TL;DR

Recently, the cross-chain interoperability L1 public chain @zetachain’s airdrop has sparked attention in the market for the “chain abstraction” track. What’s more, the adoption rate of the decentralized social protocol Farcaster has recently surged. Since the launch of the “Frames” feature on January 30th, Farcaster’s daily active users (DAU) have increased by 214% and reached a new all-time high yesterday. Data shows that the Farcaster-based client, Warpcast, ranks 38th in the social category of the APP Store in the United States, surpassing WeChat.

Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster, posted a message early this morning stating that due to a significant traffic peak from certain countries/regions, the performance of Warpcast will decline for at least the next few hours. The team is working hard to restore stability. Many people still don’t understand what Farcaster is, so this article gives you an overview of the decentralized social protocol Farcaster.

Farcaster is a P2P off-chain network based on the OP mainnet, without centralized servers. Farcaster is not only an alternative to Twitter but also provides support for a large number of apps.

A decentralized social protocol allows users to own their data, messages are not censored, and applications can be built on top of the protocol without permission. Unlike other social media applications, decentralized social protocols do not collapse and do not rely on any centralized entity.

The Farcaster protocol has the following functions:

• Create an account via on-chain registration
• Allow accounts to post and respond to messages
• Allow accounts to follow each other
• Process storage rent for accounts
• Issue keys for accounts
• Build Frames

(Note: Frames is a new feature introduced by Farcaster that can transform any content published on Farcaster into interactive applications. For more information, please read: A Quick Look at Farcaster’s New Feature Frames: Transforming Any Post into an Interactive Application to Ignite Web3 Social)

Among these functionalities, Farcaster nodes are only responsible for handling user operations, including storing user data, sending messages (such as forwarding posts), and following other users. To minimize costs and improve efficiency, Farcaster only publishes critical operations on-chain, such as creating accounts, minting NFTs, and adding account keys.

Each Farcaster account is associated with one or more usernames. Users can use their existing ENS names on attached wallets or use off-chain ENS names controlled by Farcaster.

Additionally, external applications can connect to Farcaster and provide users with a variety of new features. The most popular applications include:

• slokhbot: accounts for 74.3% of the App market share (no information yet)
• farcord: 9.3% of App market share (similar to Discord)
• Aburra: 4.65% of App market share (music social application)

There are 5 message types in Farcaster:

Cast: a message created by the user (similar to tweets or Reddit posts). When a user “tweets” in Warpcast, they are actually creating a Cast message. When a user responds to a Cast, they are sending a response message to the protocol.

One of the biggest differences between Farcaster and ordinary social applications is the concept of storage.

On other social apps, users can post an almost unlimited amount of content for free. On Farcaster, users need to rent storage units to send more messages to the protocol.

It may sound counterintuitive at first, but its main purpose is to stop spam and reduce state bloat within the protocol. Farcaster prevents this from happening by forcing everyone to pay for storage in the protocol.

Warpcast, which has been recently active, is a client built on top of Farcaster. Warpcast is an application similar in style to Twitter, and many people confuse Farcaster with Warpcast.

Warpcast is one of several applications built on the Farcaster ecosystem and is also the first and still the most popular application.

Warpcast itself has a centralized server, which is why Warpcast occasionally goes down. Warpcast’s outage will not affect Farcaster itself.

The recent attention on Warpcast is related to the popularity of MEMEs posted on it, with many posts being about the launch and promotion of MEME tokens, most of which are created on the Base protocol. For example, tokens like Degen, FAR, SPAM, CAST, etc. were all first launched as MEMEs on Warpcast, with Degen in particular attracting a lot of attention due to its wealth effect. It can be said that MEME tokens have become the fuel for Warpcast and Farcaster.

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