I am sure some of you may have heard about Farcaster, for those of you who have not, you can think of Farcaster as a protocol for building new types of social networks created by the community. It was founded by Dan Romero and Varu Srinivasan in 2020. The protocol allows users to control their data and developers to build apps without permission.
You can think of it as Hive, but using EVM architecture and running on Optimism blockchain which is part of The Superchain, a vision of a composable, unified network of blockchains that can support internet-level activity, powered by the MIT-licensed open source OP Stack.
Farcaster was launched last year and its most used application is Warpcast, a Twitter-like platform for writing posts (called "casts"), following other users, and liking or sharing ("recasting") those users' posts.
Farcaster shares its main selling points with other decentralized social media protocols: the lack of censorship, control over first-party data, and seamless account interoperability across all applications built on the network. This is opposed to the lack of interconnectivity between Twitter and Instagram accounts.
One element that particularly distinguishes Farcaster from other social media protocols is the network's emphasis on eliminating bot activity. To register, users must pay a $5 registration fee, intended to prevent the creation of spam accounts. Additionally, users can only publish a limited number of "casts" to Farcaster apps, which are tied to packages called storage units.
What are Farcaster frames?
Launched on January 26, Frames are a new feature from Farcaster that allows users to perform a number of functions, both on-chain and off-chain, within Farcaster applications, without going out to a third party.
For example, in Warpcast, users browsing a broadcast feed can now click on a Frame posted by someone they follow and perform a variety of functions, including creating NFTs, browsing an art gallery, playing games, signing up for newsletters, and making online purchases, all while staying in your feed.
You can read all about frames in this link and watch this video.
Farcaster in numbers
You can take a look at Farcaster analytics on its Dune Dashboard. Here's a screenshot of how it looks and appreciate the volume increase after frames were launched in January this year.
It will be interesting to see how the protocol evolves but it is a clear example of how decentralized social media may be one of the big topics during this crypto cycle.