Borges, with his words, created an incredibly magical Library of Babel, where you can find all completed books, reminiscent of what we might envision as the ultimate form of Arweave. However, in his self-narrative, he mentioned that the very elements making the library astonishing also render it terrifying: despite countless miracles, the labyrinth exudes a sense of confinement and decay.

Chris Dixon, in Why Web3 Matters, stated that the development of centralized platforms follows a predictable lifecycle, where, upon reaching the top of the S-curve, their relationships with users and third-party partners gradually become zero-sum, stifling their own innovation and vitality. Much like the endless walls in the library, the massive scale of centralized platforms is both an irreplaceable treasure and a source of fear due to the surrounding stagnation.

Over the past few years, we have persistently argued for the importance of decentralization, the essential need for decentralized social products, and the stark differences between owning our data versus handing it over to large corporations. Yet, in the face of significant user inertia and established network effects, the promise of decentralization seems powerless and futile, as we struggle to overcome the scaling disadvantages of Web3.

It's just hard to imagine a library without walls

Farcaster with 2x leverages.

But recently, Farcaster's performance has been as delightful as the auroras in Seattle. It seems to have captured the essence of Chris Dixon's belief that Web3 will win: winning the hearts of entrepreneurs and developers.

As of 11 June, Farcaster protocol has nearly 500,000 registered addresses, with the Warpcast client handling most of the traffic. Additionally, Farcaster's daily active users recently exceeded 50,000, with nearly 1 million posts sent per day. There are over 20 clients in development, and the total protocol revenue has reached $1.7 million.

Beyond its impressive data performance, Farcaster's social experience is also remarkable. The community's top meme coin, $DEGEN, not only boasts an impressive thousand-fold increase but has also deeply integrated with Warpcast, creating a rich application scenario. Now, through "Actions," you can even tip your favorite casts with showering $DEGENs. From a meme coin to an ecosystem, $DEGEN has shown us the ambition of a meme to build something. Playing the "attentionomics" of memes is the first leverage Farcaster has added for the social experience.

Moreover, "Frames" are similar to embedded mini-programs, “lets you turn any cast into an interactive app,“ and bring more possibilities to all ecosystem participants. Builders can use Frames to migrate the core experience of existing products into the Warpcast app for foundational user education or to find an excellent experimental environment for their MVP ideas. High-quality communities often provide the most candid feedback and sincere encouragement. In this attention-scarce market, such feedback is crucial for any project or team still exploring the optimal product-market fit.

For users, Frames makes the social experience filled with open-ended fun. You can mint NFTs, play games, view your onchain data, and more all in one place through Frames. Users focus on social interactions and content as their main tasks, with the various fun components carried by Frames serving as side tasks. This enriches and adds dimension to Farcaster's vision of an infinite social game.

For Farcaster, the Frame stack is also smartly leveraged for community growth and diversity. Lightweight yet effective, it taps into the community's abundant wisdom, imagination, and development capability. In an excellent community, pushing the first domino can naturally lead to ecosystem emergence. In hindsight, the long period of community accumulation before opening registrations was a crucial step, and the team's patience proved significant.

Liron Shapira, in his tweet questioning Farcaster's latest $1 billion valuation, raised concerns about Frames lacking standout use cases. This sounds like a narrow perspective, and it reveals that the critic may lack the tolerance and curiosity that most Web3 users possess. A feature's value is not solely determined by its permanent retention. On the contrary, a small Frame can fully mobilize the vitality and creativity of different ecosystem participants, at this stage, which is precisely its commendable aspect. We can now observe what kind of fruits Frames will bear.

Diversity matters most.

It is worth mentioning the richness of the Warpcast community and its content. Among the top 20 most popular channels, Web3 and non-Web3 topics are equally represented. This means that, apart from crypto and earning-related content, these crypto natives are also keen to showcase other aspects of their lives on Farcaster. Opening channels like /Food or /Classical reveal rich insights into food and music, while /Founders displays solid experiences and reflections from entrepreneurs at different stages of their journeys.

Diversity of content is an important buffer zone for Web3 social products. Users, as vibrant and specific individuals, unfold themselves, their lifestyle and preferences, and the network effects they accumulate, which can effectively offset some of the risks hidden beneath financialized gameplay. We have witnessed too many rapid decays like Friend.tech; this time, we can hope for a different direction.

Currently, more than 3,000 people have earned the Power Badge. This small purple lightning badge next to the username is a reward for sincere and active users. If you want your content to receive effective exposure and feedback, earning a Power Badge is a great strategy, requiring you to spend time building your connections, quality casts, and contributing to the ecosystem. This centralized incentive method has also caused some discontent, and we can observe how the team and community will iterate on thescheme in the future.

The attention-grabbing and wealth effects of meme coins, and diverse UGC content, combined with the infinite Lego of Frames and Actions, are attracting more developers, builders, and content creators to participate in building Farcaster together. This ecological emergence is an exciting signal, showing that Farcaster's network effects have begun to manifest. It seems since opening registration last October, Farcaster has successfully initiated its growth flywheel.

With the increase in user scale, Farcaster also faces new challenges, such as declining content quality, and difficulty for high-quality new users to gain attention. The team is currently solving these issues gradually. A community with positive feedback loops makes iteration efficiency unprecedentedly high, and amidst various opinions, prioritizing problem-solving becomes crucial. As Dan Romero mentioned in the /Founders channel: solving problems in the correct order is critical to compound progress.

Closing Thoughts

Let’s echo Liron Shapira's core question: how can a Web3 social protocol with only 50-5000 daily active users achieve a valuation of $1 billion? The authenticity of the DAU and the rationality of the valuation indeed have space for discussion. However, I would like to quote jtgi, an active developer who created the channel-management bot automod: "Data is context-poor, customers are context-rich." Is it that important for us whether there are 5,000 or 500,000 daily active users? What matters is the feeling we get from the Farcaster community, as Jesse Walden described in Investing in Farcaster:

"The Farcaster community feels like a microcosm of the early crypto community I (Jesse) got involved with about a decade ago: optimistic, technical, ambitious, collaborative, always online."

All of this makes me believe even more that the prosperity of Farcaster will not be as fleeting as the aurora.

Based on the expectation above, our Metopia team is actively experimenting with Farcaster ecosystem. Starting from our existing credentialing system built on Base, we have launched a series of Metopia Attestation frames. Through those embedded programs, Farcaster users can track and showcase their onchain history contributions to Base ecosystem with one click, such as the total number of interacted contracts and total gas spent. Developers can then use these attestations, centered on onchain data, to establish filtering or tiered incentive mechanisms in their own products.

We eagerly await your genuine feedback on our frames, or any ideas to build on top.

https://warpcast.com/metopia/0xc4475efc

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About Metopia

Metopia is an onchain reputation platform built on Base, providing upgradable attestations for users to capture their onchain achievements & opportunities.

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Author: Finale