Farcaster's Big Moment with Founder Dan Romero

Farcaster is a twitter-like crypto social media app that just launched what could prove to be a killer new feature. They’re called frames. We’re calling it now and we’re calling it early - we think Farcaster frames could be a breakout use-case for crypto this year and a way to onboard the masses in the months to come and we're here with founder, Dan Romero, to explain why. ------ 🏹 USE PODCAST24 FOR 10% OFF https://bankless.cc/Citizen2024 ------ 🎧 Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Player: https://bankless.cc/Podcast ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 💸 CRYPTO TAX CALCULATOR | USE CODE BANK30 https://bankless.cc/CTC 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Start 00:07:48 Intro To Dan and Farcaster 00:12:00 What's Different About Farcaster 00:17:12 Investing in Farcaster vs X 00:22:19 Introduction To Frames 00:29:40 Frames Escape Velocity 00:38:22 Building a New Internet 00:47:52 Frames Distribution 00:54:52 Sufficiently Decentralized 01:05:11 Censorship 01:10:07 Farcaster Costs 01:15:29 Farcaster Economics 01:21:54 Rapid Fire Q&A ------ RESOURCES Farcaster: https://www.farcaster.xyz Dan Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth Dan X Profile: https://twitter.com/dwr ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We only win and we only get, actually frankly, crypto, I think, to a much broader group of people if it stops being just about crypto and more about like, what is this, the kind of cool things that crypto, especially under the hood, are enabling, right? So you could imagine every channel could have some type of membership NFT. And Reddit has an example of like, people who are in a subreddit, they can have flair. But what if that flair was basically associated with an NFT? One, that's better monetization for the potential creator of that channel. Two, can't be rugged, right? So Reddit went through a big thing last year with the API, like a bunch of mods were unhappy. Like, you could imagine a world where Farcaster channel is like, okay, I don't like the way Dan and team are headed. My user base is actually on chain.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  I can kind of fork it out and go do something different. And so I think we want to balance the, the average user doesn't care about that, but the creator does. And how can you actually merge those two experiences together where you have this amazing consumer experience on mobile in an app, but the power of blockchain underfoot?

• 1:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, Dan Romero on the podcast today. He's the founder of Farcaster. Now, Farcaster is a Twitter-like crypto social media app that launched what could prove to be a killer new feature, at least I think so, and David thinks so. They're called frames. You could think of these as programmable tweets, where each tweet is actually an app in itself. The cool thing is, anyone can build a frame. A frame can be built that mints an NFT, that checks an airdrop, that buys a Girl Scout cookie. That was an actual example Dan gave in the podcast today. And basically, anything you can program, you can do. And I feel the confidence to call this now and call it early. I think that Farcaster frames could be a breakout use case for crypto this year and a way to onboard masses.

• 1:49David Hoffman?

  Calls like this do not come often from Ryan Trent Adams.

• 1:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  They don't.

• 1:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  We're only one week in, so I feel like this is very much a frontier episode and maybe an overly confident call. But and I wouldn't be surprised, David, if there's some skepticism. But I see this and I just see what feels like the future. For me, David, this was almost like the first time I used Maker Dow. Not quite that impactful, but like in the same order of magnitude.

• 2:13David Hoffman?

  These are huge words.

• 2:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  I know. But truly, it's the first time I've been excited by crypto social and this this kind of new wave of apps that we're about to see. And I think I'm most excited because I feel like we might be on the cusp of picking up where the internet took a wrong turn back in 2008 with the Twitter protocol. And this might be an example of crypto getting us back on track.

• 2:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we'll see after the listener listens to this episode with Dan, what they are thinking. I see what you see. You have a lot of confidence, but maybe that's up for the listener to decide. Before we get into the show, DYDX wants you to know, especially if you have DYDX tokens on Ethereum, you need to migrate those over the DYDX chain, especially with our six-month incentive program distributing $20 million in DYDX rewards to active traders and stakers of the DYDX chain. There's a how to guide in the show notes of this podcast in order to get that done.

• 3:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks to DYDX for sponsoring that message. So I gave my bull case in the intro, David. What was your take going into this episode?

• 3:13David Hoffman?

  Just very satisfied about the direction that Dan has taken Farcaster. My two main Web 2 apps that have defined my Web 2 activities over the last like five, 10 years have been Reddit and Twitter. And both of those have aggressively decayed.

• 3:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, they have.

• 3:32David Hoffman?

  In how I experience them and what I use them for. I'm basically never on Reddit anymore and I'm on Twitter in a more muted fashion. You should see the number of muted words I have. And now Farcaster, built by this crypto native in the year 2023 and four, is building a hybrid of these two things, the best of what I enjoy about both and doing it with all my friends in there doing crypto native stuff. It's like, I feel very blessed that Dan is doing this and building this. And he's also just The correct thinker, he's a builder, he's a thinker, and he's building in the right direction. And this whole frames thing, I think Farcaster first needed to just optimize

• 4:14David Hoffman?

  for serendipity, get users in, be a replacement to Twitter, build the foundations, and then figure out something with a little bit more magic. They could never have started with frames, for example, but now that they have clay to work with, which are the Farcasters out there, now they have something for frames to be able to express themselves. And so, you're very confident. I'm not to say I'm a bear on this, but you're the one who I think is like really beating my hub.

• 4:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, wait, I'm gassing your brakes?

• 4:40David Hoffman?

  You're not gassing, you're just the super mega bull. I'm also bullish on this. I guess I just want to see, I just want to see more stuff. I want to see, I want to see shelling points emerge around which were some of the best frames out there, and have those be recycled and reused and reiterated on.

• 4:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's see what the Bankless Nation thinks. Guys, we'll get right to the episode with Dan, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsor that made this one possible, including Kraken, our recommended exchange for 2024.

• 5:07David Hoffman?

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• 5:49David Hoffman?

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• 6:32David Hoffman?

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• 7:14David Hoffman?

  have all thrown their hats in the ring for the Cello Layer 2 to build upon their stacks. Why the competition? The Cello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability secured by Ethereum validators, and one-block finality. What does that all mean for you? With Cello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low, and you can even pay for gas natively using ERC20 tokens, sending crypto to phone numbers across wallets using social connect. But Cello is a community-governed protocol. This means that Cello needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Cello forums. Follow Cello on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum.

• 7:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are extremely excited to introduce you once again to Dan Romero. He's the co-founder of Farcaster, which is what? A sufficiently decentralized, that's a key phrase here, social media application. It looks a lot like Twitter, but under the hood, it's actually a lot different. I have used this app increasingly in 2024. I found it a much less toxic place than some of the other social media apps I use out there. And now, Farcaster has had kind of a, almost what looks like the beginning of a killer app-type moment with a new feature set called Frames. We're going to explore all of that with Dan Romero on the conversation today. Dan, how you doing? Welcome back to Bankless.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. I'm doing well.

• 8:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so it's been like a year since we had you on. And I think in our first episode, we talked a lot about Farcaster under the hood. It was sort of nerdy type technical questions.

• 8:39David Hoffman?

  Deep Farcaster.

• 8:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And so I think what we want to start with maybe is just give us the quick TLDR on what Farcaster is. And then like, let's go through the last 12 months in fast forward, like 2X speed or something, and get us to where we are today, like everything that's been built. But first, what is Farcaster? How do you explain it like I'm five?

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Farcaster is a decentralized social network. And I think for a developer, they grok that immediately. They understand that, okay, I can actually go build an application on this network and have a direct relationship with my users. But for the average consumer, they don't care. Decentralization doesn't mean anything to them. They're not at risk of getting deplatformed, or in a meaningful way, in the sense that they don't have a big audience. I think last year, we talked about YouTube was a bit of a challenge for you guys at one point. And obviously, your audience is your business. So I think for creators, they also grok that. But I think the average consumer, they don't care, right? What does a consumer actually care about when they're using a social network? It's probably some

• 9:48Speaker 00

  combination of entertainment, which is the primary, think like TikTok. And then I think there's like kind of a secondary thing, which maybe is like a little bit more Instagram or Snapchat. It's like, meeting people, if you're younger, maybe dating people or hooking up with people. But basically, those are your kind of like two primary motivations for using a social network. And so if you take something like Twitter, Twitter is entertainment, right? People can tell themselves that they're following the news or being informed. But the reality is, it's very much entertainment. Really simple heuristic. Where do people use the app most of the time? So I think Twitter actually released some of these user minutes by device earlier in last year. I think 88% of time spent on Twitter is on

• 10:31Speaker 00

  mobile, right? So we're kind of these professionals. We have these like really nice computers. We sit in front of them all day. We're terminally online. And we kind of think everyone else is like us. But the reality is, consumers, they're using social media when they're on the couch or waiting in line for coffee. And that happens on mobile. And so entertainment, mobile is kind of the thing a social network is. And so what we've done is a little bit long-winded, but a lot of focus in the last six months for Farcaster is actually trying to get it to a place where I can easily describe it to consumer. And so one thing that we don't do anymore, I never, average person will never describe it as a sufficiently decentralized network. They don't care. I don't talk about the decentralization.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  I just say Farcaster is a place where you can find interesting people that share similar interests to you online, similar to Reddit. And I think that is actually a much simpler pitch for the average consumer as to why would I care? Why would I want to go sign up? And I don't think we've nailed it in the sense that, A, you know, don't think that that's how other people are describing Farcaster at this point. They're still very much being like, oh, it's this cool decentralized social network. If you're into crypto, et cetera. But I think the big push for us in 2024 is if I come back on this podcast next year, I should have a very crisp answer on that. And then more importantly, that's how most people should be describing Farcaster is the kind of thing, what is, what need is it solving for a consumer rather than talking about the tech? And so I think we're very much in a transition is to kind of answer that.

• 12:00David Hoffman?

  I think when I hop on to Farcaster, it's first and foremost familiar to me comparing it to Twitter. It like looks a lot like Twitter. It behaves a lot like Twitter. There's a growing flavor of Farcaster that's also increasingly Reddit-like, which is lovely for me because I'm no longer a Reddit user really, ever since, I don't know, maybe two or three years ago. But for someone who's never used Farcaster before, but are familiar with the landscape of web two applications, if they were to open up Farcaster and look at it, what would be the first standout difference to them that they would notice? Like, oh, this thing is new? Or what's the new behavior that Farcaster enables or prioritizes?

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's, it's a great way of describing it is it's the UX of Twitter on mobile, which I think Twitter really pushed the feed, like Facebook and Twitter and the kind of like early version of web two social media on mobile, like feed is, that's where it kind of emerged. And then I think later Instagram.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Reddit never has been a mobile product. Like it kind of existed in the pre-mobile era. Like I think anyone I talk to who uses Reddit seriously, they use it on desktop. And it's kind of designed, you know, the threaded conversation view. It feels like a forum, Hacker News, like, so that's very much it. And so I think what we're trying to do is bridge the, the kind of like familiarity and ease of use of a, of a feed like Twitter with the depth and kind of weird esoteric interests that you can find on Reddit. And so we have a feature on, on Farcaster called Channels now, which is effectively our version of a subreddit. And so whether you're into gardening or, you know, AA wallets in Ethereum, completely different things.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  You can actually be in one feed consuming content in a way that kind of appeals to all of your interests. And I don't think we've quite figured it out. I, I think since we launched Channels and we launched Channels about halfway through last year, had a material increase in, in types of content people were posting about. Prior to that, it was kind of like, you know, standard like crypto Twitter is like, kind of, there was one main conversation. It felt like one big group chat. I mean, granted, the network was pretty small, but people felt like they couldn't express, you know, the kind of like multifaceted version of themselves. It's like, okay, yeah, I might be really into crypto, but woodworking is also something that I do on the weekend. Like, and so it's the ability to actually kind of wear many hats. Felt very limited because it's like, well, maybe my followers don't like woodworking.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  But in a world where channels show up and I can kind of like, you don't see it as like a hashtag if you're just like a Twitter person, but hashtags are kind of cringe and they get really spammy. And so the goal with Channels is to kind of nudge it in more of a subreddit direction where they're actually kind of communities. There's a, our version of a mod is called a host, but, but there's kind of like building a, a way that kind of these spaces feel really high quality and, and easy way for you to find other like-minded individuals. And so I think. Again, it kind of like where we want to head this year is get to a place where all of that feels really intuitive, which is actually quite challenging in the sense of you show up into an app, there's no one guiding you through it. And so actually that first run experience of

• 15:04Speaker 00

  like, how does the feed show? Like, do you kind of grok that these are in different, you know, categories and like how those categories work, channels? We're very far from nailing that, but I think we've made a lot of progress and that's very much the focus of where we want to be this year because, and I'll just keep reiterating it today, we only win and we only get actually frankly crypto, I think to a much broader group of people if it stops being just about crypto and more about like, what is this, the kind of cool things that crypto under, especially under the hood are enabling, right? So you could imagine every channel could have some type of membership NFT and Reddit has an example of like people who are in a subreddit, they can have flair, but what if that flair was basically associated with an NFT? One,

• 15:48Speaker 00

  that's better monetization for the potential creator of that channel. Two, can't be rugged, right? So Reddit went through a big thing last year with the API, like a bunch of mods were unhappy. Like you can imagine a world where Farcaster channels like, okay, I don't like the way Dan and team are headed. My, my, my user base is actually on chain. I can kind of fork it out and go do something different. And so I think we want to balance the, the average user doesn't care about that, but the creator does. And how can you actually merge those two experiences together where you have this amazing consumer experience on mobile in an app, but the power of, of kind of blockchain under the hood. Or another way to think about it is like a mullet, right? It's like, you know, business in the front, party in the back. And it's like, you

• 16:30Speaker 00

  kind of have this like very clean, nice feeling experience when you're using the app and then all of the stuff that can happen on blockchain and you guys are very well aware of how, how things, how crazy things could start to get, but like, that's all permissionless and it can just happen. And so I think that's kind of the mentality that we want to push. But to, to again, reiterate, I think anytime we are talking about the crypto as the, the appeal of Farcaster, outside of targeting crypto natives, we're kind of losing because we're not thinking bigger picture of like, how, how can we actually take this to, you know, 100 million people or a billion people? And that certainly is not just going to be harp on the crypto. It's, it's more like, what can this do for me? And why, why am I interested? Where's the entertainment value coming?

• 17:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think your framing of decentralization is not a feature that users really care about or normies care about, that resonates with me because very much, maybe a creator and also a user of many of these social media applications, including being probably terminally online last year on apps like Twitter, right? And I very much, and of course, many Bankless listeners, many people are in crypto for the values. We're here for the tech. We're here for the decentralization, bro. That's why we're here. That's the ethos. And yet, it's still, up to this point, hasn't been enough for me to actually invest in something like Farcaster. And I'll tell you why. It's just because the network effects are so large on the existing social media tools

• 17:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  that we use, like a YouTube or like a Twitter. I mean, I talked to Chris Dixon earlier this week. He's like, "I've spent years of my life investing, not as a landlord, but as a serf inside of this application, but I don't want to lose all of that network effect. I don't want to lose that distribution." And so even the decentralized features haven't been enough for me to totally push over and convert, except until recently. And I'll share maybe my story, Dan. So I left 2023 really burnt out on, specifically Twitter. And it was becoming a much different platform than when I first started.

• 18:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  When I first started in crypto Twitter, anyway, 2017, it wasn't perfect. It was still toxic in places, but it was a learning engine for me. And I followed people. I used it as a tool to level up on crypto, to meet people. David and I met on Twitter, started the Bankless podcast that way. There were some bad parts about it, but the benefits far exceeded the costs. And then I looked at where I spent my time in 2023, and it felt like that was no longer the case. It was actually increasingly toxic for me to be. And I almost felt, in a strange way, maybe addicted to it is part of that, but also just...

• 19:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know. It was this kind of like a hall of mirrors type of environment that I felt like I had to engage just to kind of like protect reputation. We get in these, you know, all sorts of chaos. Anyway, I decided to further invest in in Farcaster and Crypto Social after this, just because it was a more wholesome place. I would post something on Farcaster and I wouldn't get drowned out by like clout chasing kind of tweets that just are more interested in dunking than engaging the conversation. And so that was the first value proposition for me is it just felt more wholesome and more refreshing.

• 20:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I don't know whether that's like Farcaster is using a different algorithm or if that's just because like a whole bunch, it's a smaller community, right? It's a bunch of kind of the nerdy geeks that are interested in that sort of wholesome type of conversation. So it just attracts that community. And that's why I have been dedicating much more time to Farcaster in 2024. And that's like the first value proposition. But even still, Dan, I gotta say, that has just kind of like gotten us to parity level with the features that existing social media platforms offer. Okay. And it doesn't have the reach or distribution. What has excited me so much was something that happened within actually the last week time that we're recording,

• 20:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  which is Farcaster's introduction of frames. And for me, this is the first time I saw the potential of like a killer app type experience in Crypto Social. And the innovation that that unleashes. So maybe I want to talk about both of those things, but could we start with frames? Because that is an exciting new development and I want to get your take on it. And maybe you could start by explaining what frames is and explaining what has just sort of exploded on the scene in the last week.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Sure. So can I just go back to one thing you brought up? And this is the existential problem for us to solve is, you know, the both of you, you've worked really hard to build audiences on Twitter. Like you've ground those numbers up. You have an audience. You have influence. That is, is, is your livelihood is your audience, right? We are not going to be able to get people to switch over. The people who are generating kind of the content that that kind of earns that type of audience, unless we have enough users that the audience is somewhat comparable, especially in a mode where the early version of Farcaster, you could describe as a Twitter clone, right? So it feels very much like Twitter. So it's like, okay, so it's a worse version of Twitter with fewer people.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  As a, as a person with limited amount of time, who, who is using an audience to actually drive a business, why would you go invest time there? And maybe with the exception of a true ideological, uh, pure person like Vitalik, who, who has five million followers on Twitter and, and basically kind of abandoned it for the most part, I think very few people, and, and I don't hold anything against them. At first it used to be a little salty. It'd be like, oh, you talk about crypto and then you don't want to use the decentralized thing. That was just cope on my part. The reality is the only way we are going to earn people's attention is if we offer something either comparable, like, and, and the way to be comparable to Twitter is audience size. So that's really hard for us to do, or start to change the game and offer something different.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  And I actually think that ties into Frames where, uh, up until Frames, we really didn't have, you know, we had a few features here and there, some NFT stuff and, but, but nothing to kind of like really draw you in. And then in the last week, uh, it's, it's kind of wild. It was Frames, Frames is less than a week old. We, we launched a, a very simple, um, mini app primitive that can exist in a feed. And I think that the simplest way to think about this is if you go to Twitter and you do a poll today, that's a special type of post, right? Like most posts are text, image, video, you have buttons at the bottom. That's how you interact. If you, if you kind of want to do more, you either reply or you, you, you quote tweet. With a poll, you at least have a couple of kind of options.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  Obviously the person who created the poll could, could define those and then you click and then there's kind of some interactivity within the, the tweet. So now imagine taking that as, as kind of like a, just a very basic primitive. You have a canvas that you can kind of put an image or whatever you want to render and four buttons. That's it. Like we, we didn't allow anything else. There's no video, there's no, you know, anything else magic. Um, it's, it's, it's a hack of, um, there's some irony here. We're using OpenGraph, which

• 23:58Speaker 00

  For the nerds, it was actually something that Facebook invented back in like 2007, 2008, when Facebook had an app platform. And it's kind of, it's like the tailbone, where it's like, we still have a tailbone, because at one point, we were, we were animals that had tails. Vestigular organ? Exactly. So, so OpenGraph is this thing. If you, if you Google OpenGraph right now, you will see a page that Facebook hosts. But they're not working on, they haven't been working on for a decade. And actually Twitter then extended it. So you'll notice that sometimes when you share a link on Twitter, you get the small icon, or you get the really big one. And then obviously, since the new regime has come in, links have been absolutely nerfed on Twitter. And they've even reduced the amount of space that they give, and they only use this big OpenGraph image.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  But for the developer out there, that's a pretty simple thing to go add to any website. So you can like, add the big card for Twitter, and the small one for Facebook or LinkedIn. You know, nothing's happened with OpenGraph since, since that. So what we did is we actually hacked OpenGraph to make it more interactive, so that anytime you click one of these buttons, in this little mini app in the feed, we are sending a message back to wherever that OpenGraph was coming in, saying, "Hey, I clicked this button, what, what should be the next image we surf?" That's it. It was, is an insanely simple, primitive. And, and what you get out of that is developers, within like, an hour of us launching, started to have frames. And then it kind of ran into the weekend, and people started to organize grassroots, frame hackathons, and all this other kind of stuff.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Because it was just a, huh, I have a, I have one image I can change, and I have four buttons, how creative can I get? And, and within 24 hours, someone had figured out how to put Doom, the video game, inside of a frame. And we're not, again, remember, this is, this is not video, there's no, kind of like, all these other... It, it was rendering per time you clicked, and there was a little, like, the gun emoji, plus like, the different ways you could go, and that was it. Someone built chess. So the creativity with those constraints was just incredible. And actually, if it reminds me of anything, it actually reminds me of how early Twitter was, because the early Twitter API was completely open.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  And so people built clients. But then people got really creative within, and this is back in the era of only 140 characters. People invented at replies, hashtags, retweets, all in just convention of text. And so when you have constraints, people get extremely creative. And the same thing has kind of happened for frames. And what's really funny is I have a bunch of the investors on Farcaster or early Facebook employees or investors, and they're like, this is literally what Facebook did in 2007, 2008, but then they never ported it over to mobile for a variety of reasons. I mean, obviously, Facebook is doing quite well in terms of their market capitalization.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  But I think it's been a huge validation that there's tons of pent up developer demand for one simple thing is a frame is, you know, you have this simple primitive, but gets max distribution in a feed on Farcaster. So even though we have a very small number of users relative to the big guys, we're not nerfing links. We allow this primitive to exist. And so now, all of a sudden, a developer can come up with an idea, launch it in this kind of minimum viable version of a frame and have thousands of users within an hour. The last time that kind of was like a free for all was mobile and the Facebook platform.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  And so I think what we're really excited about is that there's a ton of pent up demand from developers to say, hey, I have good ideas, but the problem is if I go spend time building a mobile app or a website, I have no way of finding those users and getting that distribution. And so that is actually the essence of the frame is that it's a simple primitive that gives developers the ability to rapidly prototype and then get distribution and validation very quickly. And we could talk about other like kind of things that we're doing with it and kind of like under the hood, but that's at its core is it meets the user where they are in the feed while they're on the couch, right? They don't have to switch to a different app. They don't have to switch to mobile web. It's they're browsing. They see a little frame. Oh, click this button to mint

• 28:15Speaker 00

  an NFT. Great. Click. No, no wallet connect just happens. And so that that's why I think it's working. Like I said, we're a week in. This all could go away in two weeks, but I think other protocols are actually starting to go away, which is pretty exciting.

• 28:29David Hoffman?

  This is big.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so, so, you know, I'm paranoid, right? Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive. So I am both optimistic and appreciative for everyone who's doing everything with frames. But part of me as a founder of being like, okay, well, what happens if this goes away tomorrow? And so I think we're really trying to push the team to say like, okay, what are the the next set of, you know, three or four features that we can add that increase the surface area of creativity while still keeping it relatively elegant and constrained? So a good example of this, and we should have this out either tomorrow or by the time this podcast releases, we're going to add a text field. Again, not not revolutionary. It's not like we're doing Neuralink or OpenAI level, you know, engineering there. But the ability for someone to now, instead of just having these buttons, to be able to type in any message directly to the

• 29:15Speaker 00

  frame, obvious case that you can add is LLMs. So now all of a sudden, anyone can go take any one of these fancy new AI applications, pipe it into a frame, you do a little bit of input as the user, and who knows where you go from there. And so I think that is kind of how we're thinking about it is keep things simple, make it really fast for developers to to prototype, and then and then just give them as much distribution as possible.

• 29:42David Hoffman?

  I see three threads coming out of this conversation that you actually just identified. One, the distribution of these frames to users. That is something I want to explore. Two, the expressivity of these frames, which is what you were just talking about just now. And then three, the fact that these frames are like portals to the outside world of Farcaster. They are little applications, frames, windows that you can peer into in Farcaster that point externally, whereas I Twitter and like the generalized web two platforms are trying to actually increase the walls, you know, make be more opaque, you know, be more difficult to permeate outbound. Frames to me seems like a portal inside of a cast to go outside and bring something outside from far caster into far caster. These are the three like kind of threads I want to pull on.

• 30:27David Hoffman?

  I want to start with the expressivity one, which is where you were going anyways. There's this Vitalik blog from 2019 mainly about blockchains, layer one blockchains called base layers and functional escape velocity. And it really talks about the difference between like Bitcoin and Ethereum and how Ethereum really needed to be minimally expressive up to a certain point. And that up to a certain point is this like escape velocity where like you would apply a little bit of expressivity to Ethereum. And you get this escape velocity of what you can build on it. And so basically TLDR, a little expressivity goes a long way. And I think that's kind of what you are articulating with frames is like they're they're as a primitive, it's very simple.

• 31:09David Hoffman?

  But I think kind of the question is, is have you found, is it expressive enough that these frames have reached a part of the expressivity landscape in which they can actually achieve escape velocity and developers can imagine anything and put it into a frame? That's kind of how I would define escape velocity. Do you have any indication or knowledge or thesis about like how are you are frames expressive enough? Where they are achieving escape velocity without being overly expressive that is like overly complicated? Do you have any intuition here?

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think we have more stuff to add. I don't think like the V1 is sufficient. That said, I think a good sign that this is yet simple, universal and appealing like is multiple protocols outside of far caster. Are now just adopting far caster frames and they're actually just calling, they're not even trying to rename them. They're just calling them far caster frames now work on this protocol. So generally, okay, good sign that like, okay, this this actually might be a bit more universal and a step up for all crypto UX in terms of consumer stuff. So that that's one thing that again, going back to this idea of the the constraints. We specifically started where you so so one of the things we allow is when you click a button,

• 32:26Speaker 00

  the developer gets a request sent or, you know, HTTP request sent to their server. And that's signed. So it's cryptographically signed, but it's not signed with the Ethereum key. So every Farcaster user has an Ethereum key under the hood. We have a separate key. It's called an EDDSA key for for those paying attention at home. But that actually can't do anything on a blockchain. And technically, you can do something on Solana. You can use it for like account abstraction wallets that are coming in the future, but not the ECDSA key that that powers an Ethereum address like your your kind of like, you know, MetaMask or Rainbow, right? Despite that, what happened was every developer and I actually put a meme. I don't know if you guys, it's the it's the Patrick SpongeBob meme where he's talking

• 33:08Speaker 00

  to the kind of villain and and, you know, the villain's trying to convince him one thing, and then Patrick just keeps giving the same answer. And so the way I kind of set that up is, we thought people would use frames to kind of do these lightweight things like, oh, well, let's just go back to the Facebook app or a platform, personality quizzes, polls, like things that are very off chain and easy and you can get set up. And within 24 hours, someone was like, well, I'm just gonna have this sign something that will end up minting something through a relay on base. And then, of course, Jesse Pollock, as, you know, good friend, jumped in and started saying, great, like, Base wants to be the home for any frame that you want to put on chain. So we quickly went from, this is a terrible pun, but on frame to on chain. And these developers, they don't care that

• 33:50Speaker 00

  we told them that it wasn't expressive to be on chain. Just like water, they figured out a way to get there. And so, you know, and I think Wilson Cusack from Coinbase, he wrote up something where it's like, oh, verify a frame signature with solidity, like, just like the the amount of creativity that people brought to saying, oh, well, you told me that this is not supposed to go on chain, but I'm still gonna go do it. And I think the the most kind of, you know, seared in my brain example is a team of folks, three three developers worked on a project on Sunday, and then they launched, I think, Monday or Tuesday. They did a Girl Scout Cookie checkout in a frame. So four buttons and an image. And they were able to make like a, like a shopping cart.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Toby Luki, it's Shopify actually followed me this week and reached out and, and, and, you know, commended that team like in terms of like, wow, that was really cool. And so this is not the ideal UI to do a shopping cart, yet people figured out how to do it. And then what was cool is you, you actually got redirected at the end. And, and by the way, they were, this one of the people was selling Girl Scout cookies for, I think his niece or something. So she's now probably like the top Girl Scout cookie seller in the entire country. But, um, at the end, it just kicked you out to Coinbase commerce. And then you just, you could just do the, the shopping. So again, even though you couldn't directly do the on chain transaction, people were creative enough to, to actually make it happen. So what I would say is the, the two things that we're going to add from the expressivity standpoint in the, in the near, uh, near term, one is that text input.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  So it's a completely new version of, uh, you think of it as like I O, right? Like, okay, we had buttons and now, now we have like free text. And then the second is, um, we are going to figure out a way to safely do on chain transactions. I think you guys have been around crypto Twitter long enough to know that like the moment you make links very easy to do on chain transactions, a lot of nefarious stuff that can happen.

• 35:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Yep. But this is where actually the Farcaster social graph actually comes into play.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  So we can actually take those links and probably the, the minimum version to start is we'll just put a huge warning and it just say, hey, don't click on this if you don't trust it. But over the kind of next couple of weeks, we can actually layer in an identity layer on top of that and actually say, oh, this is a link from someone you follow. Like they, they actually made it and, and it, because it's cryptographically signed in a key that's off chain, it's probably not, you know, hacked like the SEC got hacked with the Bitcoin ETF. So you start to layer in all these primitives that for a while kind of weren't doing very much for us. If anything, they were making us move a lot slower, but now starts to enable these like, kind of like really powerful use cases where it's like, you, you could legitimately say, this is a verified link. Now, whether or not that that was good code, I, I can't verify that, but you at least

• 36:30Speaker 00

  know that it wasn't a wallet drainer from a hacked account. And, and so now you start to create an environment where If I want to do something on chain, I actually want to be on Farcaster because I'm browsing the feed and I'm actually getting some level of like, okay, I don't have to worry. And actually, one really tough example last year was my Twitter account got hacked. Okay.

• 36:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  No way.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Did not have a phone number attached to the account, strong password. I used T O T P, you know, the Google off for it.

• 36:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Twitter still hasn't given me an answer on what happened. I my hypothesis is that it was an inside, you know, someone in support. But so they waited till I was asleep, Pacific Coast time. They tweeted out a wallet drainer link, the Wise Keys N F T project. And I have a good friend who lost over a hundred thousand dollars. I feel really, really bad.

• 37:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  You were doing everything right.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  I should have been paying attention. It was kind of scammy looking, but you know, I assumed because it came from your account and I know you have good security, it was, it was fine. And so that, that hopefully all goes away in a world where everything is cryptographically signed. And obviously the S E C, you know, tweet examples, another, you know, kind of disaster scenario in terms of just less wallet drainer, but more just like an embarrassment. But in a world where everything has public, private keys underneath the hood and you have a reasonable, you know, self custody, because security, then you actually get into a world where crypto links don't feel so scary and you're actually more likely as a consumer to actually want to interact with stuff that you discover.

• 38:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I am so here for it. And I actually think that like, while this seems like maybe small to some listeners today, what we're looking at is a new primitive and a new type of platform that could like, I honestly, I say this legitimately help onboard the world to crypto. And it's, it's starting to come together in Farcaster in really interesting ways. And just at the same time in which Twitter is the most dangerous to be a crypto person. Yeah, that is true as well. And I think for bankless listeners who still haven't gotten this in their head of what's going on here, but what Dan is describing is these things called frames, basically turns a post or a tweet or in Farcaster, it's called a cast into a program, into kind of a mini app.

• 38:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this is a permissionless mini app that any developer can deploy. And without anyone's permission. So it's kind of like a core internet primitive in that way. And so what we've seen in the last week is like hundreds of these frames being developed. And I wouldn't be surprised by the time you listen to this if we had thousands. And there's all sorts of creativity kind of unleashed. And so that's what's going on here. And I can't help but think about what we're actually doing here, big picture. And you were talking about some of the investors in Farcaster who are here for kind of the early days of Web 2 and social media. What we're actually doing here, it seems to me, Dan, is we are going back to about 2007,

• 39:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  2008, and we're taking, we're retracing our steps as the internet, as a community. And we're taking a path that we didn't take at that point in time. So the path that social media took and the internet took, and the fact that we have now kind of five tech companies that dominate the world, was a path of closed walled gardens and an ad-based revenue model. So they wanted to trap all of the users inside of the four walls, their walled garden essentially, so that they could mine their eyeballs and sell more ads. Twitter didn't have to take this path. Facebook didn't have to take this path, but it was more profitable at the time to take this path.

• 40:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  We didn't have a own verb, as Chris Dixon likes to say, to kind of monetize the other path. And so what it seems to me crypto is doing, what Farcaster is doing, is it's going back to like 2007, 2008, when this Web 2 thing just started kicking off. And it's going, oh, we're not going to take the ad-based path. We're going to take this new ownership type of path. That's how we're going to monetize things. And in that path, we can keep everything open. We don't need to trap everybody inside of our ecosystem. We can keep it permissionless so that like devs can build on this and not get rugged. And that to me is probably the most profound piece of this and why like you can probably hear the excitement in my voice in what's happening. Like this is just a kernel, okay?

• 40:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  But like, I think this could get entirely massive. Do you have any reflections on that? Or is that right in your eyes? Do you think we're going back to like the mid 2000s here?

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Oh, man, I like you got me all excited just hearing that I so one that the original name for Farcaster when Varun and I started working on it was RSS plus. So I've been thinking about some version of this idea for for a decade plus. I feel like I'm in this kind of like weird Varun and I are roughly the same age. And so I'm a weird like kind of like millennial in the sense that I was in college when Facebook I not when it first came out, but but two years in. And when they were they launched the feed while I was in college, they would launch the app store while I was in college, like I actually built on the Twitter API built this app called straw poll. So I lived through that era in an era where I was just so I thought that that was the future we were headed in.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  And and I cite this a lot. Paul Graham wrote an essay in 2009. And if you go to his website, it's just slash twitter.html. It's really short, fits in like a screenshot. And he talks about how Twitter is this quirky company that it's they invented a new Internet protocol, and that doesn't happen very often, you know, the way he was defining it. But somehow it ended up in a company, whereas every other protocol HTTP, SMTP for email, all of that ended up kind of being these open standards. And and so I was obsessed with this idea while I was even working at Coinbase, I actually tweeted like a kind of rough outline of the idea for Farcaster in 2018. I still still have the tweet, I can send it to you guys. But but basically, I've been obsessed with this. I was a huge Google reader user for

• 42:31Speaker 00

  RSS and just like I'm a huge info war. And so the the Twitter out competing RSS like makes sense. They built a really slick centralized experience that just has better user discovery, better performance, you know, centralized companies are going to be better than indie companies most of the time, right? And so I think what was really disappointing, though, if I if I kind of look back on the history of Twitter and easy for me, like, you know, in this time, you just kind of make the decisions is Twitter had an opportunity roughly around 2014 to kind of veer in the we are not going to be Facebook because by that time, Facebook had killed the top platform, they were already public, they were starting to get mobile. And Twitter could have been the open version, right? And it would have been like, hey, we'll monetize off of developers.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  We're never going to be as good as Facebook because Facebook is in a class of its own. Facebook makes $200 per user per year in the United States. Okay. What was the last time you paid for anything on Facebook? That's how good they are at monetization. That's why they have a trillion dollar market cap. And that's why Twitter has always been kind of lagging behind is they just never had that scale and level of monetization. And so there's a version of the world where Twitter leaned into the API and said, we are the world's kind of like protocol. Yes, it's controlled by a company, but we're gonna, we're gonna monetize at a certain rate. And I think actually people would have been probably fine with that. And there's actually a lot of benefits if you somehow have a benevolent kind of company that monetizes. Like, there's a lot of complexity that comes with the decentralization, but we didn't have that happen, right?

• 43:57Speaker 00

  So we, we had this kind of increasing centralization on the social networks. And so one of the motivations that I got excited about working on this idea, censorship resistance. That's actually, I think, a very important thing from a freedom of speech standpoint. But the thing I was so excited about is if we could just figure out how to get enough people to use this. Maybe we can get a flywheel of developers building stuff. And I think just having people hack the like random thing that kind of looks like a, you know, Chris Dixon looks like a toy. And that ends up being a bigger thing. That doesn't happen on the App Store now. Like, you have to get like a Dun's number to launch a mobile app. It's like, you have to have like basically a backbone structure. So all of this stuff is just so much friction.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  And I always think of like what Stripe, you know, completely unrelated, but the core insight is the Colisons realized that developers wanted to take payments. This is kind of like pre crypto on the internet. And the, the, the status quo at that point was send a fax to someone at Wells Fargo and have some guy with a headset call you and try to sell you on payment processing. And they're like, okay, well, we're just gonna make this like really slick thing, sign up and then just immediately get payments and get on your way. And that mentality is like what I want to really drive is the beauty of frames is it's so fast. Like you can use Versal, which is this developer company to like spin this up. Verun was actually able to do one with Replit yesterday and just use their built in AI and have a frame up and running in 10 minutes.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  And so that's, that's the era that I want to bring back is just like really, really fast iteration and prototyping. With also the benefit that You know, that happens in crypto. That's actually one of the reasons I still stuck around in crypto. I was kind of burned out in crypto after I left Coinbase. And then I realized this is the only place that developers are still really tinkering. Everything else is super professionalized. Even AI, I actually think like, yes, there's a ton of interest there, but it's run by big companies. Crypto is not run by big companies. Coinbase is the biggest company in crypto. Like, that's it. Every other company is basically small or independent developers. And so that spirit is the thing that I wake up every day and get excited about is like, can we get to a world where it feels much more like 2007 and 2008 in terms of experimentation?

• 46:06Speaker 00

  And I think that the core difference is can't be evil. Just like Google said, don't be evil, like can't be. Build the credibly neutral decentralized system that people can look at the code. People can download open source hub software or permissionless to sign up on OP mainnet. Like, they don't have to trust me. And so that is, I think, if we can do that, I don't think we'll ever be as big as like Meta from, like, you know, whether we're a company or a protocol, but maybe like at the protocol level. Because I think if you can actually create an ecosystem where a lot of people can win,

• 46:40Speaker 00

  then, you know, things can get pretty big. And I think that the other thing is like, part of that centralization effort was actually, I think, very much driven by the zero interest rate environment of the 2010s. This kind of like growth at all costs for the company. You know, and it's kind of crazy how many people Elon fired at Twitter and Twitter basically still works. Like, everyone was saying it was gonna go away. Like, Farcaster, you know, granted, we're not at that scale. We have 12 people. We are not hiring any more people. Like, the goal is to just stay really focused on delivering this great experience. And yes, we will have to hire some more people. But like, my view is, I want to, Instagram got to 27 million users with 13 employees in 2012.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  I can promise you, we're not even close to 27 million users. So, like, we, and we have 10, 12 years plus developer productivity and AI. So, I actually really believe in this world where we can have many thriving new app services, companies, open source projects on top of this decentralized protocol. That collectively can compete with the big guys. But maybe we never just never see another like, you know, trillion dollar centralized social media company, because what this is doing is it's actually leveling the playing field and saying like, okay, the scale comes from the protocol, not the app.

• 47:55David Hoffman?

  Thinking that Frames unlocks like the next step function growth in Farcaster. Like, maybe, maybe it's not the killer app that takes Farcaster all the way to meta-size. Maybe there is no killer app, it's just a series of mini killer apps. And Frames is the first of many, hopefully. I want to talk about like the distribution curve that will emerge with Frames, where like some Frames are going to be built and then probably going to be used more than others, right? Like, you were talking about that poll in Twitter and tweets. And that's actually like the only expressive tweet form that there is. You can tweet or you can make a poll. And so therefore, the poll is the most expressive, the most used app on a tweet. And I would imagine as Frames get more developed and iterated, some Frames are just more useful,

• 48:40David Hoffman?

  some Frames are recycled, some Frames become just like highly used. And then there are some like long tail of Frames, which are just maybe more proprietary, more unique to the builder or the company that developed them. How do you think about how this will unfold? We've seen like a massive growth in usage of Farcaster just in the last week since Frames have launched, and now we have this iteration cycle growing. But like, how do you think, how do you think like the distribution or frequency of Frames goes forward in the next like weeks and months?

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, we're still very much figuring it out. I think if I could critique Frames, from what it's not good for developers is the experiences, this delightful experience you run across in the feed, you're low friction and you're willing to use it. But you're not building a durable, ongoing relationship with a, with a user, right? And if you think about the kind of, there's a variety of different types of developers, but I think that the developers that get most excited about distribution tend to be ones that want to go build a business, or you know, kind of think about being a venture-backed company. And what matters to them is retained Dow, in the same way that I focus on the Dow, daily active users, not to use jargon. So basically, the number of people who use your app every day. You may hear like monthly active users or weekly active users.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Meta talks about time spent and daily active users. And so my view is they're the best in the world at that. Like, that's the bar you should measure your app. And so if you're thinking about like, hey, I want to build a business, I want to, I want to be able to go raise money. The traction chart you want to be able to show is the kind of like trailing seven day average of people using your app, right? And so right now, frames are very ephemeral. You see them in the feed. There's no really easy way to go get them again. Ongoing relationship. Is it actually adding any additional functionality to your day to day in the app? And so one area, and I don't think we've kind of figured this out is, well, Chrome extensions, I think, are a great example of this. It's like you find something useful that you kind of want to use on a regular basis. On on kind of web, they work really well.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Like you install MetaMask or OnePassword on Chrome and it works. You know, you block. But basically, extensions have never existed on mobile. Apple's Safari extensions are meh. Don Wallet, I would actually give them credit. They've really pushed the the limits of of like that platform. Like, and I don't think anybody else has really done that. But it's just clunky. And people think of apps on mobile, right? Like, they they not install an app, they'd probably never install the Chrome extension. PWAs are another potential way that this goes. And shout out to Friend Tech. I think that they like really showcased like how you can do that well. I think they are a little bit more clunky than apps. And it's nothing on the engineers, on the people building a PW. It's actually just Apple kind of is. They're doing it as like a fig leaf to say, hey, look, we offer an alternative. When the reality is like

• 51:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  And PWA is a progressive web app?

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Yes, sorry, sorry.

• 51:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do you describe that?

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Please. So so basically, the idea is you can build a website and then make it feel like an app on the phone without actually having to go to the App Store to install it. Right? But because everyone is having to think about, Apple has a ton of rules to be in the App Store. Right? And that's been in the news recently. But but ultimately, as a developer, you're like, OK, I have to make compromises, especially with crypto in the App Store. But if you think about distribution as an app developer, you want to be in the App Store because that's really easy. Consumers understand how to do it. You can get updates and all these other nice things. So trying to marry the two, I think one thing we could do with frames is, could you actually, in a kind of easy to use way, in a secure way, extend the functionality of Warp Cast?

• 52:11Speaker 00

  In a way that you could, just a simple thing, you could add another button to the bottom of the row of every cast. So now, yes, you're using Warp Cast, but maybe the, the kind of like default button that you click to, you know, send a like or something is doing another action. Maybe it's sending an on-chain tip to someone and that, that's like tip link or one of these services. And so I, I think figuring out a way to offer ongoing a relationship and a durable relationship with users through frames is if, if we can actually nail that and, and, and figure that out, that, that I think is actually a big step function. Because now all of a sudden the developer says, okay, don't just use frames as kind of like a, like a launch strategy, go to market to try to convince people to use your app.

• 52:51Speaker 00

  It's like, no, I actually could build a business as long as I'm, I'm a button on someone's, you know, UI. And there's a lot of complexity to think through on that. And I don't know if you guys grew up in the era of like Windows Internet Explorer toolbars. Like everyone wanted to add a toolbar and they just like would stack and there are a bunch of memes and it's like you'd go to your grandma's house and you'd have to like uninstall all of them. But like, I think that you just have to balance the, the kind of simplicity and elegance of it with providing a really powerful primitive to a developer. So I think that's just one area. I think what I ultimately know is developers want to build businesses. That is, means that they have users. And the single best thing that we can do, or two things, is one, continue to grow the number of users on the Farcaster Protocol.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Because every user on the Farcaster Protocol is now kind of like, if you think about like the, the addressable market, that they are now a potential user of your app in a very easy way with frames. And then two, it's how do we make it easier for the best developers, the ones that actually build great experiences for, for consumers, to have an ongoing relationship with those consumers. Because that, that actually sets them up for success. And so, so I don't have answers there, other than that, that's how we're approaching it.

• 54:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's the flywheel too, in, in effect, isn't it, Dan? Because more users will come as like the frames increase in, in utility. And then more users come, so more dap, like app developers develop frames and you kind of get that, that flywheel in, in full effect. So I, I, look, I think that frames is one of the most interesting. Things I've seen in a long time. It feels very much to me like sort of the mid 2000s, early discovery of kind of web two, basically, and the birth of that. And that Paul Graham post, I was just looking at it, why Twitter is a big deal. And he said, the reason is, is because it's a new messaging protocol where you don't specify the receipts. New protocols are rare, like TCP IP, SMTP, HTTP.

• 54:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Twitter never pursued that journey. And here we're kind of going back to it. And that's what's so exciting here. I want to ask the question, though. So moving on from from frames for a second. So we talked about can't be evil rather than don't be evil. And we use this phrase for the crypto natives earlier in the audience, sufficiently decentralized. So can you define what that means practically in a far caster? So I think as a far caster user, or as like a, you know, former recovering Twitter user, let's say, I still, I still tweet from time to time. I want to port, have the ability to port my username and my social graph somewhere else if I want to. Like, that seems to me fundamental.

• 55:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And then we were talking about the inability for far caster to rug frame developers, let's say, or any developers. Right? So I mean, very famously, Twitter's restricted API access many times in the past, rugged entire companies, so did Facebook, right? I mean, this is like, we have a full history of this. And so how is it such that you can't rug? And what are the crypto components of this entire platform? Because I think far caster keeps its crypto profile light, but very intentional in terms of what it's trying to do on chain versus what it's trying to do in centralized servers. So can you kind of describe that landscape for us?

• 56:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's all accurate. And I think the way to think about it is there are three layers to the cake. So the first is the, and let's actually start from the consumer experience. So you download an app. Warp Cast is the most popular app. It's basically the only mobile client, although people are starting to build other mobile clients, which is exciting. 85% of usage of far casters on mobile. All right, so one, one piece of advice I always give to crypto builders. If you're building anything consumer, if the use case is to use this on the couch, 85% of the usage of couch time is on phone, not on a computer. So don't build the app that you think because you sit on a computer on the couch. Consumers sit on the couch and they, they go like this. So mobile is really important. And that's, that's how private, you know, the vast majority of people interacting with

• 56:51Speaker 00

  Farcaster interacted through a mobile app. The mobile app is a centralized thing. So the, the best example here is like Gmail and email. Like email is a protocol. Gmail is a, is a private service. You could use Yahoo, you could do something different. Gmail is the client. Yes, the, the client, the app. The, the kind of app Warp Cast, we run that in AWS, like we, we have an App Store account on Google and Apple and, you know, kind of manage all that stuff. We, we build this app. And then the next layer down is where it starts to get interesting is we connect into the Farcaster protocol, which at this point is actually decentralized. And that is a layer of, of servers that kind of all peer together.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  So you can almost think of it as a lot, sort of like BitTorrent, not, not quite. So it's not a blockchain, but it's kind of like a, a group of servers that, that get to eventual consensus on what's the state of the network, right? Like what, what casts come from, you know, what people, what do their profiles look like? Who's liking what casts? Like the, the system kind of works pretty well. And that's totally open source. Anyone can go download and, and run a hub. The hubs have varied up into like some, at one point we had 700 people running a hub. They're, they're not that expensive to run. And most people just run them in the cloud, but you could run them on a kind of like home, home computer. And each hub has a full copy of the network. Okay. So that's similar to an Ethereum node, right? It's not a blockchain, but, but it takes that property of, as a developer, I can just spin up a hub and I don't have to rely on anyone else to get anything.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  I can be like, okay, I want all the, the, you know, cast from, from Ryan. Like boom, like you can immediately get that information. You don't have to pay anyone else, don't have to ask for permission. The last part of the system, and this is the only part of the system that's actually on a blockchain, is it, but, but critically important, it's the actual like identity. And, and the identity is just a simple number. It's an integer. So I am the third user on Farcaster, Farcaster account, Varun plus me. So I'm FID, Farcaster identity, three. And the whole system just works off of that that number. So each of you have an FID anytime you're doing something. The way that system works is when you go to write a message, that leaves the app, it goes into that kind of BitTorrent hub network.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  The hub goes, okay, this is coming from FID three. Please tell me, does does the signature, the cryptographic signature, match the thing that's on the blockchain? If yes, great, now I'm going to distribute it. If no, this is a it's a spoofed, it's it's a fake cast. And that so that that's the system. So so the beauty of that system is the only thing that costs money. Or there there are kind of two things. When you sign up, you create that initial mapping, you get that little FID. And then anytime you you kind of want to make an adjustment, maybe you you roll your your cold storage, your hot wallet, and you want a new address that controls that ID. But then, other than that, it's I always like to say it's like an all you can eat buffet. It's like, once you pay, like, you can do as much as you want on the Farcaster network.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  But and what's really nice about that is there's no cost. Right? So I think that the challenge of like, just imagining the the usage of social media, that even if you had a small cost, it creates a mental thing of people being like, oh, I don't know if I want to press this button. It's like a little bit. You you want to encourage as many people as possible to to use the app. You want to have people to smash the like button. That is actually how you drive the the kind of growth of the social network. And so in in in building this system, we we like to think of it as like a hybrid blockchain system. We we we just tried to take a pragmatic approach. Varun and I both worked at Coinbase. I wrote a post, actually, when I left for Bology's Moment in the Sun Nakamoto publication called Coinbase's pragmatism. And and the idea that like, we always approach a Coinbase is like,

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  what's the best user experience? While still holding true to the values of crypto. And you guys have been in crypto long enough. It's like Coinbase has taken a lot of arrows. Coinbase takes basically no arrows at this point, relative to where they used to. And people now appreciate it's like, oh, yes, this this company actually like practice what they preaches. Yes, it's a big company. They sometimes have to make compromises, but they've been a net positive for the ecosystem. I think for us, it's we don't need to be maximally on chain. Like, that doesn't actually make the product any better. If anything, it makes it worse and more expensive. And so for us, it's it's sufficient decentralization mentality is this pragmatic mentality of saying, do the the one thing that matters to make sure that that is sovereign, you know, censorship resistant, no one can go muck with that,

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  and then take pragmatic approaches everywhere else and be transparent and open in how you approach it. And I think here here's an example. If we had a maximally decentralized attitude, the Warpcast client would be open source. And the expectation is everyone would run their own hub because you shouldn't trust any hub that would be run by someone else. And so you get into a place where you you've actually achieved even more decentralization, but you don't have any usage. And so for us, this this mentality of sufficient decentralization is live up to something where you can look, you know, vitally in the face and say, yes, this is a credibly neutral decentralized network, but we are not going any more decentralized than we need to for the average user because the the user experience doesn't improve here.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  And and the developers actually have sufficient decentralization to have a great experience. And so that's where you're kind of trying to meet, rather than being purely ideological and saying, oh, I can make this system even more decentralized. There's a time and place for that, you know, potential systems that are designed for people who really need that. But I think the reality is any version of the world where the social media that we use is built on kind of a permissionless open system, where you can't rug people with APIs, which is the case of Farcaster. I think it's a significant improvement over where we are.

• 1:02:31David Hoffman?

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• 1:03:16David Hoffman?

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• 1:05:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so me as a Farcaster user, when I create my Farcaster like identity and this Farcaster ID, right, that's where the the point at which my crypto address, my public-private key gets associated with a Farcaster ID and that association-

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Farcaster's social security number.

• 1:05:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, basically. And that association is the thing that is like an entry is created on-chain for that.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  And with that, once we have that entry on-chain, that is the piece, that is the property registration that needs to be completely permissionless and decentralized. And by the way, that's some gas fee for creating it. Like, I'm wondering, where's that record stored? Are you using a layer two of some-

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  We're using OPMainNet to store that.

• 1:05:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so it's OPMainNet?

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you can think of that as like a big phone book, and it's just two columns. It's FID and then the Ethereum address that controls it.

• 1:06:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  But once we have that-

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  Through transitive property.

• 1:06:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  So once we have that, we've created sort of a property right where Farcaster doesn't own my account and the social graph that I'm building that's associated with that account. I own my account. And what is that secured by? Well, it's secured by OPMainNet, which is settled and secured on top of Ethereum. So effectively, I own the property rather than the Farcaster protocol, rather than Dan Romero, rather than the developers who are working on the Warpcast client, right?

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  Yep. So the worst thing I can do to you is I run Warpcast, right? Or, you know, the company Warpcast, which is the biggest client. And let's say you started posting something illegal. There's certain types of, you know, I'm a big free speech believer, like, you know, I live in the US, big believer in the Constitution. But there are types of speech that are not protected by the Constitution and some types of speech that are actually kind of illegal, okay? You start doing that on Farcaster, I can't actually affect your account on the protocol. Like, we've designed it so that we cannot. Like, there is no way, can't be evil at that level. I can do though, and Warpcast is a US Delaware-based company. I have to follow the laws in the US.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  So I will label your account, or that content specifically. I'm not going to render it. I'm not deliverable.

• 1:07:27David Hoffman?

  You're not going to render that in the Warpcast client?

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  Just like Gmail can decide what spam on Gmail and Yahoo can decide what spam on Yahoo Mail, Warpcast can decide what content it's choosing to not show. The core difference, though, is let's say we get really aggro on what we decide to show versus not. We think we know better than anybody else. People will start to move. They'll move to another client because Warpcast is built on Farcaster. So your identity can just be booted up in the same way that if you don't like what Wallet X and Ethereum is doing, you just take your mnemonic and put it in Wallet Y and the account can actually live in both wallets at the same time. Exact same property in Farcaster.

• 1:08:08David Hoffman?

  But what actually transfers over? Because I think a very important thing in the property is actually the accounts that I affiliate with, who I follow on Twitter. Does that transfer over to alternative clients? How does that transfer over?

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  That mapping, the social graph, lives outside of Warpcast, any client. It lives at that kind of the BitTorrent hub-like layer.

• 1:08:33David Hoffman?

  The Farcaster hub layer, that's where that lives.

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  Which again is, yeah.

• 1:08:37David Hoffman?

  Where is that data stored? So like my account and my ownership, my mapping to my keys to my Farcaster account lives on the OP stack. And when I have a social graph, where does that data live? And how do I control my access to that data?

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  So anyone can run a hub. We have, I think it was this morning, 250 unique hubs around the world. That's it.

• 1:08:58David Hoffman?

  Okay, so that's like a Farcaster node.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  And then it would work. Warpcast can't censor anything at the hub level.

• 1:09:04David Hoffman?

  That's the second layer of the cake. Okay, so we have the OP stack mainnet, which I control my keys, then therefore my Farcaster account. And then there's another layer on top of that called Farcaster hubs, which control social graphs. And that is an open permissionless node system that maintains the relationships between Farcaster accounts. In more of a Web 2, non-blockchain way, maybe not Web 2 way, but a more centrist resistance way. BitTorrent network more.

• 1:09:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so I think the best way to think about that is if you want to get data onto that that middle layer, you have to have the right signature from the account that controls it in the blockchain. And that's that's how those systems are designed. So you can't spoof any information. No one can remove your information. Those hubs just say, whatever's on the blockchain, that's the canonical representation of someone who's allowed to post into this network under that ID. And so then the whole system works. Warp Cast, we run five hubs of the 250. We can't touch any data on those hubs. Like, we can't like, remove it. Like, the only thing we can do is prevent it from being rendered on our app.

• 1:10:12David Hoffman?

  One last decentralization resource cost question. Okay, so when we last talked a year ago, a farcaster was not on OP MainNet, then launched on OP MainNet. So I think that means like, the whole, like, some of the training wheels are gone from the system. Very cool. Now, also, there is a real cost to creating a user account. Only one cost per account, which is also very cool. Who pays for that? Is it is it much? Is it a lot? Is it something that needs to be worked on? And and what are the, you said the overhead costs are not much ongoing, because it's one per account, which is great, but still, it's a cost. What's the future of this cost? What's the future of this overhead cost to the farcaster or the warp caster farcaster business?

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so let's separate each of those layers. So at the blockchain level, right now, we have a kind of a gate fee to get on. Because if it was free, you would just have people put spam, right? Like, you would just register a whole bunch of these things for gas. And then you would you would load up, you know, each user has a maximum amount of data that they can put on hubs, which is very high, relative to what the average user uses. And so you would just fill these things up. And everyone's computer who's running one of these hubs would just be full of junk. And then there wouldn't be any space for anything else. The performance would be bad. It doesn't work. So we started when we went permissionless in November, so anyone could just interact with the contract, you didn't have to use WarpCast. We were charging $12 in OP made net ETH. To create an account?

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  To create an account, which obviously no social media basically charges you money upfront. That's not. So we have since brought that down step by step, just as we've monitored how much spam. It's now $3. So the idea is we are trying to find the Pareto optimal part of cost with spam. So spam has increased, like we kind of have a way of labeling it at the WarpCast, the app level, just in the same way that anyone can send an email, even if it's spam on the email protocol, but obviously Gmail is going to do a good job of filtering spam out. So WarpCast has that kind of same role. But we also have to think about if the amount of data required to run a hub gets too high, you will have less decentralization.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  This is the fundamental thing that Ethereum deals with, right? It's why Bitcoin did not increase their block size. Like if you really want optimized decentralization, you need to make it as easy as possible to run. Our view is if this system works, I actually think somewhere between 10 full hubs and 100 is the right order of magnitude of decentralization. Because if you have enough companies, then they can kind of like compete against each other and then no one has like one control. I'd probably say closer to 100 would make me happy, but I think our system actually should not have overly focused on decentralization. Because what we should be focused on is trying to get users, right? Because if you put too much friction to sign up, then people just stay on the centralized web too. So I think

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  we are trying to figure that out and it's iterative and it's, we're trying to be pragmatic around it. And then what happens is that the, once you've paid for that, you as a user don't have to pay anything to hubs. You can basically use any of these other apps in the ecosystem for free. And then if you wanted to be kind of hardcore and say, hey, I don't trust anyone else. I want to, I want to host my own client and my own hub and then just directly interact kind of with the blockchain like that, you're able to do that. And so I would say that's probably on the order of, I don't know, $100 a month or something. If you, if you really wanted to go do that. I don't, I don't think that that is appealing for most people, but for a business that's actually relatively inexpensive if you wanted to kind of like have a Farcaster app.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  And so we think that the architecture that we have today can scale to about 10 million users. We're at 85,000 total signups, so we have a ways to go. And at that point, I think because the hub system, so the on-chain system scales basically forever. But the the hub system actually hits a point where it would need to be sharded, right? And so sharding is hard on Ethereum because you don't want to have double spends. That's not an issue in the hub world, right? Like, you can actually post the same thing twice. So it's an eventually consistent system. It's not, it's not like a blockchain. And so our view is, once, once we hit that scale, so if we, if we do get there,

• 1:14:29Speaker 00

  we will have scaling solutions that are available to us that frankly, just much harder to do with blockchains. So I genuinely believe it won't be easy, and it's not like we've solved it now. I think we can get a system that can get into hundreds of millions of users, if not a billion plus users, over the next, you know, three to five years.

• 1:14:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I get it. Okay, so that's interesting where the costs are. The costs aren't actually like sort of block space or gas fees on OP mainnet, right? That's a, you're just registering kind of the account there. Mainly, the costs are put in place for civil resistance and so that you don't get bot attacked and that kind of thing. And then there's also this ongoing, at the second layer of the cake, the the Farcaster hub piece, this sort of, you know, state, state management, state growth thing that we see in in, in blockchains in general, which is like, if you let the state get too large and there's no cost associated with the state, then the nodes become harder and harder to run. So that that makes a lot of sense to me. I want to like zoom out, and we're going to get to lightning round questions in just a second.

• 1:15:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  But one last question before we do, and these are from some Farcaster users, but one last question. So going back to the fork in the road that we are kind of resuming, we're going back to the late 2000s, okay? And like, we're pursuing this open, decentralized, permissionless model instead. Talk to me about the Monetization, the economics behind that. Because by now, we are very familiar with getting our eyeballs sold. We're very familiar with massive social networks that are basically getting $200 a year, apparently, for all of the data that we produce on top of it. What's to prevent Farcaster from doing the same thing? Right?

• 1:16:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think it was Chris Dixon earlier this week re-impressed upon us that these small architecture changes, like you own your own property and can exit the system at any point in time. These can make have fundamental downstream consequences in terms of the business model and the economics. But like, I guess I want you to kind of paint that picture. What's to prevent you from just starting to sell all of like the Warp Cast users' data and monetizing that with an ad-based model? Like, what is a reason you wouldn't do this? How do we know that a Farcaster? You know, maybe it's not as evil now, but like, maybe you could be evil, or maybe the economics incent you to be evil. What's different this time?

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think about this a lot. So let's just go through a couple of things. One, as long as I'm around, I'm telling you, we are not doing anything scummy, because I don't want to be scummy. So that is the first line is like, there's a level of trust of like, who's running this thing? And I think Varun and I are very aligned on that. But, you know, things can change, right? So don't trust what I say. Okay. So second thing, there's a difference between Farcaster, the protocol, and Warp Cast, the app, right? So Warp Cast, the app, that's a business, right? Like, it's no different than Gmail. We will have to figure out how to monetize it at some point. We actually have some early efforts, and this is actually, I'll get to in a second. But will there be a day that Warp Cast has ads? I'm pretty sure, yes.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  It's a model that a lot of consumers, I don't like, but, you know, as soon as X offered the premium subscription where I could get them out of my feed, I paid. Like, I just, I much prefer my attention to not be looking at ads.

• 1:17:53Speaker 00

  But a lot of consumers, they're like, well, I'm fine with ads. It's like people who watch network TV, right? Like, so I actually don't want to judge people who say, hey, I'm actually willing to get a free experience for ads. Like, that's a personal choice. I think there are ways that you can do it and not be kind of like, you know, surveillance capitalism-y. But here's the important thing, and actually, I think the best analogy to just think about is Coinbase in its business of kind of being a crypto brokerage. If Coinbase, if you have a Coinbase account, if Coinbase starts doing a bunch of stuff that you don't like, you know, you can move your ETH, your Bitcoin, your Solana, whatever, to Kraken, to a self custody wallet, to whatever additional competitor, right?

• 1:18:39Speaker 00

  That does not exist in Web 2. Like, it just doesn't. Like, there is no exit while still having Interop. That, Farcaster, that works right now. So if Warp Cast starts doing stuff that you don't like, right? Dan and Varun are no longer there. The kind of like, you know, minion middle management takes over and starts to just run the Web 2 playbook. The discerning consumers will just leave. They will literally go to a different client, and then they will have the option to be either running a client that they control 100% for the hardcore people. Or I would imagine the market is going to go, okay, great, we'll just offer a client that you pay us, I don't know, $9 a month, $10 a month, you don't see any ads. And it's just like, we respect your, your, you know, your time, and we're targeted towards people, and we're offering a premium experience.

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  That cannot exist today. I cannot go do that on Twitter or Instagram, because their business model is, no, no, no, like, we want you to be in our client because we want to show you as many ads.

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  By the architecture of Farcaster, you can just move, right? You don't have to worry even about, oh, does my account get migrated? You can run two clients at the same time. So maybe Warp Cast has a feature that you really like. In the same way that you can use MetaMask, and you can use Rainbow, and you can use Coinbase Wallet with your Ethereum address, and you can use it on different platforms and different use cases, you can do the exact same thing with Farcaster. Because we designed the system to have the identity live outside of the company. And I actually think it's a better improvement on even something like email, because if you think about it, if you have a Gmail address, you have a lot of history with that Gmail address. It's used in a lot of different services. If you want to go change your email to a different provider or be self-hosted,

• 1:20:15Speaker 00

  it's a lot of work. So every time you sign up for a new service with an email, you get locked in because Gmail controls the domain. And that doesn't exist within the Farcaster architecture. It's much more like Ethereum where your Ethereum account, your wallet, lives in Ethereum, not the actual wallet. Same thing with a Farcaster account. It's, you're just providing an interface. Through those cryptographic keys that are underneath to interact with this Farcaster protocol. And so I really believe in markets and I believe that if we design the system right, that's the part that's can't be evil is the core architecture of the protocol enables you to seamlessly go use another client, test it out while still keeping yourself at Warp Cast. And then if you decide, hey, I think these guys are

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  doing the wrong thing, just you're immediately booted up. No downtime. It's not even like an email newsletter where you have to wait for the domains to transfer. It's just like, no, you could actually use simultaneously.

• 1:21:09David Hoffman?

  Dan, it's been just really cool to see a lot of the traction show up in the Farcaster universe. I know even frames aren't really a crypto thing. They're not crypto at all, but they kind of embody crypto ethos, I think, in the openness and the complexity at the margins sense of the of the application. So this is really very exciting to see. Ryan put out this tweet a couple of days ago after we scheduled this podcast asking-

• 1:21:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait, wait. Did you say tweet, David? Cast, my friend. It was a cast.

• 1:21:36David Hoffman?

  Pardon me. Pardon me.

• 1:21:38Speaker 00

  It's like Xerox and Kleenex. I'll take it. As long as you're doing your tweeting on-

• 1:21:44David Hoffman?

  On Farcaster.

• 1:21:46Speaker 00

  I'm happy. Actually, Vitalik said as much the same. So, yeah, you can tweet, just do it on Farcaster.

• 1:21:52David Hoffman?

  On Farcaster, yeah. So Ryan put out a tweet on Farcaster asking for some community questions. You ready? Do you have time for a quick lightning round?

• 1:21:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 1:21:59David Hoffman?

  All right. So this is from Leighton Cusack, who's actually the second Cusack to be invoked on this podcast. What parts of Farcaster are still centralized? Is Farcaster unruggable today? And is that still the goal in the future?

• 1:22:13Speaker 00

  So we have two features. So there's the technical answer where I could say, yes, it's all decentralized at the core and nothing. But I always start with the practical experience from the consumer. What is centralized? So if you use Warp Cast, which most people do, that's our client, we have two components on Warp Cast that are popular that have not been pushed into the protocol. And I don't think we are going to do it, at least for the next six months. Like, we want to actually really understand the shape of the feature. One downside of doing everything at the protocol level is you move really, really slow. Not going to pick on any blockchains, but we all know the rate of innovation of blockchains that are more decentralized, which is a lot more hurting cats, right? So I think for us, we want to optimize on getting the feature right and keeping that at a centralized level before pushing it down to the protocol.

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  We also like to think we spent three years, we delivered on hubs, the permissionless signups, all that works and like that's unruggable. So I think we've, we've earned some trust with our community, but those two features are one, uh, our DM system, direct cast that just lives on Warp Cast. And so there are, you know, other protocols that offer that. There's potential to push it into the Farcaster protocol as a spec, make it interoperable with other ones. We're just not going to deal with that in still six months. Like we just added like emoji reactions. If I had to have like tried to coordinate that across like five clients and it just moved way slower. So direct cast, the DM system, not, not, um, uh, decentralized. And then channels, we've added some additional functionality, basically mod functionality, which I think is

• 1:23:38Speaker 00

  important for a subreddit. So the, the content for channels, the, the kind of topics is in the kind of decentralized system, the, the roles of mod are centralized right now. If I'm talking to you a year from now, like it seems like we do, I, I am going to assure you that those channel stuff will all be decentralized in the protocol.

• 1:23:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Question from Johnny Mack. This is at nonlinear. Eith. What are some great opportunities for other clients, Dan?

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  Uh, this is a joke because I usually tell people when they request features on, uh, Farcaster to, to us, I say, you know, we're focused on X, great opportunity for another client.

• 1:24:15Speaker 00

  I think so. Great, great opportunity for another client. Uh, but I, I look, I think the obvious answer is look at what works really well in web two. And as we develop out that level of content, so there is no image oriented client, there is no video oriented client. So those are the two obvious ones for me. Um, and a little alpha, although this will launch tomorrow. So, you know, whatever, but we are launching video tomorrow, which we've held off on. We, we basically didn't think people would go and create it, but now we're at a stage where we actually have enough people banging down the door to want to put video in, we'll do it. So I would love to see bankless videos on Farcaster.

• 1:24:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Are we talking like 90, like episode, episode, I mean, this episode is.

• 1:24:55Speaker 00

  Starting with five minutes, 4K, and then we'll work our way up.

• 1:24:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Nice.

• 1:24:59David Hoffman?

  Where are, where is that stored?

• 1:25:02Speaker 00

  Cloudflare, like you, you, you as the client choose where the, the data is stored. Right? So just like I choose where my website is hosted. Like that, that is the key thing is you don't have to go use a decentralized technology there. But the beauty of the system is if someone wants to go build it's an amazing video streaming platform. LivePira is a great example of one, or, uh, you know, I, on IPFS. They're free to do it. And if it actually offers a better experience, people are going to choose that.

• 1:25:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you could just change the pointers. It's like DNS, right?

• 1:25:31Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:25:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:25:33Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:25:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, next one. What kind of frames would you like to see built on Farcaster? This one comes from me.

• 1:25:40Speaker 00

  I think that the, I, I, I have a, if you search on Farcaster frame idea, I have a bunch where I've just been throwing them out. I, I think two, two areas or one, um, games I think could be pretty powerful because obviously everyone is on a social graph. And like they can actually do kind of interaction across other people.

• 1:25:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:58Speaker 00

  Uh, like one last night I was thinking of is definitely not Pokemon. Just call them pocket monsters that resemble Pokemon, because I guess the Pokemon company likes to sue people like Pal World and things like that. But, um, just, just make it so you can like have a little critter and have them battle other people. And again, maybe it doesn't appeal to everyone, but like that kind of expressivity around like, okay. Frames today have been, to use a Chris Dixon thing, pretty single player. Make them multiplayer. Like that, that I think is, is you're on a social graph and like people are being social. So, so make them social.

• 1:26:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Question from, uh, Tim Riley, putting yourself back into your shoes when you first started Farcaster. What would surprise past Dan the most about what has actually happened so far?

• 1:26:43Speaker 00

  I think it was pretty naive. Um, I, I thought I was coming into Farcaster with this like great network in Silicon Valley and crypto people who were all at the time. This is kind of pre, pre the current regime at Twitter complaining about Twitter. And I thought that I would actually be able to kind of like pull them in. Maybe a little, little too optimistic there. And I think going back to this point of like the state of preference. We need an alternative decentralization is important. And then the reveal preference is, um,

• 1:27:11Speaker 00

  I have an audience that I worked really hard for the last 10 years building on Twitter. Like, I'm not going to go switch over. And so I think that was a, that was a mistake. Should have had a different initial go to market. We didn't focus on mobile enough in the beginning. And like, this is now, I just like, you know, the Steve Ballmer developers, developers, developers. I also tell to anyone building crypto, mobile, mobile, mobile, like that, like, yes, it's hard. Apple is really a pain with, with anything crypto. But that's where consumers spend time. So meet the consumer where they are, not, not like what gives you the easiest time in terms of the experience that you want to build. And I, and I think just like pushing us to be creative faster on mobile, I, I think would have just saved time, right? Like, maybe, maybe this would have been happening a year ago with all the stuff versus three years in.

• 1:27:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dan, as we close this out, this has been a fantastic conversation and you've certainly built a lot in the last year. So as we close this out, I have kind of like one final question on my mind. What I saw in Farcaster is particularly the innovation that's being developed lately on frames is a way to onboard the masses to crypto. And I'm wondering if you're seeing that as well. And like, the, the thing for me is Farcaster treats crypto as a first-class citizen. And anybody can build crypto use cases. And you have this nucleus of the, I don't know how many users are on Farcaster now. We're in the hundreds of thousands, presumably we're not into the millions. But you've got this nucleus of crypto builders who are, who are here and doing things.

• 1:28:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do you think Farcaster can onboard the next generation in crypto? How do you think that plays out?

• 1:28:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, and this is actually relevant, I think, for the Bankless audience, although they probably are crypto native. But we actually just launched free signups on Warpcast. So remember, I said that the protocol charges a fee. So Warpcast is actually paying the protocol for every signup. But we were slowly expanding this program again in the mind of we don't want to be overwhelmed with spammers. We're just trying to take the playbook, just go use any of the top social media apps in the App Store. And it's not from a surveillance capitalism point of view. It's just a these apps are so big and scaled, they know what works to onboard people, right? Every step in an onboarding funnel is a potential place to lose interest or get frustrated. And so if you go through the Warp Cast signup process, you don't need any crypto. We generate

• 1:29:33Speaker 00

  a wallet behind the scenes. We actually now offer the ability to just link a phone number, not for a like, oh, like we want to send you text messages. It's actually that if you're from a country and we just expanded it to another 10 countries today, we're giving anyone in those 20 countries a free signup. So we're paying $3 fee, and we'll see how long that sustains. But ultimately, it's actually about just like reducing friction on onboarding in a way that isn't crypto forward, but crypto powered, right? So the idea is like when you actually onboard, we are registering something on chain on your behalf. But we don't require you to be like, oh, connect your Metamask. Oh, I don't even know what Metamask is. What, buy some ETH, bridge it to OP mainnet. Like, none of that happens. Like, we just assume even for, and

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  this has actually been a pushback point, is crypto natives go, wait, I want to onboard with crypto. And we're like, well, we have a limited amount of time, resources, just onboard with an in-app purchase. Apple doesn't provide us any of your PII, so it's not doxing you. And that's how we do it. Because it's just like, we have one onboarding flow, and we want to simplify as much as possible. Because if we can, then we have an opportunity when the gardening channel takes off, or the F1 channel takes off. It has nothing to do about crypto, and just everything about like, Farcaster is just like a better piece of social media, or a platform for social media because of frames and all these other things. Those users don't have to Know anything about crypto? And then the best part is, once they show up, they by definition have an Ethereum wallet. And then they're going to start to see frames in the feed.

• 1:31:03Speaker 00

  That's like mint. It's like, well, what's that? And you start to actually get curious because you start spending time in a place rather than this thing where you put up a huge barrier before you sign up of saying, well, first get a Coinbase account, then you get a wallet, then you can actually go use the thing. It's no, it should just be in the app that you're using and saying, well, okay, like, how can I use this? Wait, I just minted something? What does that even mean? And then you so you kind of learn. And I think that's how you do it. It's kind of like warm people up to crypto rather than throw it in their face right from the beginning.

• 1:31:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  I love it, Dan. Yeah, it's very exciting. So when they onboard a Farcaster, they get an Ethereum wallet in the back door? And then they could start using it without even knowing it, without some of the onboarding pain we've seen so far in crypto. Dan, thank you so much for joining us today. Really cheering Farcaster on and everything you guys are doing over there.

• 1:31:51Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:31:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless listener, a few action items for you. We brought Dan on a year ago. We'll include a link to that episode in the show notes. Also, the Paul Graham post that we talked to. And then finally, look, if you don't have a Farcaster account, this is a, I guess, self sovereign social media account. Like you actually own it. It's registered property that sells through the Ethereum blockchain. Then go create one. We'll include a link so you can go do that and go follow Dan and follow Bankless while you're at it. Got to end with this risks. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. Vote for Black, you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks.