Farcaster – What’s Special About the SocialFi Project Launched by Vitalik Shill?

SocialFi is an area that has been receiving a lot of attention recently, especially with the appearance of Friend.tech, a SocialFi platform that has attracted a lot of attention on Base. In this article, let’s learn about a potential project, Farcaster, mentioned by Vitalik in an interview with Blockworks to see if there’s anything special about it.

Before jumping into the article, everyone can learn more about some of the following articles to understand better.

• What is Farcaster? Farcaster cryptocurrency overview
• What is SocialFi? Top 5 most prominent SocialFi projects today

What is Farcaster?

The SocialFi platform received a lot of attention from Vitalik

Farcaster is recently receiving a lot of attention through Vitalik’s “promotion”. This also happened twice with the first time happening in an interview with Blockworks, the founder of Ethereum mentioned Farcaster as a protocol to support social networking applications to become more decentralized.

The second time took place just a few days later after the X (Twitter) account was hacked to post a fraudulent link and caused followers to lose $690,000. The founder of Ethereum posted a series of articles on Farcaster explaining the cause of the incident, saying that it would not have happened if the recovery verification process was done using an Ethereum wallet the same way Farcaster does. presently.

The application that Vitalik uses is Warpcast – a dApp similar to Twitter built on Farcaster. He also regularly shares his information and opinions on this social networking application. Next, let’s learn in detail about Farcaster to see what is so special that has received such attention from Vitalik.

Overview of Farcaster

Farcaster is a fully decentralized Social Graph protocol and allows connecting applications and users through the infrastructure provided by Farcaster.

Here there will be two new concepts that everyone needs to understand, the first is Social Graph – a database that records social relationships. For the SocialFi protocol, when a Social Graph is built, applications will form a synergy that links and shares information with each other without going through a centralized party such as Twitter, Facebook and Google.

This is achieved because all user data in Social Graph is stored decentralized on the Blockchain and when users use dApp Social A, the data will be taken from Social Graph and sent to that application A. When new social interactions of users on Social dApps A, B,.. are created, that data is recorded in the Social Graph. All this shows, the data does not belong to the dApp but to the user. Therefore, users can freely move from one Social dApp to another without encountering problems with their data.

The second concept is “full decentralization”, when we look at Web2 social networks where corporations have access to users’ data and social relationships. With Twitter recently rebranding itself to X, we can see Twitter easily owning @x accounts without consulting the owners.

In a similar vein, Reddit recently changed the pricing for its API, wiping out a number of popular third-party apps. Through the above two cases, we see that the limitations on the freedom of users and creators are clear.

Farcaster describes itself as a fully decentralized protocol. Two users can always connect and communicate with each other, even if the rest of the network wants to prevent them from doing so, the network is sufficiently decentralized. This also means that developers do not have access to public data on Farcaster’s network.

Architectural model of Farcaster

Before going into Farcaster’s architectural model, let’s go over 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:

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.

Some Outstanding Updates of Farcaster

After launching Farcaster V3 version in August 2023, Farcaster has recently been opening the door for users to participate in its ecosystem before opening publicly to all users in the near future. Next, let’s take a look at some Onchain parameters on Farcaster.

Up to now, Farcaster has attracted more than 20k users to join its ecosystem with a total revenue of 335,000 USD. This is not a large number when compared to today’s leading SocialFi platforms such as Lens Protocol or CyberConnect. But Farcaster has quite detailed plans to be ready to publicly open for users to join its ecosystem later this year or early next year.

The chart above shows the number of daily active users on Farcaster, we see something extremely positive that the number of daily active users increases over time. At present, on average, Farcaster will attract more than 1,000 users to join its ecosystem every day.

Recently, Farcaster has also accelerated its activities to attract new users to join its ecosystem. So we are also seeing an increase in new users joining Farcaster with last week attracting 774 new users. In addition, another quite important parameter is that the total number of messages (including activities such as: Posting, liking, following,…) has reached nearly 6M. This also shows the active activities of users in the Farcaster ecosystem.

Outstanding Projects In The Farcaster Ecosystem

At present, Farcaster’s ecosystem is quite small, consisting of only 24 dApps. However, we also see outstanding projects appear, including:

Warpcast – A social network used by Vitalik

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,…

However, at the present time, to participate in the Warpcast experience, users need to receive an invitation from Farcaster to participate in their ecosystem experience. However, Warpcast was able to attract more than 10,000 users on its platform.

Paragraph – The project received a lot of investment from big names

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.

Unlonely – Potential Web3 live Stream platform

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.

summary

Although Farcaster’s ecosystem is still quite new with only more than 20 projects built on its ecosystem. But Farcaster has clear strategies to attract users and developers to its ecosystem. Above is all the information I want to introduce about Farcaster, hope everyone has useful knowledge.