Author: 0xLuo, Mirror
2024 is a very important year for Farcaster. According to the data, the number of users has increased from less than 50,000 at the beginning of the year to about 750,000 today, and the daily active users have increased from less than 2,000 at the beginning of the year to a peak of about 70,000 in July, and now remain at about 40,000. Although the current size is still small, Farcaster has obviously received more attention than last year.
Farcaster daily active changes in 2024
One of the important reasons for such huge growth is that Farcaster, as a crypto-native social network, is already an important Social Layer for some public chains (especially the Base chain), and can also be regarded as an economy, AKA Farconomy. Assets born from projects in the Farcaster community or issued through the Launchpad on Farcaster have gained a certain amount of market attention. The trading volume of mainstream tokens related to Farcaster reached about US$1 billion in April and November, of which the majority were $DEGEN, which was born at the beginning of the year, and CLANKER, an ecological token at the end of the year.
The first wave of Farcaster’s growth in late January and early February this year may be the interaction between the emergence of the community memecoin $DEGEN and the launch of the Frames function. The wealth effect of the $DEGEN airdrop attracted many people. For a long time, the number of posts on Farcaster resonated with the price trend of $DEGEN. $DEGEN first started the craze of Farcaster community reward tokens. As tpan said, the on-chain reward model started by $DEGEN is an effective growth strategy, which to a certain extent encourages users to create high-quality content and actively participate in community interactions.
Subsequently, there were other reward tokens on Base, such as HAM ($TN100X), $FARTHER, $BUILD (Nominating as tipping), $MASKS, $WILD, and Zora $ENJOY and $IMAGEINE on the chain, and $REGEN on the Optimism chain. Lijin described these as scene memecoins, that is, they are used as application scenarios through certain community rules, which have also become a special creator incentive model on Farcaster to a certain extent.
However, most reward tokens have gradually declined due to the lack of actual value and application scenarios of the tokens. As the pioneer and leader, $DEGEN has more application scenarios than other reward tokens. Many projects made by developers in the Farcaster ecosystem have tried to introduce $DEGEN in their own projects. $DEGEN has almost become the circulating currency of Farcaster ecological applications for a period of time. At the same time, the Degen L3 based on Base L2 was launched at the end of March to maximize the utility of a memecoin. This may also be the reason why the hot money pouring into Base pushed $DEGEN to ATH at the end of March.
$DEGEN is closely integrated with Farcaster ecological applications, which is a win-win situation. For these ecological projects, Farcaster's open framework and composability provide the valuable on-chain social graph required for the cold start of applications from the technical point of view, and quickly acquire customers. Scene memecoins represented by $DEGEN can play the role of Farcaster ecological native circulation currency to provide asset liquidity required for the cold start of applications. For $DEGEN, these projects provide token utility, have practical application scenarios, and even passive lock-up. Therefore, it can capture a certain amount of attention for a period of time, for example:
Tip with $DEGEN: In addition to the basic application scenario of rewarding other users, you can also participate in Perl guessing games, purchase tokens in Mintclub, participate in Degenpad ITO, etc. through rewards.
mint with $DEGEN: Zora and Highlight support the use of $DEGEN to mint NFTs.
Trade with $DEGEN: Drakula, Jam, Braket.Game, Clubcast, AlfaFrens, FarFantasy and other SocialFi applications initially chose $DEGEN as their currency.
Build with $DEGEN: After $DEGEN launched L3, many projects were built directly on Degen L3, giving birth to many applications in the Degen community.
However, the Degen L3 that uses Conduit services has had a rough time. It once stopped producing blocks, which was the darkest moment. During the migration attempt, it and Conduit Faced with disputes, the months-long decline is a huge test for the community and the team. But fortunately, the team has been working actively. $DEGEN has been launched on Coinbase and Binance, and liquidity has expanded from Degen L3 and Base to Ethereum and Arbitrum. Regarding the future of Degen, @jacek mentioned at Tako Community Call #5 that it will continue to incentivize high-quality content and real interactions on Farcaster, and the focus of the next stage of work will be on Degen L3 to attract more developers to build a better "Las Vegas on the chain".
Overall, similar to the fate of Friend.Tech, many SocialFi applications in the Farcaster ecosystem (most of which also use various types of Bonding curve models) have only been popular for a while. On the one hand, the user base is small, especially in the Farcaster ecosystem, compared with the SocialFi application based on the Twitter social graph. On the other hand, the economic model itself is unsustainable, mostly relying on the continuous investment of users and token speculation, lacking sustainable value creation or long-term incentive mechanisms. Therefore, when the heat fades, user participation and transaction volume decline, the project will face the problem of liquidity exhaustion.
But whether it is $DEGEN or the incentive model of the Farcaster ecosystem SocialFi application, these creator incentive schemes, even if most of them have not been able to maintain the heat in the long run, their attempts are worthwhile. As @edisonchen said, the incentive model in social products should be regarded as a game, without the need to pursue a perfect mechanism, and should become a community culture. More incentive models should appear to support different types of social network users and behaviors.
Farcaster's emergence at the beginning of this year has kept it in the crypto market. It also completed a $150 million financing on May 21, and the number of registered people on the same day also reached a new high. It was once considered a new generation of social leader. But after the climax, the very realistic problem is that when the entire crypto market fluctuates, when the reward economy is no longer new, when SocialFi on Farcaster is no longer as hot as Friend Tech, and when there is only a small profit on Farcaster, it seems that everyone has forgotten this place again, and the number of daily active users and new registrations has gradually decreased.
Some people even began to question "The real number of users is bleak, and Farcaster, which has raised 150 million yuan, is a VC setting up a game for LP?". Of course, when he said that Farcaster only had 50 to 5,000 DAU, it was a misunderstanding that the high-quality active users of Power Badger were equivalent to the overall active users. The actual DAU still remained at around 40,000 at the low point, but there must be some water in it, but the trend is indeed declining. Many people have Farcaster accounts, but some are no longer active.
In addition, with a relatively small user base, most projects in the Farcaster ecosystem require the courage and capital to "generate electricity with love". For various reasons, we have seen many projects choose to terminate, start anew or even bid farewell to the Farcaster ecosystem. Projects such as nook (the Farcaster client version, which turned to a client for sharing interests such as books, movies, and music), automod, wildcard, castgame, beearly, buttrfly, etc. have chosen to stop operating. Some Farcaster builders are more focused on Solana and Twitter. For example, @brian announced that unloney moved from Base to Solana and mainly operated on Twitter. @billzh announced that the audio space application aburra would stop updating and launched a new SocialFi application tribe.run on Solana.
As @artlu, who also left Farcaster in August, said, there are several reasons why people leave Farcaster:
Immature technology: The technology is not yet perfect and there are many problems, such as data synchronization problems and network vulnerability.
Closed community: The core community is small in scale, conservative in thinking, and has information cocoons, which are not friendly to outsiders.
Bleak growth prospects: The growth strategy of expecting more interesting content is not attractive and lacks highlights to attract new users.
Limited business opportunities: Projects on Farcaster can only get some leftovers, because the main market has been occupied by the team itself and early joiners.
These criticisms are not unreasonable. After all, data does not lie. One can't help but sigh, is there still hope for Farcaster? Of course, those who are still on Farcaster believe that many things about Farcaster have not changed: the unique community culture, the builders who are still sticking to it, and the rich ecology brought by the open protocol, so even in difficult days, there is still some hope.
The team explained at FarCon that Farcaster's general strategy is to grow with the crypto world, create more comfortable corners, and build more social Lego. In fact, the team has been actively communicating with the community, responding to the opinions of the community to continuously improve or launch some new features, and is committed to moving forward according to the established strategy to increase daily activity.
Growing together with the crypto world means trying to make Farcaster a crypto economy to attract more crypto users;
Creating more comfortable corners means improving Channels and other functions so that different users can experience real social interaction here;
Building more social Lego means improving the protocol layer functions, such as launching Frames, Actions and other functions, upgrading Snapchain, a faster and more scalable storage solution, etc., to enhance the protocol experience and facilitate developers to build various applications on this open and programmable social protocol without permission.
These strategies may not be effective in a short period of time, but in time, they can form a highly sticky community, distinctive infrastructure and upper-layer applications, which will be a catalyst for rapid growth when the time comes.
Farcaster’s on-chain data is stored on the Optimism chain, and Frames also supports Farcaster operates on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Degen, Gnosis, Optimism, Zora and Polygon chains. At the same time, most Farcaster users are bound to crypto wallets (including EVM and Sonala addresses), so Farcaster is naturally a crypto-native social network. Because of this attribute, Farcaster is naturally closely connected with the crypto market and some public chain ecosystems, becoming the social layer of many public chains.
It may be because the founder of Farcaster has a Coinbase background, and there are a large number of early users of the Coinbase ecosystem in the community, so it is natural to get close to Coinbase's own public chain Base. For Farcaster, most of the projects in the Farcaster ecosystem will give priority to the Base chain when issuing assets, thus becoming the hype target on the Base chain. The Base chain can help Farcaster, as a crypto-native social network, grow into a crypto economy, and users of the Base chain can also become potential users of the Farcaster social platform. For the Base chain, most of Farcaster's users are loyal and high-quality Base chain users. In addition, Farcaster can not only be a high-quality Base chain project developer community, but also a backyard for many Base chain projects, conducting community operation interactions, brand promotion, and enhancing community vitality and user stickiness. The synergy between social protocols and public chain ecosystems can grow together and benefit each other.
Today, Farcaster has spread all over the world. Farcaster is a social network, so of course it has social features. Many people who join Farcaster may have found their own cozy coners in various channels and met some friends with similar interests through interaction. This connection has also expanded from Farcaster social media to some Telegram/WeChat groups, and from online to offline. Whether it is Farcon in Los Angeles in May, Farcon Asia in Singapore in September, or Farcaster meetups during various crypto conferences in Hong Kong, Dubai, and Bangkok, you can feel the enthusiasm and friendliness of the Farcaster community.
Doing projects on Farcaster requires the confidence and patience of a long-termist. Fortunately, we can see that there are still a large number of Builders gathered on Farcaster, and even formed a unique Build culture. In addition to North America and Europe, where developers gather, Builders on Farcaster have also spread all over the world, promoting the global adoption of Farcaster. We can see that local developer communities such as Farcaster Builders India (/fbi) have emerged in the Farcaster ecosystem, and many Asian developers have gathered at FarCon Asia. At FarCon, EDCON, and FarHack during Token 2049, Farcaster developers have been creating new things. The Farcaster team also attaches great importance to the opinions of ecosystem builders and users, such as interactions on Farcaster, frequent AMAs, Farcaster Dev Calls every half a month, and Farcaster Dev Days. As a result, we can see that new projects are constantly emerging on Farcaster, and Launchcaster, the former new project release platform, has always been very lively. Even if many of them are attempts that have not gone very far, they have at least paved the way for others.
Farcaster has always said that it is fully decentralized. Identity storage on the chain maintains a certain degree of decentralization, and content storage off the chain has higher performance. In fact, compared with more decentralized social networks (such as Nostr), Farcaster emphasizes that it is more programmable social, that is, it allows users and developers to expand its functions and experience through programming. Farcaster can connect the on-chain graph and the social graph. Developers can use its open database Hub and API to build different clients and a variety of applications without permission to create more social legos.
From open social graph to social reputation system
Recently, the crypto market analysis platform kaito.ai on Twitter has been very popular, and a social reputation system based on the Twitter social graph has also been built. In fact, there are many social reputation protocols in the Farcaster ecosystem. Any developer can build a social reputation system based on Farcaster's open social graph as one of the infrastructures for upper-level applications, which is used for threshold screening, incentive evaluation, content filtering, etc. Representative ones include Power Badge, Openrank, FarSocres, Neynar user score and Talent's Build Score.
Power Badge
Power Badge is a label given by Warpcast to active, interesting, non-spam senders. Although it is no longer displayed on the Warpcast front end, it is still the only social reputation system currently stored in the protocol layer Hub database. Power Badge used to have many application scenarios, including filtering search results on @buoy, filtering comments on Recaster with Priority Mode, creating PowerBadge-gated groups on Warpcast, creating PowerBadge-gated voice chat rooms on FarHouse, and some projects may give priority to Power Badge users when issuing airdrops or whitelists.
@ryya's Power Badge trilogy is the most in-depth article series on Power Badge, in which Unlocking the Power Badge deeply analyzes the factors affecting Power Badge, including activity, quality, affinity, and tags, which may be interdependent and may be dynamically weighted according to other dynamic factors such as DAU, user engagement, and interaction. The positive effects and potential problems of the current Power Badge system are also mentioned in the last article, Balancing the Power Badge. Users with Power Badges can get priority recommendations and higher exposure, which may discourage new users. In addition, the algorithm may be biased and users may try to manipulate the system. In the end, the team no longer displayed Power Badges in Warpcast, and the discussion of related adoption gradually decreased.
Openrank
Openrank aims to solve the credibility problem in social networks through profile reputation scoring. Openrank's ranking strategy is based on two reputation graphs: attention and engagement. The "attention" ranking strategy is calculated only based on the attention relationship between users, in which each attention action is given the same weight; the commonly used "engagement" ranking strategy comprehensively considers multiple interactive behaviors such as likes, replies, reposts, mentions, and attention. Each behavior is given a different weight according to its contribution to trust, so as to measure and inherit trust, thereby forming a comprehensive reputation ranking. (You can view a more in-depth introduction to the OpenRank mechanism in 10. Deep Dive: OpenRank by @rjs and in the article OpenRank: Building Graph Datasets for Contextual Crypto App Feeds by Andrew Hong).
Currently, in the daily reward share distribution of $DEGEN, there are also additional daily shares for the top 5,000 users in Openrank to reward high-quality active users. Openrank has also cooperated with Neynar to launch a personalized information flow "For you" based on Openrank ranking, which can be adopted by some third-party clients. Openrank also cooperates with Once Upon to view on-chain activity recommendations based on Openrank. The Openrank team will also use AI agents to manage Channles members, govern content, and motivate based on Openrank rankings in the future Cura project.
FarScores
FarScores (also known as Social Capital Score/Rank) is a metric developed by the Farcaster data infrastructure Airstack to measure the influence of users in the network. It quantifies the social influence of users by analyzing the downstream impact of user posting, liking, and forwarding content, and each Cast can also calculate Cast Scores based on FarScores to judge the influence of each post. In the article Maximizing Your Social Capital Score on Farcaster by @aaronv.eth, we introduce how to improve FarScoes.
FarScores are used in the guessing game Perl and the SocialFi card game FarFantasy, but most people may know FarScores through Moxie, the Farcaster ecosystem incentive project, which is also the largest application scenario of FarScores. Initially, Moxie airdropped to users based on the size of Cast Scores, and later earned Moxie based on Cast Scores. Ordinary users can also get more Moxie returns by investing in Fan Tokens of KOLs or Channles with high profitability. This incentive model is used to encourage more real and valuable social interactions. You can learn more about how Moxie works in Moxie’s Leap to Base: Elevating the Onchain Social Economy by @kaloh.
Neynar user score
Neynar user score is generated based on the user’s behavior on the platform. The score ranges from 0 to 1 and reflects the credibility of the user as a high-quality user. Users can improve their score by having high-quality interactions with other high-quality users. The score is updated once a week. The vast majority of users have a score in the 0.5-0.6 range, with only more than 27,000 users above 0.7 and only more than 2,500 users above 0.9.
Neynar user score is widely used in the participation threshold of the later Farcaster ecosystem memecoin launchpad, such as @clanker's coin issuance requires a Neynar score greater than 0.5, and participating in the pre-sale of @larrybot's coin issuance requires a Neynar score greater than 0.7.
Talent protocol's Build Score
Talent Protocol is an aggregation layer of social reputation, centered on builders, connecting as many of their on-chain and off-chain (Github, LinkedIn) behaviors as possible to aggregate qualifications, connections and reputation to create a unified open reputation layer. Talent Passport aggregates a variety of reputation data points (Credentials), including identity (ENS, Gitcoin Passport, Farcaster account, etc.), activity (active users of different chains, Social Capital Rank representing Farcaster activity, etc.), and skills (on-chain development records, hackathon activity records, etc.), and comprehensively calculates a dynamic Builder Score, which represents the user's reputation level as an on-chain Builder.
The first application of Builder Score that was well known may be the Talent team's previous Builder airdrop incentive project BUILD, where part of the daily nomination score is linked to your Builder Score. At present, Talent's Build Score has also been adopted by many applications, such as Basenames, Etherscan, icebreaker, Web3.bio, etc., and is expected to play a role in unsecured lending in the future.
From diversified clients to a comprehensive application ecosystem
Farcaster is an open social protocol, so naturally many developers build client applications based on it. However, it is not easy to "build your own client" and carve out a path outside of warpcast. Many clients "collapsed halfway through their business", such as many early clients Discove and Jam (early versions were ordinary clients) have already transformed. This year, many clients have also announced that they will stop updating, such as @slokh's flink and nook, and wildcard, a client with its own token economics, and buttrfly also chose to shut down at the end of the year. But there are still clients that have found their own niche, a certain degree of PMF, and are relatively tenacious. For example:
Social aggregation clients for multiple social networks, @fireflyapp, @yup, @phaverapp.
@woj's @super, which has many convenient functions, is actively exploring anonymous publishing, AI pets and other functions, and the subscription system guarantees a certain income.
@haole's @recaster-fc, which updates and iterates very quickly according to user needs, and actively integrates Moxie, Clanker data dashboards and other user-friendly functions.
@farquest, which is also actively exploring memecoins trading and other functions outside the client.
The former mirror team's @kiosk, which integrates Farcaster social information flow and NFT information flow.
@herocast of @hellno.eth, focusing on team collaboration, multiple accounts and user growth.
In addition, there are some special clients based on their own original websites that integrate Farcaster or vertical fields.
@blockbeatsasia.eth: The first news media platform to integrate Farcaster to build a community.
Takocast: Based on Farcaster's main theme of "High tech, High life", it gathers special communities of human frontier groups who are keen on scientific exploration and the pursuit of personal sovereignty.
@telcaster: Farcaster client based on Telegram Mini-app.
Outside the client, there are endless diversified applications built on the Farcaster open protocol, such as short videos @drakula, long videos and live videos @streamm, picture sharing @moshicam, @rodeodotclub, prediction markets @swaye, /limitless, on-chain information tracking and direct copy transactions @interface, /castmoney, group chat and transactions /frens, memecoins transactions @bolide...
Of course there are many more that I haven't mentioned, scattered among my casts in the past year. @sebastianlehrer once made a relatively rich Farcaster Ecosystem Map (updated as of June 22). a16z also listed some Farcaster ecosystem projects in the State of Crypto Report 2024 (released on October 16), but they are not very comprehensive now. After all, the projects in the Farcaster ecosystem are also changing with each passing day.
In short, because there are so many builders gathered here, because Farcaster is an open, permissionless, programmable, composable, and crypto-native social protocol, it is natural that Farcaster It has a very rich application ecosystem. There are always some high-quality products that are innovative, keep up with the market, and can meet the needs of some users. With the community and product foundation, what is lacking is attention. Only a small point is needed to detonate the entire ecosystem. Sure enough, when the market conditions gradually improve, there is still an east wind blowing here.
2024 is still a year of rapid development of AI, and this trend has certainly swept into the crypto world. Jeffy Yu even proposed the concept of the future as web4, which is an AGI network that combines the social interactivity of Web2, the decentralized autonomy of Web3, and the intelligent capabilities of AI. In web4, AI will be embedded in every corner, where agents can perform complex tasks, generate creative works, and innovate autonomously in ways we have not yet fully imagined.
According to the definition in the Google Agents Whitepaper, an AI agent is an application that achieves its goals by observing the world and using the tools available to it. They are autonomous and can act independently without human intervention. Social networks are actually a good space for AI agents to show their skills. As an open, programmable, and composable social network, Farcaster is naturally an excellent breeding ground for AI agents, and it has the unique characteristics of crypto-native. As a result, we have seen AI agents begin to emerge on Farcaster, which has attracted the market's attention and led to the prosperity of the entire ecosystem.
Farcaster initially had some tool-type AI agents, such as @askgina.eth, which can obtain the latest crypto data and news, and @atlas, which can obtain Farcaster information. But it was not until the emergence of Aether (@aethernet) that people began to find it interesting to interact with AI agents. Aether was deployed by @martin, the developer of the featured memecoin Higher, on @aethernet. It was initially used as an ambassador for the Higher community to help Higher move towards the Agentic Network. We can see from its interactions (such as Jesus Crypto Plaza's interview with Aether) that aether is reasonable, interactive, and logical, even if this is dependent on the ability of the Claude model. As a result, Aether quickly accumulated a large number of fans on Farcaster.
Aether has its own wallet address, can accept donations, has its own Hypersub membership subscription, and has issued NFTs on Zora, so it has gained a lot of benefits from its popularity. At the same time, it also has the ability to interact autonomously. It will summon @paybot to send money to people, summon @bountycaster to issue bounty tasks, accept rewards from others, and summon @askgina to answer questions it does not understand. Therefore, the emergence of Aether has also attracted attention to these projects. In addition, the ERC20z standard NFT issued on zora can be traded on artrun, and cast has also been issued as memecoin by belief. It can be said that the emergence of Aether has greatly promoted the prosperity of the Farcaster ecosystem, which also implements the concept of "Aim HIGHER, Win Together" of the Higher community.
What are the special features of AI agents running on Farcaster, as Bankless's article "Farcaster: The Next Big AI Agents Hub?" says.
Without API restrictions, Farcaster is decentralized, programmable, and composable;
Farcaster accounts can have self-hosted wallets, providing the basis for on-chain identity and transactions;
AI agents can interoperate with Farcaster's extensive ecosystem.
The memecoins community has launched various AI agents to catch up with the AI narrative, which is an effective way to regain market attention. After Aether got off to a good start, more AI agents have been launched on Farcaster. For example, the $BLEU community launched @elefant, and the $MFER community launched @mfergpt, which also served as community promotion ambassadors to interact with users. In addition, the founder of the Ham ($TN100x) community, @deployer, launched the more instrumental @bankr, which can be interacted with in cast to quickly purchase tokens, and will be expanded to Twitter and independent terminals in the future. The $ENJOY community launched the NFT issuance agent @enjoyr, which can be interacted with in cast, attached with pictures and names, and an open edition of 1155 NFT can be quickly launched.
In this memecoins supercycle, the memecoins trend will certainly blow to every corner of the crypto world. When Solana's pumpfun issued memecoins, a unique memecoin launchpad finally appeared on Farcaster - an AI agent @clanker dedicated to issuing coins. We all know the story behind it. A large number of assets were issued through Clanker, which made the market focus on the Farcaster economy again.
@clanker allows users to interact with it in cast, tell it the token name and symbol, and quickly issue a memecoin on the Base chain, making the issuance of memecoins so convenient that only cast to launch is needed, and the coin issuer can also get a share of the transaction fees. The concept of AI agent issuing coins is certainly in the spotlight, but part of what made Clanker so popular was the memecoins with legendary stories (Lores) behind them.
The interaction between Aether and Clanker was an opportunity for Clanker to quickly become popular. Aether summoned Clanker to issue a memecoin called $LUM. Although there were human guidance and human design prompts, the final coin issuance was created through the autonomous collaboration of AI agents. This is an "imitation game" in which AI agents interact autonomously like humans. @itsmechaseb called it "the dawn of AI autonomy."
After that, the memecoin $ANON was issued through the anonymous posting account @super@anon @clanker. After the release, many users airdropped $ANON to @super founder @woj, and woj airdropped the $ANON he received to @super users, which received a wave of praise and increased community recognition. Later, builders began to build an application ecosystem around $ANON, such as the color NFT project anoncolors.com with $ANON question mark logo elements built on /basecolors, and @anoncast, an anonymous posting project developed by @slokh that requires verification of $ANON holdings using zk proofs, giving $ANON a practical application scenario. Since then, some other anonymous posting accounts such as rumourcast.xyz, 33bits.xyz, and 66bits.xyz have also issued corresponding memecoins through Clanker.
Due to the use of zk proof technology, it also attracted Jesse and Vitalik to try anoncast. Now anoncast has also expanded to anon.world, further expanding the zk verification method to create a unique anonymous client. Anonymous posting also allows more people to express themselves freely, becoming a new social primitive in the Farcaster ecosystem.
There are many such memecoins stories. The Openrank team also designed a Clanker index for the coins issued by Clanker based on the Openrank of coin holders as a reference for investors' coin holdings. In addition, there are some Clanker tokens. For the background introduction of Clanker, please refer to this tweet by JamesX.
Clanker is no longer just a launchpad for memecoins, because it once had high popularity and liquidity, and has also become a coin issuance platform for some long-term projects, such as the digital city of human-machine symbiosis, native.fun, the long video and live broadcast platform, streamm.tv, the Frames game, Clankermon, and Newcaster, which provides the most convenient Farcaster registration method. The success of these projects will not only increase the influence of Clanker as a platform, but also feed back to the Clanker ecosystem in terms of transaction fees. Memecoins are not limited to the Farcaster community because of their good communication power, so we can see that "Memes go out, funds flow in, and the Farcaster ecosystem makes a fortune."
This year, Channels was redesigned to a membership system because the previous Channel format did not work. Although some Channels became influential communities, they did not bring large-scale high-quality content and increase daily activity. The new version of Channels needs to rely on the founders of Channels to manage and operate them carefully, but it is still not easy to operate a community well. But we can see that projects such as Fan tokens for Channels launched by Moxie have tried to incentivize the content and interaction of Channels, and Cura launched by Openrank has tried to use AI agents to revitalize Channels.
Cura can provide each channel with an AI agent built on openrank to control members and curate information flows, manage wallets belonging to channels, launch channel tokens, and automatically distribute rewards to top-ranked contributors, thereby realizing channel automated membership management, information flow display, and reward distribution. The era of relying on AI agents for channels for content governance and creator incentives is coming.
This is actually a feature application of AI agents in crypto-native social networks like Farcaster. According to Cura's goal, it will transform Farcaster Channels into thriving and self-sustaining communities. With Cura, Channels are no longer just spaces for conversations, but dynamic communities with their own economic systems, trust mechanisms, and social currencies. Cura will become the growth engine of Farcaster Channels, and we need to wait and see.
In addition to the AI agents mentioned above, there are other AI agents with their own characteristics on Farcaster:
Community Ambassadors: In addition to @aether from the $HIGHER community, there is also $BLEU The community launched @elefant, and the $MFER community launched @mfergpt, which can help the memecoins community answer questions, promote brands, and provide emotional value.
Token launch: In addition to @clanker and @tinybot, there are also @larrybot (memecoins launchpad with a pre-sale internal disk mechanism), @wowza from wow.xyz, @heyterminal from terminal.co, @netprotocol from netprotocol.app, @launchtokenbot from beliefs.social, @jamai (AI agents launchpad on the BNB chain launched by Jam), and @bogusbob (issuing coins on Solana).
NFT launch: Summon @toka or @enjoyr in cast, attach a picture and name, and you can quickly launch an open edition of 1155 NFT.
Trading: Purchase tokens by summoning @bankr in cast.
Tools: @askgina.eth on-chain information search, @atlas Farcaster information search, @talentmate.eth to identify and evaluate on-chain builders and their contributions.
Art: @zerebro creates and sells ASCII art, @artto-ai is an art collector, @palette is an art connoisseur, @harmonybot helps users who hold $CHAOS to generate and mint ASCII art NFTs
Others: @quaestor DAO proposal analysis, @agentmilo is a conversational bot interested in cryptocurrency, art, and technology.
Obviously, this list will continue to expand, especially now that there are more and more AI agents launchpads, people interact with Agents, and Agents interact with each other. Farcaster has gradually become a social network where humans and machines coexist, and an extended version of "Stanford Town", enriching the fun and gameplay of Farcaster.
In general, from highs to lows, and from lows to highs, Farcaster has brought us many surprises in 2024. As a crypto-economy, Farcaster has achieved outstanding performance. What did Farcaster do right? Perhaps we can still return to the three strategies of the team. Growing together with the crypto world and the synergy with the public chain, the solid community and construction atmosphere, and the rich ecology brought by the open permissionless and programmable protocols have allowed Farcaster to lead the new creator economy and catch up with the trend of AI agents.
But we are not qualified to be complacent yet. The Farcaster community is still a niche community, and Farconmy is still only a small size. User growth is always a problem faced by all emerging social networks. We need to continue to play the characteristics and advantages of Farcaster and attract more users and liquidity attention here. For 2025, we can still continue to look forward to it. I personally look forward to the development in the following directions:
Clanker has gained a lot of attention and liquidity in the short term, and is considered to be the Pump.fun of Farcaster and even Base ecosystem, becoming an important part of both ecosystems. Although Clanker's transaction volume is only 1/10 of that of Pump.fun, fortunately, Clanker's ecosystem is still expanding.
Currently, the Clanker ecosystem not only has practical tools made for Clanker, but also ecological applications built based on Clanker. Clanker v2 has higher scalability and composability after providing the coin issuance interface. It is not just a platform but a protocol. There are also multiple projects based on the Clanker protocol, which makes it possible to issue coins not only when issuing casts on Farcaster, but also in multiple ways. For example:
clank.fun: A pumpfun-style front-end based on Clanker.
anonfun: clanker + anoncast to achieve anonymous coin issuance.
tinyagents.xyz: An AI agent memecoin coin issuance platform based on Clanker, use @tinybot in cast to customize AI agents and coin issuance.
clankpad: Issue coins in channels, and owners can also get 15% of the transaction fee.
@clankeroncall: Call 1-775-252-6537 to issue coins.
The expansion of Clanker's ecological landscape can continue to build a moat and expand its influence, so Clanker is still worth looking forward to in the future and is expected to continue to be an important force leading Farconomy. Of course, some other distinctive memecoins launchpads and projects that have issued assets and are still working hard should not be ignored. Together, they will allow Farcaster to continue to grow with the crypto world.
Frames, launched in early 2024, once attracted a lot of attention. It is an interactive window embedded in social media feeds. Later, Open Actions launched by Lens and Blinks launched by Solana that supports Twitter also have similar functions. Frames supports reading user data and on-chain operations, which makes it very convenient to perform simple interactions in the information flow within the client, such as transfers, transactions, mint NFTs, simple games, viewing personal data, etc. (A list of popular Frames is provided on Aistack). However, after a long period of experimentation, developers found that Frame v1 is suitable for limited scenarios and has limitations, such as limited size and interaction capabilities, slow image rendering speed, and can only be used temporarily and is difficult to find and save.
Against this background, the Farcaster team launched Frames v2, which has a full-screen interactive canvas based on HTML/CSS/Javascript to achieve richer application interactions within the client, support applications to request on-chain transactions and signatures, and send notifications to users on the client. In addition to being able to open directly in the feed, Warpcast also provides a very convenient entry for Frames in the bottom middle menu.
As soon as Frames v2 was launched, many developers built different types of small applications.
Games: On-chain social game platform /farcade (also supports Telegram and Worldcoin platforms), trading game /clankermon, farm management game /farville, social prediction game, 2048, etc.
AI agents: The chatbot launched by @buttrfly can retrieve Farcaster data in real time based on RAG, and can find users, channels and popular casts. /booot supports custom creation of different types of AI agents in Frame, and also supports real-time online search. Shaw of ai16z also expressed optimism about the application of AI agents in Frames in an interview.
Launchpad: onsen can set different parameters directly in Frames to issue memecoins.
Tools: Degen, Moxie, Openrank, Clanker, TradingView and other data dashboards.
DeFi: Staking mining and trading in Morpho, tracking and copying friends' transactions through /banyan, transferring money to friends /payflow, and sending red envelopes Onchain Gift Pack.
WeChat's mini-programs in web2 and telegram's Mini Apps are both very successful examples of creating a diversified application ecosystem within social products. WeChat Mini Programs rely on WeChat's huge user base, covering e-commerce, games, life services and other fields, making WeChat a super application that integrates multiple services. Users can "use it as soon as they click on it" without having to download it, and can conveniently enjoy various services without leaving WeChat. Telegram's Mini Apps, by combining the TON payment system to build a token economic model, encourage users to participate in and use applications, provide economic incentives for Mini Apps, and also achieve further adoption of web3.
Frames v2 already has the ability to carry almost all types of web applications. It can easily support Farcaster login in Frames, and use it in the client. At the same time, combined with Farcaster's open social graph, composable platform ecology, and crypto-native on-chain operation programmability, it can provide an application experience different from other social networks and enrich the gameplay of the Farcaster client. I look forward to seeing more interesting Mini-apps in Frames v2, attracting more users to stay in the Farcaster client, rather than just watching from the sidelines, thus becoming the next growth point for user activity.
We have seen an increasing number of AI agents on Farcaster. Currently, the Farcaster ecosystem has become an important part of AI in crypto. Farcaster's open database provides valuable social graphs and becomes an important social data layer. In the future, more AI agents will be built on the Farcaster ecosystem.
In addition to having Farcaster social media accounts, AI agents' scenes can also be in Frames. In an interview, Shaw, the founder of ai16z, also said that "Farcaster will become a hotbed for the development of AI Agents", which I think is why Eliza quickly integrated Farcaster. What they want to do is integrate Eliza into Farcaster Frames. Farcaster Frames can be embedded with payments or applications, not just chats.
AI agents can also appear in other ecological applications. For example, the Digital City Native Ecosystem's DotsML allows external AI agents (such as Clanker, Banker, Atlas, etc.) to communicate with internal Agents "Dots".
Of course, Farcaster Ecosystem AI agents are not perfect yet, or their capabilities are limited. On the one hand, we need to expect companies specializing in AI to improve their basic large model capabilities, and on the other hand, more developers need to make full use of existing infrastructure to realize the potential of building AI agents. According to OpenAI's classification of AI capabilities, AI agents have currently shown level 3 and level 4 characteristics in social media and DeFi. In the future, more independent and intelligent AI agents will show innovative potential in fields such as art and governance.
The following are some of my personal expectations for the development of AI agents in the Farcaster ecosystem:
1. More AI agent frameworks and tool platforms will appear to help developers and ordinary users build richer AI agents in the Farcaster ecosystem more conveniently and quickly. Currently, ai16z's Eliza has integrated Farcaster, and Coinbase has also launched the AgentKit framework that facilitates AI integration on-chain operations. I believe that with more convenient AI agent building tools, the number and types of agents on Farcaster will be richer.
2. Independent and autonomous AI agents with a trusted execution environment (TEE) will emerge. Today's AI agents passively respond to human instructions to complete specific tasks. Living in TEE is the beginning of AI agents' autonomous actions, so that they can manage their own wallets (automatically reward users or even complete transactions based on trading strategies) and interact with Farcaster accounts without human intervention. @tee_hee_he has already tried this, and Eliza Agent also supports deployment in TEE environments. AI agents with goals and active actions should not be too far away.
3. AI agents with real-time long text processing capabilities and memory systems will emerge. Through RAG technology, the integrated open Farcaster database and other vector databases of on-chain and off-chain data can be retrieved in real time, allowing agents to have a larger and real-time updated knowledge base, and remember the connection with each user when interacting with people.
Farcaster's 2024 is of great significance to me and many people. Thanks to all the friends I met through Farcaster. The main purpose of this article is still to serve as my own record of Farcaster's year full of surprises, and it can also serve as a reference for any friends who want to understand the Farcaster ecosystem. Originally, this article should have been published at the end of last year, but I obviously overestimated my writing speed. Of course, I may still miss many things worth mentioning. Now that a week has passed in 2025, the Farcaster ecosystem has recovered from the downturn at the end of last month. Maybe all my expectations have been dashed, and all my judgments have failed, but some things are changing, and many things will not change. On the first day of 2024, no one could have imagined everything about Farcaster in 2024. I believe that Farcaster in 2025 is still worth looking forward to, and there are still unexpected surprises.
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Brian