@dwr

State of Farcaster, December 2025 (I'm going to be writing a series of casts this week on this topic.) Varun and I have been working on Farcaster for over 5 years. The goal has always been to build an at-scale decentralized social networking protocol with 1 billion people using it every day. This is a hard problem and while we've made progress, we are still many orders of magnitude away from achieving our goal. Since the early days, we’ve believed two things matter most: sufficient decentralization and product-led protocol development. (Links to both blog posts below.) That’s led us to make pragmatic, not dogmatic, decisions about the low-level protocol and make a lot of iterative changes with our own app. We were never going to make decentralization maximalists happy. We spent the first 4.5 years with a social-first strategy. We shipped a working version of the protocol that was sufficiently decentralized and allowed multiple independent teams to permissionlessly build on and integrate it. However, despite many different attempts (and a few short-lived spikes), we haven’t been able to find a sustainable growth mechanic for the Twitter-like social network, i.e. no product-market fit. *** Earlier this year, we launched a wallet in our app. It has scaled quickly and we think it's the closest we've been to product-market fit in five years. But how does a wallet help grow a social network? First, every user who signs up, funds, and starts using the wallet is also on the protocol. The more people that find the wallet useful, the more people using the protocol. Second, because there’s an existing social network, we can more easily build social features for the wallet that leverage the protocol. It’s far easier to add a wallet to a social network than a social network to a wallet. Finally, we believe the best way to grow the number of people using the protocol is a “come for the tool, stay for the network” strategy. (The wallet is the tool, the protocol is the network.) See the post from Chris Dixon below. *** Does this mean the protocol is now a casino? No. The protocol is a collection of casts, follows, reactions, identities, and wallets. As a developer, you can use whatever you find most useful. The system is open. Our app is leaning more into the intersection between wallets and social, but there are other clients like Uno, Recaster, Cura, Base, Zapper, and Firefly taking different approaches. As a user, you have control over your experience by choosing your client. And if you still want to use the Farcaster app, you can use the following feed and keyword mutes (e.g. try muting $) to shape your experience.

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