What is Farcaster? Farcaster is a decentralized social network built on Ethereum that allows users to connect with each other without having to go through a third party. Let’s find out what is special about this project with Weakhand in this article.
The SocialFi segment is still quite new in the crypto market, to better understand this segment you can read the following 2 articles:
- What is Cyber Connect (CYBER)? Cyber Connect Cryptocurrency Overview
- What is Farcaster? Farcaster Cryptocurrency Overview
- What is SocialFi? TOP 5 Most Outstanding SocialFi Projects Currently
- What is DeSocial? Growth Potential of Decentralized Social Networks
What is Farcaster?
Overview of Farcaster
Social networks today are a way for users to connect with people as well as the world around them. However, some platforms take advantage of user data to gain illegal profits. Therefore, decentralized social networks are a potential solution to solve this problem. By eliminating 3rd parties, such a social network has the ability to provide greater privacy and security to users.
Farcaster is a decentralized Social Graph protocol that leverages the benefits of blockchain technology to provide secure and scalable user identity management, real-time settlement, and dissemination of updates. updates as well as decentralized access to all data on the network.
What is Farcaster?
Since its launch in 2021, as of now, Farcaster is in version V3 with many changes compared to the original V1 version. The cumulative number of users on Farcaster reaches nearly 30,000 people, although this number is still quite small when compared to Cyber Connect or Lens Protocol. However, with a new public ecosystem for the community, this number is truly impressive and is still growing strongly every day.
Farcaster’s mechanism of action
Before going into Farcaster’s operating model, let’s learn some key concepts in the protocol including:
- Accounts: Represent users on Farcaster’s network. Each account has a unique Farcaster ID (also known as fid) on the network.
- Usernames: Is the username pointed to the user account. Each user can connect multiple names to one account, but only one can be active. Farcaster operates its own Offchain namespace as fcast.id. Each Farcaster account can claim a free name. In addition, users can also use names from the ENS domain name service with the .eth extension.
- Signers: Includes a pair of cryptographic keys used to sign messages before transmission within the network. Each account can have multiple Signers, which is useful if users want to share account ownership or use multiple applications at the same time.
- Messages (messages): These are public updates on the Farcaster network such as creating a post, following someone or adding a profile photo.
- Storage: Storage grants each Account permission to publish messages to the network. It is rented by paying an annual fee, similar to renting space on a web server. Storage is managed and tracked on-chain using StorageRegistry Contract.
Farcaster consists of three layers: Identity layer, data layer and application layer. In there:
Architectural model of Farcaster
The identity layer includes a series of Smart Contracts also known as Registry Contracts used to manage accounts, memory for each account, and keys stored Onchain on Optimism. As for user names, they will be managed Offchain for namespaces operated by Farcaster or Onchain for domain names from third parties such as ENS. Registry Contract includes 3 main Smart Contracts:
- Registry Ids: Issue fids to create a new account on Farcaster.
- Storage Registry: Rent storage units for an annual fee. Each account must have at least one storage unit to publish messages on Farcaster.
- Key Registry: Allows each account to register subscribers for their activities on social networks such as posting, Like, …
Next is the data layer which includes many Farcaster Hub hosted Offchain to ensure good speed and performance to provide the best user experience. Each Farcaster Hub stores the entire public status or messages created by every account on the network.
Finally, the application layer includes all dApps that leverage Farcaster Hub’s common data source to develop unique features on its platform.
What is the Farcaster difference?
After learning about how it works, I found that Farcaster offers unique features as follows:
- First is the content distribution mechanism: Various types of user-generated social content (any information posted by users on Farcaster) are not stored on the Blockchain but are stored on the Hub node in Farcaster Network. This will help significantly reduce the cost of hosting and distributing content across the Farcaster ecosystem.
- Next is the data storage method: As a distributed storage node, Farcaster Hub is responsible for storing and disseminating user content. Each Farcaster Hub uses an incremental data structure such as Directed Acyclic Graph to store user content. This storage method allows nodes to quickly access the network and effectively synchronize the latest data.
- Finally, develop Client applications: Farcaster supports developers to develop different Client Applications by accessing the Farcaster Hub network to get data. and display that data to end users in a variety of ways. This provides users with a rich selection of applications and allows developers to maximize their creativity.
Through these technical methods, Farcaster has realized an open, secure and efficient decentralized social network that not only reduces operating costs but also gives users and developers a lot of freedom than.
Projects in the Farcaster Ecosystem
Applications in the Farcaster ecosystem
To date, Farcaster has attracted more than 30 different projects to build on its ecosystem. Here are some outstanding projects on the Farcaster ecosystem:
1. Warpcast
Warpcast is a social network frequently used by Vitalik to post information as well as share his views on a social issue. Warpcast is designed similar to twitter in terms of interface, users can post posts of up to 320 characters, Reply, and message others with the advantage that users’ messages will be encrypted before sending. Go,…
This is also the product built by Farcaster’s development team, and is also the most comprehensive and complete product on Farcaster. Up to now, Warpcast has attracted more than 20,000 users on its platform, accounting for more than 90% of the market share and greatly contributing to the flourishing development of the Farcaster ecosystem.
2. Paragraph
Paragraph is a decentralized social networking platform called SocialFi or DeSocial that allows users to create content, build their own communities and make money based on the content they create through community participation. willing to pay a certain financial level to be able to read it.
Paragraph’s operating mechanism is quite simple as follows:
- Step 1: Content creators build content on the Paragraph platform.
- Step 2: Content creators will attract people and their communities to their products on Paragraph.
- Step 3: Users will pay a fee to read the content. This is called Memberships fee.
- Step 4: Content creators and the Paragraph platform will share revenue with each other.
Paragraph aims to help developers profit transparently. Paragraph has also integrated with Farcaster or stores data on Arweave – a decentralized permanent storage platform.
In addition, Paragraph has also gone through 2 rounds of capital raising with the first round receiving an investment of 1.6M USD from some famous investment funds such as: Binance Labs, FTX Ventures, … As for the second round, although it was not announced Details of the amount of money raised to become one of six projects invested by Base Ecosystem Fund show the great potential and interest of VCs in Paragraph.
3. Unlonely
Unlonely is a live streaming platform built on the Base ecosystem with many interesting features such as betting, launching private tokens,… Unlonely’s development team sets this development goal becoming Web3’s Twitch, it is known that Twitch is one of the largest live streaming platforms at the moment.
To use the Unlonely platform, people only need to own a device with a network connection (both PC and Mobile) along with a Metamask wallet address. Currently, Unlonely is being deployed on both Blockchain Base and Farcaster giving users better access to its platform.
Core Team
Farcaster was developed by Merkle Manufactory company. Some key members of the team include:
Dan Romero: Co Founder
- He started as CEO of Coinbase in 2014.
- In 2019, he decided to start a business with Varun Srinivansan and became Co Founder of Markle Manufactory company.
- He worked as PM for OneNote – a software developed by Microsoft in 2010.
- After 3 years of work, he decided to start SoundFocus – a platform for sound, images and media.
- Then in 2015, he decided to leave SoundFocus to become director of engineering at Coinbase.
- After more than 4 years together, he and Dan Romero decided to start a business and established their own company called Markle Manufactory.
Investor
- June 13, 2022: Farcaster announced a successful $30M fundraising led by A16Z. Participating in this capital round are a number of other investment funds such as: Coinbase Ventures, Scalar Capital,…
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