Understanding Farcaster, the decentralized social network strongly promoted by Vitalik’ OR ‘Understanding Farcaster, the decentralized social network strongly advocated by Vitalik

Understanding Farcaster, Vitalik's endorsed decentralized social network

Author | defioasis

Editor | Colin Wu

Last week, Vitalik Buterin’s Twitter account was hacked and used to post phishing links, resulting in users losing over $690,000. After researching, Slowmist Cosmos pointed out that the phishing organization behind the theft of Vitalik’s Twitter account is still related to the current hot and crazy PinkDrainer. The hacking method may be SIM hijacking or other possibilities. Two days later, Vitalik stated on the decentralized social media Farcaster that his Twitter account was indeed subjected to SIM card hijacking attacks. The reason may be that his phone number was exposed when registering for Twitter Blue. It is regrettable that he did not realize the advice not to use phone numbers for identity verification. Vitalik stated that he has uninstalled Twitter and joined Farcaster, which can control account recovery through Ethereum addresses.

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Farcaster is a decentralized protocol for building social applications, which can be used with front-ends such as Opencast and Warpcast. Farcaster received a $30 million investment led by a16z in 2022. This article will briefly analyze this decentralized social protocol favored by Vitalik and a16z.

Core Issues of Social Networks

Social network activities can be simply understood as a group of users interacting with each other, such as sending messages (text, images, audio, etc.) to others, liking, commenting, and reposting their posts. In centralized social networks, this group of users can only interact within a specific social application, while in decentralized social networks, a group of users from different applications are allowed to interact across applications.

However, this will face challenges. Farcaster classifies four core issues of decentralized social networks: identity, authentication, availability, and consistency. Identity, namely usernames, allows users to switch between different social applications and act as their identity; authentication ensures that users can trust the sources when receiving messages from others; availability ensures that user data is always available in different applications; consistency requires all front-end applications to consistently support and enforce these rules of social networks.

Solutions of Farcaster

Farcaster’s social network covers three layers: the identity layer, the data layer, and the application layer. The identity layer is based on Ethereum and determines the operations and authorization methods that can be performed on the network. Identity and authentication are the core aspects; the data layer stores information authorized by the identity layer and makes it available; the application layer consumes the information stored in the data layer.

(1) Identity: Farcaster ID (FID)

Farcaster introduces usernames and Farcaster IDs (FIDs) for user social identities. FID is a unique and tamper-proof identifier for user identities introduced by Farcaster. Although FIDs are decentralized and represented by numerical identifiers, it is not appropriate to use numerical identifiers to represent users. Therefore, users can choose to register a Farcaster name as their username and bind it to their FID. Farcaster’s usernames are managed in a dedicated namespace, and usernames may be reclaimed, while FIDs will not be.

Usernames and Farcaster IDs will be reflected in two different contracts on Ethereum, the Name Registry and the FID Registry, which together form the basis of Farcaster user identity.

It is worth mentioning that user identity recovery benefits from FID. Users can set up another address in advance as a credential to recover their Farcaster identity. This other address can be their own alternative wallet address, another known Farcaster user address, or even a third-party custodian.

(2) Authentication

Message authentication benefits from Farcaster ID. When a user receives a message, they can verify the authenticity of the message by checking the sender’s FID and looking up the corresponding public key (address) on the Ethereum chain, and then confirming if the signature sender is generated from that address.

To protect the private key on the device (the private key needs to be loaded onto the device application to generate signatures), Farcaster introduces the concept of Signers. Signers are Ed25519 keys generated off-chain, and users can register signers by using the signer’s public key to transact with the KeyRegistry. Then the private key can be used to sign and publish messages to the network.

(3) Availability: Storage Leasing

In centralized social applications, users store information on servers similar to RSS servers and retrieve all data on the network by indexing these servers. Farcaster introduces storage hubs to store data. When different users interact socially, they download copies of each other’s information and store them.

However, to prevent spam information from flooding the hubs, Farcaster collects rent from users for storing data on the network, which is the main source of revenue for Farcaster. Users rent storage space by paying an annual fee to Farcaster, which can suppress spam information and encourage users to clear low-value data. Storage is managed and tracked on-chain by the StorageRegistry contract.

(4) Consistency

Farcaster is not a direct social application but a lower-level social protocol, similar to the relationship between the Lens Protocol and Lenster. Currently, applications built on Farcaster mainly include the DAO-supported Web3 social application Alphacaster, the creation and sharing platform Discove, the on-chain group and personalized subscription platform Jam, the open-source Twitter-style frontend Opencast and Warpcast, as well as the social aggregator Yup, which can be cross-posted to Twitter and Lens. Vitalik uses Warpcast as the Farcaster frontend. In terms of logic, Warpcast is basically the same as the core logic of Twitter, where you can view posts from “world groups” and leave comments, reposts, and likes on posts (threads) from users you follow.

Applications built on Farcaster provide consumption scenarios for data stored on hubs. Application servers communicate with hubs, download all information, organize and categorize this information to create applications for different user experiences, and then provide APIs for users on different clients to use.

Applications built on Farcaster need to adhere to rough consensus and run code as the governance model of Farcaster. When someone proposes a FIP proposal (Farcaster Improvement Proposal) and it is accepted by protocol developers, application developers, and users, and the code is released, changes to Farcaster will occur. Different entities reach consensus through agreement or rejection. Farcaster does not have a binding voting process or an official role with veto power.

Social Ecosystem Partners

Link to other applications or communities through Farcaster identity accounts, including user reminders Alertcaster, Move-to-Earn Blobs, on-chain social event previews Eventcaster, Farcaster ecosystem indicators tracking Farcaster Network, earn points by completing tasks FarQuest, messaging application Frens, Ethereum on-chain exploration Interface, decentralized hacker news Kiwi News, find the latest Web3 projects Launchcaster, personalized media source Neynar, publishing and communication LianGuairagraph, find interesting topics Pincaster, DAO tools created by Nouns Builder Purple DAO, search via Raycast search engine, search using API/GUI Searchcaster, Farcaster community content exploration Surveycaster, tip rewards Tipcast and token-driven real-time streaming Unlonely.

Currently, Farcaster is still in the testing phase, and users can submit a waiting list. Both Farcaster and Lens Protocol serve as underlying protocols for building social networks, but compared to Lens Protocol, Farcaster is further away from the user spotlight and focuses more on developers and application creation. According to official data as of mid-September, just after Vitalik announced the use of Farcaster, Farcaster has a total of over 20,000 users and over 3.8 million historical messages on hubs, and has started filtering out spam messages after migrating to Optimism to open up to more users. Although there is no news about Farcaster’s airdrop plans, Farcaster has already included the FIP governance module as an important part of the protocol, which is still worth experiencing and interacting for users.

Reference

https://www.youtube.com/@farcasterxyz/videos

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