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

> 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).

None of that matters, you’d be bringing all the Farcaster users with you.  But, the TAM for builders grows.

> fwiw, there are some crypto experiments going on there

Experiments, but no funded companies and they are even farther away from Crypto Twitter than Farcaster is.

I'll update my priors on AT Proto once they have multiple well-funded businesses building on it. 

Right now it's the core team +hobbyists.

The political / anti-capitalist nature of the core network is super polarizing for regular entrepreneurs.

> 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?

I suspect the builders that feel this way are building on the other permissionless network. fwiw, there are some crypto experiments going on there. Seems like morphing the Farcaster protocol to ride on AT Protocol would be an easy way to let MM focus on crypto and not have to also build a new protocol.

building @privy, ex-farcaster | surfing @ venice, ca | eating @ gjusta / gjelina | “lucky me, lucky mud” 🤠

Hyperliquid

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.)