What is Vitalik's favorite decentralized social protocol? Farcaster product experience introduction
The decentralized social protocol Farcaster has recently surpassed 150,000 registered users and has also become a platform for Ethereum founder Vitalik to share personal posts. What are the unique features of the Farcaster protocol? What challenges will it face in the future? This article will provide a simple analysis from a product experience perspective.
Table of Contents
Farcaster Product Introduction
Farcaster is a decentralized social network built on Ethereum, allowing interaction through various front-end interfaces, with Warcaster being the official front-end interface for team operations and the first mobile app with more comprehensive features.
Currently, users who wish to experience Warcaster need to pay an annual fee, which is currently five US dollars per year, serving as a means to pay for on-chain fuel and reduce fake account issues.
Warcaster Product Interface and Design
Accounts
Before using the Farcaster protocol, users need to create a key pair and an on-chain address, and establish an FID and username to use the service. Farcaster accounts are created through the IdGateway contract, which assigns a new Farcaster ID to the user's on-chain address.
Although users need to record and store the private key when creating an account, if a user loses their private key, they can still recover the account through email on the Warcaster server.
Posts
Warcaster, like Twitter and BlueSky, consists of posts with character limits, allowing functions such as commenting, reposting, and liking.
In addition to regular posts, users can post to specific channels to better reach users in that channel, and users can filter content through channels.
Moreover, Farcaster protocol introduces a unique new feature called Frame for posts, which has been highly praised by the crypto community.
Frame provides users with more diverse post formats, supports various interactive designs, and in addition to basic features like voting and video sharing, users can further engage in token airdrops, NFT minting, and even in-app shopping.
Tipping
In the Warcaster app, users looking to create channels or tip can use the in-app token called Warp tokens for purchases, linking to Coinbase Commerce via email for users to buy cryptocurrencies.
Farcaster Product Architecture and Process
Hybrid On-chain and Off-chain Architecture
The operating structure behind Warcaster is the Farcaster protocol, which is a hybrid on-chain and off-chain architecture where identities are stored on-chain and user post content data is stored off-chain.
When performance and cost are more critical, or when consistency is not strictly required, Farcaster typically uses off-chain means to store information. However, off-chain systems still ensure security through user signatures.
Only when security is crucial, operations are performed on-chain, usually concerning user accounts and usernames, recorded on-chain. Farcaster's current account logic is built on the Optimism mainnet, and Frame's on-chain operations can also interact with the Ethereum network.
Farcaster Hubs
On-chain servers are essentially blockchain nodes, while off-chain operations are handled by Farcaster Hubs, which are also decentralized infrastructure. Each Hub stores a copy of all Farcaster data, accessible externally through APIs.
With the above architecture, the lifecycle of uploading a post on the Farcaster protocol is as follows:
- Alice creates a new post.
- Alice signs the message with the account key.
- Alice uploads the message to a Farcaster Hub.
- The Farcaster Hub checks for validity.
- The Farcaster Hub transmits information to other Hubs via the gossip protocol.
Anyone can run a Hub on a laptop or cloud server, but the team states that Farcaster does not provide incentives for Hub operators and does not intend to do so. Although Warpcast currently provides a small reward for Hub operators, these rewards may be discontinued in the future, and Hub operators are expected to operate independently by charging for storage space.
Farcaster Product Strategy
Compared to traditional decentralized social protocols like Mastodon, Misskey, and PeerTube, Farcaster integrates blockchain into its product, offering native tipping, token distribution, on-chain integration, and other features, catering more to the blockchain user community.
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If we further segment decentralized social protocols in the blockchain ecosystem, Bluesky, Nostr, Lens Protocol cater more to the Bitcoin community, with simpler features and designs. Farcaster and Lens Protocol, on the other hand, are more oriented towards the Ethereum community, offering more diverse post interactions and on-chain integrations, showcasing potential future applications of token-integrated services.
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Farcaster has even garnered Vitalik's favor and frequently posts lifestyle posts on the platform, indicating Farcaster's influence within the Ethereum community.
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Slow Growth of Decentralized Social Protocols
Although Farcaster's usage and interface arrangements are not significantly different from Bluesky, Nostr, or Lens Protocol, it offers a more refined user experience compared to other applications, making it more competitive.
However, like most decentralized social protocols, Farcaster faces significant user switching costs, and despite its quality of service, it still lags significantly behind Twitter. As a result, most people still prefer to stay on Twitter.
If a new product is not ten times better than existing products or does not have other advantages, the switching costs for users will outweigh the value of trying it out, making it challenging to drive product growth, which will be a problem Farcaster will need to address in the future.
However, by combining blockchain-created functionalities and business models, whether it can become another advantage remains to be seen, testing how quickly the Farcaster team can find a killer application through this and achieve true product-market fit for growth.