Author: katiewav, crypto KOL; Translation: golden finance xiaozou
FarCon, held in California from May 1 to 5, 2024, was like a storm of excitement and optimism. The atmosphere was exciting, and it felt magical that all expenses were paid entirely on-chain. I was also blown away by the quality of the projects I had the opportunity to review at FarHack. It was clear that talented developers of all types - from Farcaster native founders to freelance developers to media enthusiasts - were eager to build on Farcaster, and this excitement is contagious and cannot be underestimated.
A more subtle point, however, is that I think many people left FarCon with more questions than answers. Throughout the weekend, we discussed many familiar ideas and concepts, frustratingly repeated over and over again. There’s also a contentious question hanging over our heads: Can a truly decentralized, positive-sum social network exist with a single team (with the best of intentions) at the helm? I’d like to share some of my own initial thoughts here — from the most commonly discussed questions I’ve heard, to questions I’m interested in from the Farcaster community, to my own general framework for thinking about consumer crypto. 1. Is the infrastructure ready? Personally, I don’t think the infrastructure is ready for mainstream consumer adoption. Despite all the conversations we’ve had about L2 and L3, these chains remain challenging to use. Whenever I’ve used L2 or L3, it’s been pretty difficult to check the status of a transaction on the respective chain — for example, LP ENJOY tokens on Zora are still very confusing. Signing into the Farcaster client via “Sign-in with Farcaster” is still cumbersome and, frankly, a bit annoying. At Farcon, many people who were excited to buy products on-chain had to wait more than 10 minutes to complete their purchases as they bridged their funds to Base first.
However, lurking behind the excuse that “we have to wait for infrastructure before we can develop applications” is a danger and complacency. A framework that emerged from my discussions with people at FarCon is to think about the development of infrastructure and applications in two phases.
Phase 1: Make infrastructure easier for less technical, less crypto-native, and perhaps more product/vision-oriented people (creatives) to use tools and iterate on application concepts that may attract mainstream consumers. We have made great progress in this regard thanks to the efforts of the Farcaster team, Farcaster native infrastructure teams (such as Neynar), general infrastructure teams such as Stack and Privy, and other developers in the community. Leverage crypto-native users as a testing ground for these MVPs, and iterate over time without critical infrastructure barriers.
Phase 2:Build great applications and product experiences for consumers of all interests, crypto-native levels, and backgrounds.
I think we’re at the end of phase 1. We’ve made amazing progress on infrastructure over the past few years, from working with companies like Privy to build embedded wallets, to lowering costs with L2/L3, to working with companies like Decent to optimize bridges and chain abstraction, to seamless withdrawal solutions like Ansible, and the build of the Farcaster protocol itself, which was a feat of complex network engineering. There’s still a lot of work to do to further improve the user experience, but we’re finally at a point where we can do this in parallel with rapid application development and experimentation.
2、The Future of FarcasterClients
During FarCon there was a lot of discussion and debate about the future of clients, as the Farcaster team may be incentivized to maintain Warpcast as the primary client, and most clients will only be auxiliary to Warpcast, or even quickly swallowed up.
In my opinion, this is a meaningful core discussion given the form of clients to date - most clients are some form of rebranding or partial cut of the global Warpcast feed. To me, most of the potential client concepts I have heard of stay in this narrow range. My sense is that this homogeneity comes from a core desire to attract and siphon Farcaster's valuable social graph away from Warpcast, while paying much less attention to other fundamental elements of Farcaster (the Farcaster protocol and its data architecture).
In the past I have talked to Archetype Research Advisor Andrew Hong and a few teams trying to build social networks, and I realize that the ability to leverage data structures designed for social graph modularity and a p2p network out of the box is a game changer for application developers. I would love to see clients that go beyond supporting existing Warpcast users to offering entirely new experiences or features that might not make sense on a Twitter-like interface like Warpcast, or that appeal to users who might not be interested in crypto (which is the primary user base for Warpcast). Also, at a high level, I think consumer-facing interfaces that try to do everything don't actually do anything - "There is no super app, I love you." channels are a smart effort in that direction, and topic-specific Warpcast channels can do a better job of telling specific communities what a more niche, differentiated client looks like, and allow those clients to emerge more naturally.
The above points to the previous point that the infrastructure/login mechanisms have not yet reached a state where they fully abstract Farcaster/Warpcast from the client experience, which could leave us stuck with “meta-functional” clients.
A natural question that arises is: if you want to attract non-Warpcast users, why leverage crypto infrastructure? In an age of abundant information and media (both real and simulated), social curation and coordination are essential. I believe that social products that are fully coordinated by users (rather than monolithic algorithms) can become very powerful, and tokens are a powerful mechanism to facilitate such coordination.
One particularly curious short-term question I left for FarCon was what the future holds for commerce on Farcaster and commerce-focused infrastructure/clients. On site, I found multiple teams bringing different commerce experiences to us throughout the conference. This category quickly sparked interest from builders, and I hope to keep an eye on developments in this space over the next few months.
3Two Frameworks for Consumer Crypto
A common question I hear at FarCon is what I care most about in consumer crypto today and how I view the space from a broader perspective. Now, I roughly break down the consumer crypto space using the following two frameworks:
(1) Ecosystem First
The crypto ecosystem is notorious for tribalism (i.e. Ethereum vs. Solana), and this is also true for the more narrow consumer ecosystem. It is interesting to see Zora, Base, and Farcaster interact as closely connected ecosystems. Transactions based on Zora and Base often rely on Warpcast for distribution and discovery, while Farcaster relies on Zora and Base to provide products, content, and tokens for community participation. I believe that the culture and practices that emerge from these ecosystems, both independently and in relation to each other, will be core to shaping the near-term future of consumer crypto, as builders are often most comfortable building in ecosystems with specific users and excitement.
(2) Use Cases First
The types of use cases/products I’m considering fall into the following categories:
· Bridging off-chain/on-chain user data
· Brand loyalty
· On-chain social
· On-chain media/music
These categories overlap, so I’ll describe the more comprehensive ideas below:
The user’s on-chain and off-chain experience is extremely fragmented. As the lines between the physical and digital worlds blur, the ability to form a truly recognizable, representative identity is disintegrating. The opportunity to create seamlessly blended physical and digital experiences is huge, especially as social graphs move freely online and offline.
For individuals/communities: How can my favorite online channels better connect to the people, groups, and places I interact with offline? And vice versa.
For brands: How can brands better understand how consumers who shop in physical stores spend their time online and engage with them on those platforms?
Now is a critical time to think about the intersection of crypto and media, but I also believe these products will stabilize over a longer timeframe. Traditional media and music are facing an existential crisis and are falling apart in terms of business structure, monetization, and the roles of consumers and artists/critics. I think more broadly, tokens and crypto are powerful tools that can be used to coordinate media networks that are increasingly reliant on user participation, user-generated content, and even user ownership.
Overall, I left FarCon more excited and concerned about its future. There is no doubt that the star teams and early ecosystems have emerged organically and they have laid the foundation. I think it will take a diverse community of developers, creatives, and powerful users to take this ecosystem to the next level, and I am very happy to be a part of it.
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