Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

Our original thesis was incorrect: a decentralized permissionless protocol would allow other clients to grow users for the protocol.

This evolved into product-led protocol development (see blog post).

And even that has fallen short on the most important thing developers want: daily active users and user growth.

Updated version of this philosophy:

1. Make the underlying data and APIs as open as possible

2. Ensure that accounts / identities are portable and sovereign

3. Build an opinionated, high-quality client that is relentlessly focused on user growth. There will be reasonable criticism early on "how can I trust you won't stop building the protocol", but time and consistent shipping on protocol promises will earn trust (and assuming 1 and 2 actually work).

4. At some sufficient scale—not sooner than 10M+ DAU at the protocol—work on further decentralizing the protocol / hardening it from capture. And because you have a big client, you can do that.

https://danromero.org/product-led-protocols.html

My latest thinking on product-led protocol development

Should do a follow up blog post.