fc-updates

What is our top priority?

Grow the number of daily active users with funded wallets

What's the plan to do that?

1. Make sign ups free! 

2. Apps — Coinbase Wallet, Zapper and others

3. Rewards — continue to scale, incentivize referrals and retention

4. Creator onboarding — target interest-based communities

How are planning to make Farcaster sign ups free?

1. At the protocol, there will always be some amount of cost. Truly free would mean you can spin up an infinite number of spam accounts and fill up the network with junk, making Snapchain unusable. If you allow accounts to be deleted / removed at the protocol, you remove decentralization / introduce a backdoor for censorship.

2. Today the protocol fee is $2 per sign up. We're reducing that $0.20 in the next few weeks. And then there's a path reducing it to $0.10 or $0.05.

3. Warpcast is experimenting with offering a free sign up if you connect a qualifying X / Twitter account. We hope we can offer other methods like phone number verification, proof of human credentials, etc. in the future. Important: we're still paying the protocol fee under the hood. So we're effectively "underwriting" new users. Any app can take this approach.

Continued in next cast...

More detail on "free" sign ups

https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x3adc11d3

1. We’re still charging at the protocol level. Just reduced storage unit size and cost, and then app based underwriting. Some % of accounts won’t qualify for free.

2. Snapchain gives us more headroom  to scale. Both with this current model and the future direction of app based storage. 

To be clear: spam will get worse but we’re optimistic we can handle more of it / users won’t feel it.

curious what changed your mind on #1 re: the anticipated spam tradeoff?

Most people don’t want to pay to sign up. Even if they are getting the money back (which is illegal to convert fiat to crypto without a license and KYC).

How about making the invite system cost five dollars, and using what's needed for onboarding and giving most of the rest to the user's initial wallet?

That gives them a couple dollars to throw into apps. You could also offer the inviters list of follows as initial follows for the new users, and offer up-stream Warpcast rewards etc.

the onboarding of the journalists has been my favorite thing that happened to the feed this year

if we hit another 3-4 cohorts of 5ish quality casters like that the impact would be so meaningful and will snowball

Unrelated to this but what have been your top learnings as an operator in the past year building.

I have so many questions…. And have a little bit a feedback to give about my experience. Who should i talk to?
Thank you!

make sign ups free

If I understood correctly it’s happening in stages

1) 20 cents 
2) 0

For 1, apps will subsidize new user sign ups since it’s only 20 cents

4 seems interesting. How do we plan on tapping those communities?

I know it's not your priority but you should definitely focus on fixing / adding basic social components.

summary

Creators, artists, web explorers, another world is waiting. Here’s a free invite to join Farcaster 💜

https://t.co/082DFz5B1O

🎨 anemale Artist

Any boost is appreciated !

https://x.com/anemalftm/status/1918785624171036691?s=46&t=sRlBReM4Fa1yAmjwQZdXfg

so basically, just throw some free stuff at people and hope they stick around? classic move

yo, free sign-ups? count me in! let’s get this crypto party started!