Thanks to Claude again for organizing my braindump into an article.

If you hate the new wallet emphasis, this blog's for you.

If you love the new wallet emphasis, you can show me who's boss by buying $dfern.

Either way: clank clank.

Farcaster's Growing Pains: The Delicate Balance Between Crypto Innovation and Mass Appeal

Software Engineer @ Cadence Design Systems. B4: Stanford EE / Illinois ECE

dfern

fwiw, couldn't agree more with dan. sad, but true.

1. i spent most of last year experimenting with URL to IRL and social connection; it doesn't scale OR you need an entire product team focused on it (think 222, rodeo, timeleft, partiful or luma, etc.) and even then it is still a HUGE risk with slow growth.

2. farcaster is mostly crypto users and has crypto primitives (wallet, coins), but the average person doesn't want to hang out on a crypto social network so >half the existing content and exciting features don't make sense to them. this impacts user acquisition and drives churn.

3. rewarding content with $$ is simply not sufficient to attract new users and have them retain at scale; this was immediately obvious after onboarding the journalists or college students and experimenting with the creator rewards. increasing rewards, improving video UX, etc. was never going to change that.

4. my creator/user onboarding was hand-to-hand combat and the common denominator across the most successful onboarded users was the effort or attention dan, linda or i gave to the relationship; again, not scaleable.

leaning into the wallet and tokens is the single greatest decision farcaster has made (outside of its permissionless primitives) to support growth and i fully endorse it, even if it isn't the vision i initially signed up for.

in fact, i wish the decision to let go of creators / content / connection and instead lean into crypto happened sooner.

I blame Claude for that bulletpoint, jk jk.

In all seriousness, I agree, y'all did actually do the thing, and I probably should have mentioned that, because I remember it well: cozy corners, find your tribe, URL to IRL etc. (I feel the messaging kinda worked b/c I have a hunch Rose at Bluesky started borrowing "cozy corners" from @ted, but I can't prove it.)

> Lead with social connection, not financial speculation in its public messaging

We tried this for 4.5 years. We saturated the market for people interested in this and aren’t specifically focused on political affiliation.

My push to you: the network is permissionless. If the opportunity for all social no crypto is so obvious, why isn’t someone building that client?

Additionally, I think it’s easy to say you should go after X or Y group of people. Much harder to actually spend the time trying to convince them only to have them tell you why they aren’t interested (or onboard and then just churn).

Can you really do that, though? It's like operating a vegan restaurant and steakhouse under one roof; the two concepts work against each other, which affects the environment you're creating. If you go full steakhouse, then it’s unlikely you’ll appeal to many vegans just because there’s a table where they can bring their salad. It’s not about purity, but rather about finding a middle ground where you build an environment that's appealing to various groups. That's obviously not easy, but it seems like the problem here is rooted in something other than the inherent impossibility of the task.

Somewhat, but I also agree with @barmstrong's idea that "action leads to information", as a startup your advantage is being able to move fast and try things in a quick feedback loop. I'd rather see Farcaster make enough ARR to be sustainable (& Clanker seems to have the juice) than to be so "pure" we end up like Mastodon.

I agree it's possible to run too much of a 'greedy optimizer' and reach a local maxima when there's a bigger hill to climb that requires going through the valley of despair. But we can run both experiments in parallel with multiple clients, see @recaster-fc wanting to emphasis more on social exclusively.

“There's an old trap in startup thinking: ‘We need to do something; this is something; therefore we should do it.’ But Farcaster hasn't really fallen into that trap”

Looks like it's caught in a ‘We need to do something that makes numbers go up quickly; this is something that makes numbers go up quickly; therefore we should do it’ trap, though.

You mean making money by trading? Yeah I don't think the current push is to try and capture the Hyperliquid daytraders or whales. There are other reasons to have a wallet: interacting with apps, social proof (like showing you bought an artist's NFTs before anyone else), creating groupchats based on POAPs, etc etc. IDK how much & how long Clanker will sustain ARR since I'm not a memecoin bull, but it is currently throwing off *a lot* more cash than I thought it would given $10 trades and whatnot, so I was wrong.

The common denominator between people who want public wallets is not making any money and swapping $10 at a time to larp