Farcaster Why is the community’s response mediocre despite Vitalik’s praise and a16z’s investment?

Why is the community's response mediocre despite Vitalik's praise and a16z's investment?

Although social protocols may inherently have a “three-day fire” constitution, why didn’t Farcaster, funded by a16z, cause a large-scale discussion and adoption in the community, according to Vitalik?

Author: bayemon.eth, ChainCatcher

This summer, Friend.tech became popular overnight. A pair of blue bunny ears quickly landed on the front page headlines of major media outlets. Community users rushed to join the Friend.tech family, and the question “Who has a Friend.tech invitation code” repeatedly appeared in various communities. With Layer2 newcomer Base as a guarantee and top institutions LianGuairadigm participating in seed round investment, in a general sense, Friend.tech’s “prosperity and wealth” was preserved.

However, from a data perspective, Friend.tech, with excellent innate conditions, seems to have not escaped the curse of the “three-minute heat” of Web3 social. After the announcement of LianGuairadigm’s investment, the highest daily trading volume reached 539,800, but yesterday it was only 124,000. But Friend.tech’s sudden popularity has also redirected many people’s attention to the long-neglected social track.

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There are more social applications with big institutional support than just Friend.tech. As early as July last year, the decentralized social protocol Farcaster received a $30 million financing led by a16z. In addition, Vitalik has expressed his interest in decentralized social media in recent conversations with Bankless, and bluntly said that “Farcaster is actually very successful.” In addition, Farcaster’s founder, Dan Romero, was a former Coinbase executive, and to some extent, the founding team also has a “Web3 big factory background.”

However, according to Dune data, Farcaster has only 24,202 registrations and only 13,655 daily interactions. With only a five-digit number of registrations and interactions, it is obviously unable to compare with the viral spread of Friend.tech or even the recent Tip Coin. Although social protocols may inherently have a “three-day fire” constitution, why didn’t Farcaster, funded by a16z, cause a large-scale discussion and adoption in the community, according to Vitalik?

The technological barrier brought by being a “protocol”

In Binance’s “Web3 Social: Road to Mass Adoption” report released in December 2022, the Web3 social ecosystem is divided into four categories: infrastructure, middleware, applications, and tools. Although the article starts by comparing Friend.tech and Farcaster, Farcaster Protocol, as a protocol, is fundamentally different from the application-type Friend.tech.

The so-called protocol is actually a set of logically determined rules used for data querying, organizing, and displaying, serving as an intermediary between blockchain infrastructure and applications. Through this set of logic, users at the application layer can communicate without considering the differences in internal processes, data structures, and program designs. Simply put, the existence of protocols allows people building the Tower of Babel to communicate barrier-free using the “same language.” Farcaster creates an intermediate layer that allows developers to create dApps without permission and allows users to freely migrate digital identities and social graphs among many dApps. As most of the innovations in Web3 are built within the existing ecosystem, protocols are particularly important for both infrastructure and applications. This is probably why Vitalik is particularly optimistic about protocols like Farcaster and Lens.

That being said, since protocols in the Web3 social ecosystem are like the “universal language of the world,” why hasn’t Farcaster received the attention of the majority of people? Taking the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) as a comparison, even though it is an OG protocol that has been almost ubiquitous for 40 years, the vast majority of users do not understand or even care about the principles of network data transmission because, in the eyes of ordinary users, the so-called principles only need to be concerned by developers and network engineers. A seemingly “omnipotent” protocol can easily create the illusion of “boiling the ocean,” making ordinary users or even amateur players who have little knowledge feel intimidated.

Furthermore, as social protocols, the biggest difference between Farcaster and Lens Protocol is that Lens Protocol stores all information on the Polygon network, while Farcaster adopts an off-chain solution, meaning that only the most important basic information such as accounts, storage, and keys are stored on Ethereum, while the authentication, registration, and other related information that requires frequent operations are stored off-chain in Farcaster Hubs. This also means that Hubs need to store replicas of all node data and update them in real-time based on protocol activities, so disk storage will increase the operating costs of Hubs and also have relatively high requirements for devices. Although the Farcaster team has stated that they are seeking solutions to address storage and bandwidth issues and reduce Hubs’ costs, until these problems are resolved, the relatively high participation costs of Farcaster have discouraged a small number of “enthusiastic citizens.”

To some extent, as a social protocol, Farcaster’s target audience is much smaller compared to social applications like Friend.tech, which fundamentally does not generate excessively enthusiastic fan-based economic effects.

To be crypto-native or not

Temporarily stepping out of the circle of protocols and focusing on applications, Warpcast, a social application built on Farcaster, has a frontend page similar to Twitter and can also perform functions such as posting, replying, and commenting. In addition, it can also link wallets, track on-chain activities, and showcase NFTs, and other crypto-native behaviors. Although the appearance is similar and the functionalities are similar, Warpcast and Twitter only resemble each other at the level of “looking alike,” with no connection or interaction between them. On the other hand, Friend.tech and Tip Coin clearly started with the intention of relying on Twitter for traffic — Friend.tech invited major Twitter KOLs to join in the early stages, while Tip Coin was even more straightforward, allowing users to exchange project tokens simply by tagging their tweets. It can be said that Friend.tech and Tip Coin gained popularity due to their “simple operations” and, to some extent, they are users’ direct monetization relying on Web2 social networks. The only connection between them and Web3 is the tokens, without any new crypto-native concepts and operations.

On the other hand, dApps like Warpcast built on top of Farcaster initially target crypto-native users, which means that the social graph built on top of Farcaster needs to be constructed from scratch by users. Currently, Web3 social networks cannot be as comprehensive as Web2 networks. In addition, users who are not familiar with encryption technology will need more time to understand the concept of fully shared social graph with third parties and accept that the control of data will belong to developers and not be subject to the user’s supervision, as in the “decentralized” nature.

Although Farcaster is a more authentic Web3 social protocol, the cost of rebuilding the social graph based on it is not negligible until the concept of Web3 is widely recognized and Web3 social truly achieves “ubiquity”. However, in the long run, Farcaster, as a protocol layer play, is much more interesting than “mandatory” social applications such as Friend.tech and Tip Coin, which “force” the conversion from I to E for airdrops. In the further future of the entire Web3 social ecology, people will see the value increment brought by Farcast to the social graph through long-term accumulation.

With the embrace of Optimism, can Farcaster change its fate?

In August of this year, Farcaster chose to migrate the Farcaster identity and storage contract to the OP Mainnet and launched permissionless registration. On the one hand, permissionless registration replaces the previous invitation model, which is highly likely to increase the number of Farcaster registrations and usage. Choosing a Layer2 network with nearly 5 times the TPS is indeed an effective way to hedge against subsequent throughput risks.

In addition, Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster, directly pointed out that the “most active users and developers” are using Optimism or other OP Stack networks (such as Base). If most social applications monetize users’ social networks, then social protocols like Farcaster monetize the energy of the community developers. This easily explains why Farcaster chose OP in the vast Layer2 sea. For protocols that rely on developers to create diversity in social ecology, the superchain kingdom that quickly established itself after the release of OP Stack is indeed too tempting. Farcaster, which actively approaches the source of power, also seems to be announcing that the team has put large-scale adoption of the protocol on the agenda.

Currently, Farcaster is still in the testing phase, and users can submit a waiting list for now. However, recently, Farcaster has gradually opened registration to some eligible users (donors, holders of some NFTs on the Ethereum chain, etc.). This week, Farcaster will further achieve permissionless registration and will be open to more users.

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