployment of Lens V2 may trigger a wave of innovation in the Lens ecosystem.

Airstack positions itself as a leading Web3 social data and API provider (including Farcaster and Lens).

Lens Community: Still searching for benign sources of growth

Lens daily activity statistics data source: Zurf.social-https://hey.xyz/posts/0xe222-0x032f

Currently, Lens is still in a closed phase, and only over 100,000 people can access Lens handle.

Lens has encountered some problems in terms of robots and is actively working to resolve them through the use of AI, closed testing, and other potential means. The decrease in the number of robots on the platform may partially explain the decline in activity over the past few months, but this cannot be fully confirmed.

As far as the author knows, the Lens team has always focused on developers and creators. This is to guide the supply of applications, services, and content.

The content on Lens is often created by ordinary users or Web3 creators, which is in stark contrast to the developer-intensive community of Farcasters. Some examples of creators include Jessyfries.lens, ChaoticMonk.lens, Grams.lens, and thefaketomato.lens.

The Orb App “Developer Community” (similar to the group function in the Twitter community) has 500 people. Although the level of activity is only moderate, it may be the best place to get Lens updates and ask questions to other developers.

Overall, the Lens community is still in its early stages and has not yet seen a solid community flywheel.

Related reading: How to prepare for the Web3 social protocol Lens Protocol?

Summary

Lens and Farcaster are clearly different in their design. While the author has more theoretical interest in the composability provided by the Lens protocol and Web3, the author appreciates the achievements of the Warpcast team in building the protocol, client, and community simultaneously. Will Lens V2 bring a new wave of innovation to the Lens ecosystem? Will Warpcast continue to rise and dominate the Farcaster ecosystem? Let’s wait and see.

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