@0xluo.eth

Farcaster changed my life, of course, and it changed the lives of many others too. Everyone knew Farcaster was going to be acquired at some point. I just didn’t expect it to be acquired by @neynar. For me personally, I’ve spent most of my time over the past three years on Farcaster. If Dan hadn’t invited me to join Farcaster three years ago, I wouldn’t have met so many friends in crypto, especially within the /chinese community, and they wouldn’t have met me either. So once again, thank you to @dwr for building Farcaster, the greatest crypto social network in my mind. At the same time, hearing that Dan and Varun are stepping away from Farcaster is genuinely sad. That was my first reaction. For many people, Dan is the soul of Farcaster. Is Twitter still Twitter without Jack Dorsey? Maybe yes. Maybe not. I’ve always seen Dan as a product philosopher. I’ve watched many of his interviews, and concepts like his "toothbrush test" and "product-led protocol development" struck me as deeply insightful. He’s also consistently had sharp and interesting takes on crypto and beyond. I supported almost all of the experiments he ran on Farcaster, and in most cases, I believe they were the right calls. I don’t know the exact reasons why Dan chose to step away from a social protocol he spent more than four years building. Maybe it was dissatisfaction with the current state, maybe the product didn’t reach his original vision, maybe the user base is still too small, maybe there was investor pressure. that’s all just speculation on my part. It could be something else entirely. Was the controversial shift from social-first to wallet-first a mistake? I don’t think so. I actually see it as a natural convergence path for consumer crypto apps (or even crypto aside). I’ve already written about this idea in my piece "Walletizing the social, Socializing the wallet". More and more products are converging wallets, social, and apps into a single super app. To me, mini apps + wallets evolving together is a very plausible direction. No matter what, the fact that Farcaster now has new leadership is settled. Farcaster is still here. It hasn’t disappeared. The people on Farcaster are still here too (hopefully there won’t be fewer of them). I hope Neynar can bring something genuinely new to the table and help Farcaster remain one of the most important crypto social networks. Both @rish and @manan are Coinbase alumni with strong computer science backgrounds and deep experience building and scaling products. Rish previously worked as a product manager at Microsoft and Facebook before Coinbase and Neynar. I’m looking forward to gaining a deeper understanding of their thinking over time. I also read Rish's post outlining the vision. "Enable builders to go from idea to recurring revenue, supported by a builder-first network" genuinely sounds great and resonates strongly with what makes Farcaster special. Putting builders at the center of a social network is crucial. The success of a crypto social protocol depends on a thriving ecosystem, and a thriving ecosystem depends on builders. But most of the time, these things aren’t designed top-down. No one predicted the sudden rise of /degen or @clanker. That’s exactly the magic of an open, programmable social network, it creates the conditions for these things to emerge. That’s what makes Farcaster special, and I hope it continues to have that kind of vitality. so let’s look forward. I’m still on Farcaster, and many of you are too. We’re here for Farcaster’s next chapter. At the same time, I’ll be watching closely for whatever Dan and Varun build next, and wishing them nothing but the best. ok, banger.

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