Where is Farcaster still centralized?

June 2025 edition

Important to call out: our top priority remains user growth. Prematurely solving any of these potential issues below doesn’t help user growth in the near-term. So not a top a priority. May change in the future. 

1. Most users use the Farcaster app. A nerf on Farcaster app is de facto censorship from the protocol today. This will change as Coinbase Wallet, Zapper, Uno and other clients come to market.

2. Snapchain write nodes are run by the Farcaster team and Neynar. In theory we can collude to censor additional writes to the protocol. Low likelihood, but possible. Way to solve this is increase number of write nodes. But again, not an issue today.

3. Farcaster “channels” — metadata and creation are centralized. Content has always been decentralized via FIP-2. Creation is not available via API but metadata is. Making some progress on a plan to move channels into FIP-2 without having reliance on the Farcaster app. 

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Decentralization is a journey, not a swap.
Every step away from single-point-of-failure is alpha - even if sometimes you gotta trust the team not to nerf your memes.