What is Farcaster? Everything you need to know
The cryptocurrency industry is in a constant state of development and improvement, with various protocols coming into the limelight on a regular basis.
However, Farcaster is a. Hot topic among crypto enthusiasts.
The first quarter of 2024 saw an influx of new users to the protocol, as the popularity of applications built on it rapidly increased.
The following guide takes a closer look at what Farcaster is and some of the more popular apps built on top of it. We also look at how to sign up for Warpcast, the decentralized version of X.
What is Farcaster?
First of all, Farcaster is a protocol for developing decentralized social networking applications built on optimism.
Optimism (OP) is Ethereum’s layer two scaling solution. We have a dedicated guide on the subject which you can find here:
What is Optimism (OP): A Guide to One of Ethereum’s Layer Two Scaling Solutions
In essence, the Farcaster protocol is completely open source, allowing anyone to develop applications. The goal, as with all things decentralized, is to provide an environment where there is no censorship and users have full control over their audience, interactions, and information.
Interestingly, Farcaster was co-founded by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan in 2020. Before starting the project, both worked at Coinbase, the largest US-based cryptocurrency exchange. In January 2023, the project received a seed round investment of an undisclosed amount.
Key Elements of Farcaster: How Does It Work?
First, Farcaster uses hybrid architecture to ensure that information about user identity is stored on-chain, while data about interactions and posts is stored off-chain.
The system itself is protected by smart contracts running on the Optimism network, as expected.
Without going too much into technical details, users can think of it as a Twitter alternative that runs on blockchain and maintains control over their data.
The most popular application built on Farcaster, to which the official website directly refers, is called Warpcast; This is a Farcaster client for iOS and Android users. There is no support for macOS or Windows.
Let’s take a look at what warpcast is like.
How to Use Warpcast?
As mentioned above, Warpcast is the most popular client on Farcaster and is only available for iOS and Android. Using it on your Mac is unlikely to work either, as there’s no support yet. In other words, desktop is out of the question; At least naturally.
Signing up with your phone is pretty simple, however, you’ll need to record a starting phrase and keep it safe; This will allow you to recover your account or transfer it to another device. This is also the key to your account; keep your seed phrase safe = keep your account safe.
A very important point to note is that Warpcast is not free to use. The team decided that perhaps charging was necessary to prevent bots. There is a $5 annual fee that you must pay.
Sending messages (broadcasts) is also not free. The application uses a storage system for which users must pay certain fees.
The explanation for this is this:
When you sign, you get enough storage for:
- 5,000 publications (posts)
- 2,500 reactions
- 2,500 follows
One unit costs $0.75 per month, two units costs $1 per month. The good thing is that there is a lot of activity on the chain, but the end user doesn’t get into it much; Farcaster handles this on the backend.
The feed looks like this:
It’s quite similar to X’s. And yes, Vitalik Buterin is on Warpcast; so do many other popular crypto personalities.
All in all, the experience is pretty similar to Twitter’s (X) experience, which is perhaps what the team was going for. The features seem comparable, but still Warpcast adds all on-chain capabilities.
Users can link an address to verify ownership of certain assets, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Given the huge increase in daily active users at the beginning of February 2024, it is interesting to see whether interest in Farcaster will continue.
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