Original Title: "Farcaster Releases V3 and Goes Live on OP Mainnet"

Source: Debox Institute

Introduction

Farcaster founder Dan Romero launched the Farcaster waitlist application form on September 1st, allowing users to fill out the form to experience the Farcaster ecosystem in advance. As a star project in the social graph, Farcaster announced in July 2022 that it had completed a $30 million seed round of financing led by A16z. Other social protocol projects with large-scale financing include Lens Protocol and Cyberconnect, which recently launched its own cryptocurrency. However, based on the recent price performance of Lens Protocol Profiles (NFT) and $Cyber, it seems that the social track is not favored by market funds. At this time, Farcaster has launched a registration form for the waitlist, so let's see if the official launch of Farcaster can ignite enthusiasm in the social track.

Farcaster Development Updates

The goal of Farcaster is to create a decentralized social network. Its founder, Dan Romero, is a former executive at Coinbase. He has emphasized that Farcaster is a trusted decentralized social protocol that allows users and audiences to establish direct connections, while developers can use this protocol to build any client or program.

In the latest development update, Farcaster has migrated its identity and storage contracts from the Ethereum mainnet to the Optimism mainnet, and has announced the technical architecture of Farcaster v3. The main reason for Farcaster's migration to Optimism is that founder Dan Romero believes that there are currently the most active developers and users based on Optimism and the OP stack (OP Superchain). My personal guess is that this may be due to Coinbase's strong support for OPstack, which has prompted Coinbase's related developers to focus on OPstack, including some developers on Farcaster. As a former executive of Coinbase, Dan Romero naturally wants to go with the flow, after all, they used to be "one family".

Farcaster v3 Technical Architecture

From the technical architecture of Farcaster v3, we can see that most of Farcaster's ecosystem is offchain, which means off-chain applications, while the on-chain part only includes DID (FID account, ENS) and storage signature contracts. It can be said that the on-chain construction is streamlined to the extreme. In fact, more off-chain applications can reduce the development cost and user interaction threshold of the Farcaster ecosystem, and less on-chain interaction also greatly reduces the user's social cost and on-chain data redundancy. Users only need to do necessary interactions. The Farcaster protocol itself serves as a decentralized communication hub that connects off-chain and on-chain, and this architecture actually "modularizes" the social protocol, making the protocol itself more lightweight.

Farcaster is a mode that is almost completely different from the Lens protocol. Users who have used Lens know that most of the data in the Lens ecosystem needs to be put on the chain, which is a significant cost for both users and project ecosystems. Lens itself is also created by the star team Aave, and I am personally very excited to see which mode will be more suitable for web3 and become a true "web3 social giant".

Farcaster User Activity

Farcaster (Wrapcast) user activity data

The official client of Farcaster is Wrapcast, which has a UI and interaction experience similar to Twitter. Currently, it is still in the beta testing phase. According to Wrapcast's data, there are about 20,000 registered users of Farcaster, with around 5,500 monthly active users. According to the founder's disclosure of Farcaster's daily active users, it has recently reached around 2,500, which is about twice the growth in the first half of 2023.

Farcaster Daily Active Users (as of August 29, 2023)

It is worth mentioning that early users of Farcaster seem to be mostly developers, which has led to a stronger "Builder" culture and more value-oriented social content. Unlike some social protocols that capture users' "airdrop" expectations and use them to manipulate data without any social value, Farcaster's social content is more focused on value.  In fact, an excellent community or social platform culture can indeed attract more excellent users to join. For example, the well-known V God often posts updates on Farcaster, with a much higher frequency than on Twitter, and often discusses EVM development-related issues with others on Farcaster, making him a heavy user of Farcaster. To be honest, for a web3 social platform, being able to get the high participation of Ethereum founder V God is like being treated as a "favorite son".

V God's social media activity frequency (left image Twitter updates rarely, right image Farcaster is often active).

Farcaster Ecosystem Introduction

Farcaster client app application

Although the current number of registered users for Farcaster is only about 20,000, its ecosystem applications are currently quite diverse, mainly divided into two categories: with and without clients. Most of these ecosystems are based on Farcaster's official client application, warpcast, for expansion and development. If you want to experience it, you need to obtain Farcaster's internal testing qualifications.  Currently, Farcaster has opened a waiting list for registration. Friends who want to experience the Farcaster ecosystem can scan the QR code below to register and wait for official approval.

Farcaster registration waiting list (source: founder Dan Romero's tweet)

If the registration is successful, here are a few high-quality ecological projects of Farcaster that we would like to briefly introduce to everyone. You can give them a try.

Warpcast

Warpcast is the official client of Farcaster. Its overall usage habits are almost identical to Twitter, except that it adds some web3-related topic tags and on-chain hot data tracking.

Yup

Yup is a social content aggregator that can link Lens, Twitter, Farcaster, and bluesky into one app. You can publish content to multiple linked platforms at once and receive social push notifications from multiple linked platforms. This app is really user-friendly for social users, reducing social repetition for users.

Alphacaster

Alphacaster is a DAO community voting governance tool, which is divided into two categories: DAOs and NFTs. The community is classified based on the type of user wallet assets, and only those who hold specified assets can speak in the corresponding community.

Additionally, there are Farcaster ecosystem launch applications such as launchcaster and task platform farquest, among others.

Conclusion

As the underlying decentralized communication protocol, Farcaster allows any developer to develop and expand applications based on Farcaster. The Farcaster team has also written a "step by step" development tutorial on the homepage of the official website to facilitate developers to quickly get started. Will Farcaster, with such a strong "developer culture", bring new stories to web3 social networking? Everyone is watching with bated breath.

Original Link

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