Farcaster 的 2024

Author: 0xLuo, Mirror

2024 is a very important year for Farcaster. From the data point of view, the number of users has increased from less than 50,000 at the beginning of the year to about 750,000 today, and the number of daily users has increased from less than 2,000 at the beginning of the year to July. The highest number was around 70,000, and now it remains around 40,000. Although the current size is still small, Farcaster has obviously received more attention than last year.

Farcaster DAU changes in 2024

One of the important reasons for achieving such huge growth is that Farcaster, as a crypto-native social network, is already an important Social Layer for some public chains (especially the Base chain) and can also be regarded as an economy, AKA Farconomy. Projects born from the Farcaster community or assets issued through the Launchpad on Farcaster have gained a certain amount of market attention. The trading volume of mainstream tokens related to Farcaster has reached about US$1 billion in both April and November, of which The major ones are the $DEGEN, which was born at the beginning of the year, and the CLANKER ecological token, which was born at the end of the year.

Farconomy - Farcaster tokens trading volume https://dune.com/queries/4076475/6864083

1 $DEGEN and the creator economy

The first wave of growth in Farcaster in late January and early February this year was probably the interaction between the emergence of the community memecoin $DEGEN and the launch of the Frames feature. The wealth effect of the $DEGEN airdrop attracted many people. For a long time, the number of posts on Farcaster resonated with the price trend of $DEGEN. $DEGEN first started the craze for token rewards in the Farcaster community. As tpan said, the on-chain reward model launched by $DEGEN is an effective growth strategy, which to a certain extent encourages users to create high-quality content and actively participate. Community interaction.

Onchain Tipping as a Growth Strategy https://tpan.substack.com/p/284-tipping- as-a-growth-strategy

Later, there were other tipping tokens on Base such as HAM ($TN100X), $FARTHER, $BUILD (Nominating as tipping), $MASKS, $WILD, $ENJOY, $IMAGEINE on the Zora chain, and $ on the Optimism chain. REGEN et al. Lijin describes these as a kind of scene memecoins, which use certain community rules as their application scenarios. These have also become a unique creator incentive model on Farcaster to a certain extent.

However, most of the reward tokens have gradually declined due to the lack of actual value and application scenarios of the tokens. As the founder and leader, $DEGEN has more application scenarios than other reward tokens. Many developers in the Farcaster ecosystem All projects are trying to introduce $DEGEN into their own projects, and $DEGEN has almost become the currency of Farcaster ecological applications for a period of time. At the same time, Degen L3 based on Base L2 was launched at the end of March to maximize the utility of memecoin. This may also be the reason why the hot money pouring into Base pushed $DEGEN to ATH at the end of March.

The close integration of $DEGEN with Farcaster ecological applications is a win-win situation. For these ecological projects, Farcaster’s open framework and composability can quickly acquire customers from the technology’s valuable on-chain social graph that applications need for cold start. The scene memecoins represented by $DEGEN can act as the Farcaster ecological native currency to provide the asset liquidity needed for cold start of applications; and for $DEGEN Generally speaking, these projects provide token utility, have practical application scenarios, and even passive lock-up. Therefore, it can capture a certain amount of attention over a period of time, such as:

• Tip with $DEGEN: In addition to the basic application scenario of tipping other users, you can also participate in Perl guessing games, purchase tokens in Mintclub, participate in Degenpad ITO, etc. through tips.

• mint with $DEGEN: Zora and Highlight support minting NFTs with $DEGEN.

• Trade with $DEGEN: The initial versions of SocialFi applications such as Drakula, Jam, Braket.Game, Clubcast, AlfaFrens, FarFantasy, etc. all chose $DEGEN as their currency.

• Build with $DEGEN: After $DEGEN launched L3, many projects were built directly on Degen L3, and many Degen community applications were born.

The Degen Ecosystem Map (5/8/2024) https://warpcast.com/farmedia.eth/0x8f5c5358

However, Degen L3, which uses the Conduit service, had a troubled life. It stopped producing blocks for a time, which was called its darkest moment. It also faced disputes with Conduit during the migration attempt. The decline for several months was a huge test for the community and team. But fortunately, the team has been actively working on it. $DEGEN has been listed on Coinbase and Binance first, and the liquidity has been expanded from Degen L3 and Base to Ethereum and Arbitrum. Regarding the future of Degen, @jacek mentioned when participating in Tako Community Call #5 that he will continue to stimulate high-quality content and real interactions on Farcaster. The focus of the next phase of work will be on Degen L3 to attract more developers to create better Good "Las vegas on the chain".

Generally speaking, similar to the fate of Friend.Tech, many SocialFi applications in the Farcaster ecosystem (most of which also adopt various types of Bonding curve models) have only been popular for a while. On the one hand, the user base is small, especially in the Farcaster ecosystem, compared to the SocialFi application based on the Twitter social graph. On the other hand, the economic model itself is unsustainable. Most of it relies on users’ continued investment and token speculation, and lacks sustainable value creation or long-term incentive mechanisms. Therefore, when the popularity subsides and user participation and transaction volume decline, the project will face the problem of liquidity exhaustion.

But whether it is $DEGEN or the incentive model of the Farcaster Eco-SocialFi application, even if most of these creator incentive programs fail to maintain their popularity in the long term, their attempts are worthwhile. As @edisonchen said, the incentive model in social products should be As a game, there is no need to pursue perfect mechanics, and it should become a community culture. More incentive models should emerge to support different types of social network users and behaviors.

2 Farcaster is Dead? Long live Farcaster!

Farcaster's rise to prominence at the beginning of this year has allowed it to maintain a certain level of attention in the crypto market. It also completed US$150 million in financing on May 21, and the number of registrations that day also reached a new high. It was once considered a new generation of social leader. But after the climax, a very real problem is that when the entire crypto market fluctuates, when the tipping economy is no longer new, when SocialFi on Farcaster is no longer as popular as Friend Tech, when there is only a small profit on Farcaster, it seems Everyone has forgotten this again, and the number of daily active users and new registrations has gradually declined.

Some people have even begun to question, "The number of real users is bleak, and Farcaster, which raised 150 million yuan, is a VC set up for LP?" Of course, when he said that Farcaster only had 50 to 5,000 DAU, he misunderstood that the high-quality active users of Power Badger were equivalent to the overall active users. The actual DAU was still around 40,000 at the low point, but there must be some moisture in it, but this trend is indeed is declining. Many people have Farcaster accounts, but some are no longer active.

In addition, when the user base is relatively small, most projects in the Farcaster ecosystem require the courage and capital to "generate power with love". Due to various reasons, we have seen many projects choose to terminate, start over, or even bid farewell to the Farcaster ecosystem. Projects such as nook (Farcaster client version, turned into a book, video and other interest sharing client), automod, wildcard, castgame, bearly, buttrfly and other projects have chosen to be discontinued. There are also some Farcaster builders that are more focused on Solana and Twitter. For example, @brian announced that unloney will move from Base to Solana and mainly operate on Twitter. @billzh announced that the audio space application aburra will stop updating, and launched a new SocialFi application tribe.run on Solana.

As @artlu, who also left Farcaster in August, said, people leave Farcaster for the following reasons:

• Immature technology: The technology is not yet perfect and there are many problems, such as data synchronization issues and network vulnerability.

• Closed community: The core community is small in size, conservative in thinking, has information cocoon phenomenon, and is not friendly enough to outsiders.

• Growth prospects are bleak: A growth strategy that expects more interesting content is unattractive and lacks the spark to attract new users.

• Limited business opportunities: You can only get some scraps from projects on Farcaster, because the main market has been occupied by the team itself and early entrants.

These criticisms are not unreasonable, after all, the data does not lie. It makes people sigh, is there still hope for Farcaster? Of course, those who are still on Farcaster believe that many things about Farcaster have not changed: the unique community culture, the builders who are still persevering, and the rich ecology brought by the open protocol, so even in difficult days, we can still see Some hope.

2.1 The team is keeping building

The team explained at FarCon that Farcaster’s general strategy is to grow with the crypto world, create more comfortable corners, and create more social LEGOs. In fact, the team has been actively communicating with the community, responding to the community’s opinions to continuously improve or launch some new features, and is committed to moving forward in accordance with the established strategies to increase daily activity.

• Growing with the crypto world means trying to make Farcaster a crypto economy to attract more crypto users;

• Create more comfortable corners and improve functions such as Channels so that different users can experience real social interaction here;

• To create more social LEGO is to improve the protocol layer functions, such as launching Frames, Actions and other functions, upgrading Snapchain, a faster and more scalable storage solution, etc., to improve the protocol usage experience and facilitate developers in this open , build various applications without permission on programmable social protocols.

These strategies may not be effective in a short period of time, but over time, they can form a highly sticky community, unique infrastructure and upper-layer applications. When the time comes, they will be a catalyst for rapid growth.

The path to 1 million daily active users https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x778b9e01

2.2 Grow with crypto → Synergy with the public chain

Farcaster's on-chain data is stored on the Optimism chain, and Frames also supports operations on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Degen, Gnosis, Optimism, Zora and Polygon chains. At the same time, most Farcaster users are bound to encrypted wallets (including EVM and Sonala address), so Farcaster is naturally an encryption-native social network. Because of this attribute, Farcaster is naturally closely connected with the encryption market and some public chain ecology, becoming the social layer of many public chains.

It may be because the founder of Farcaster has a Coinbase background and there are a large number of early users of the Coinbase ecosystem in the community, so it is naturally very close to Coinbase's own public chain Base. For Farcaster, most projects in the Farcaster ecosystem will give priority to the Base chain when issuing assets, thus becoming the target of speculation on the Base chain. The Base chain can help Farcaster grow into a crypto economy as a crypto-native social network. The Base chain Users of Farcaster can also become potential users of the social platform Farcaster. For the Base chain, most of Farcaster's users are loyal, high-quality Base chain users. In addition, Farcaster can not only be a high-quality Base chain project developer community, but also the back garden of many Base chain projects for community operations. Interaction, brand promotion, strengthen community vitality and user stickiness. The synergy between the social protocol and the public chain ecology can lead to mutual growth and mutual benefit.

2.3 Create cozy coners → a larger community

Friends map in Supercast.xyz https://www.supercast.xyz/map

Today, the Farcaster people have footprints all over the world. Farcaster is a social network, so of course it has social features. Many people who join Farcaster may have found their own "cozy coners" in various channels, and met some friends with similar interests through interaction. This connection has also expanded from Farcaster social media to some groups on Telegram/WeChat, and from online to offline. Whether it is Farcon in Los Angeles in May, Farcon Asia in Singapore in September, or Farcaster meetups held during various crypto conferences in Hong Kong, Dubai, and Bangkok, etc., you can feel the Farcaster community. Warm and friendly.

Fireside Chat ft. Dan at Farcon Asia in Singapore https://x.com/TakoProtocol/status/1838807434032484800

Doing projects on Farcaster requires the confidence and patience of a long- termist. Fortunately, we can see that there are still a large number of Builders gathered on Farcaster, and even formed a unique Build culture. In addition to North America and Europe, where developers gather, Builders on Farcaster have also spread all over the world, promoting the global adoption of Farcaster. We can see developer communities with local characteristics such as Farcaster Builders India (/fbi) emerging in the Farcaster ecosystem, and many Asian developers can be seen gathering together at FarCon Asia. At FarCon, EDCON, and FarHack during Token 2049, Farcaster developers have been creating new things. The Farcaster team also attaches great importance to the opinions of ecosystem builders and users, such as interactions on Farcaster, frequent AMAs, semi-monthly Farcaster Dev Calls, and Farcaster Dev Day events. As a result, we can see that new projects are constantly popping up on Farcaster, and Launchcaster, the former new project release platform, has always been very lively. Even though many of them were attempts that didn't go very far, they at least paved the way for others.

2.4 Make more legos → Create a programmable social network

Farcaster has always said that it is fully decentralized. Identity storage maintains a certain degree of decentralization on the chain, and content is stored off-chain with higher performance. In fact, Farcaster is compared with more decentralized social networks (such as Nostr). It emphasizes that it is programmable social, which allows users and developers to extend its functions and experiences programmatically. Farcaster can connect on-chain graphs and social graphs. Developers can use its open database Hub and API to build different clients and diverse applications without permission, creating more social Lego.

From open social graph to social reputation system

Kaito.ai, the encryption market analysis platform on Twitter, has been very popular recently, and it has also built a social reputation system based on the Twitter social graph. In fact, there are many social reputation protocols in the Farcaster ecosystem. Any developer can build a social reputation system based on Farcaster's open social graph. As one of the infrastructures for upper-layer applications, it is used for threshold screening, incentive evaluation, content filtering, etc. Representative ones include Power Badge, Openrank, FarSocres, Neynar user score and Talent's Build Score.

Social Reputation Systems in the Farcaster Ecosystem

• Power Badge

Power Badge is a label given by Warpcast to active, interesting and non-spam senders. Although it is no longer displayed on the Warpcast front-end, it is still the only social reputation system currently stored in the protocol layer Hub database. In the past, Power Badge had many application scenarios, including filtering search results on @buoy, turning on Priority Mode to filter comment areas on Recaster, creating PowerBadge-gated groups on Warpcast, creating PowerBadge-gated voice chat rooms on FarHouse, etc., and some projects in Power Badge users may be given priority when issuing airdrops or whitelists.

@ryya's Power Badge trilogy is the most in-depth study of Power Badge. In the article Unlocking the Power Badge, the influencing factors of Power Badge are analyzed in depth, including activity, quality, affinity and label. These parameters may be related to each other. dependent and may be dynamically weighted based on other dynamic factors such as DAU, user engagement, and interactions. The positive effects and potential problems of the current Power Badge system were also mentioned in the last article Balancing the Power Badge. New users may feel discouraged due to the priority recommendations and higher visibility that users with Power Badges receive, and the algorithm may be biased and users may try to manipulate the system. In the end, the team no longer displayed the Power Badge in Warpcast, and discussions about its adoption gradually decreased.

• Openrank

Openrank aims to solve the credibility problem in social networks through profile reputation scoring. Openrank's ranking strategy is based on two reputation graphs: attention and engagement. The "Following" ranking strategy is calculated only based on the following relationship between users, in which each attention action is given the same weight; the commonly used "Participation" ranking strategy comprehensively considers likes, replies, forwards, mentions, and followings, etc. Multiple interactive behaviors, each of which is given a different weight based on its contribution to trust, are used to measure and inherit trust, forming a comprehensive reputation ranking. (You can see a more in-depth introduction to the OpenRank mechanism in @rjs's 10. Deep Dive: OpenRank and Andrew Hong's OpenRank: Building Graph Datasets for Contextual Crypto App Feeds in the article).

Currently, in the daily reward share allocation of $DEGEN, additional daily shares are given to the top 5,000 Openrank users to reward high-quality active users. Openrank has also cooperated with Neynar to launch a personalized information flow "For you" based on Openrank rankings, which can be adopted by some third-party clients. Openrank also cooperates with Once Upon to view on- chain activity recommendations based on Openrank. In future Cura projects, the Openrank team will also use AI agents to manage Channels members, content governance and incentives based on Openrank rankings.

• FarScores

FarScores (also known as Social Capital Score/Rank) is a metric developed by Farcaster data infrastructure Airstack to measure a user's influence on the network. It quantifies users by analyzing the downstream impact of their actions such as posting, liking and forwarding content. social influence, and each Cast can also calculate Cast Scores based on FarScores to judge the influence of each post. In this Maximizing Your Social Capital Score on Farcaster article by @aaronv.eth, you’ll learn how to improve your FarScoes.

FarScores is used in the betting game Perl and the SocialFi card game FarFantasy, but most people know that FarScores may be through Moxie, the Farcaster ecological incentive project, which is also the largest application scenario of FarScores. At the beginning, Moxie airdropped to users based on the size of Cast Scores. Later, they also earned Moxie based on Cast Scores. Ordinary users can also get more Moxie returns by investing in Fan Tokens of KOLs or Channels with high profitability. Encourage more real and valuable social interactions through this incentive model. You can learn more about Moxie's gameplay in @kaloh's article Moxie's Leap to Base: Elevating the Onchain Social Economy.

• Neynar user socre

Neynar user score is generated based on user behavior on the platform. The score ranges from 0 to 1 and reflects the credibility of the user as a high- quality user. Users can improve their ratings through high-quality interactions with other high-quality users. Ratings are updated weekly. The scores of most users are in the 0.5-0.6 range, only more than 27,000 users have scores above 0.7, and only more than 2,500 users have scores above 0.9.

Neynar user score is widely used in the participation threshold of the Farcaster ecological memecoin launchpad. For example, @clanker once required a Neynar score greater than 0.5 to issue coins, and participating in the pre- sale of @larrybot coins required a Neynar score greater than 0.7.

• Build Score of Talent protocol

Talent Protocol is an aggregation layer of social reputation. It is centered on builders and connects as many of their on-chain and off-chain (Github, LinkedIn) behaviors as possible to aggregate qualifications, connections and credibility to create a unified open reputation layer. . Talent Passport aggregates a variety of reputation data points (Credentials), including identity (ENS, Gitcoin Passport, Farcaster account, etc.), activities (active users on different chains, Social Capital Rank representing Farcaster activity, etc.), skills (chain development records, hackathon activity records, etc.), a dynamic Builder Score is calculated comprehensively, representing the user's reputation level as a Builder on the chain.

The first well-known application of Builder Score may be the Talent team's previous Builder airdrop incentive project BUILD. Part of the daily nominable score is linked to your Builder Score. Currently, Talent's Build Score has been adopted by many applications, such as Basenames, Etherscan, icebreaker, Web3.bio, etc., and is expected to play a role in unsecured lending in the future.

From diversified clients to a comprehensive application ecosystem

As an open social protocol, Farcaster naturally has many developers building client applications based on it. However, it is not easy to "build your own client" and break out of warpcast. Many clients "collapsed before they started their business", such as many early clients Discove and Jam (early versions were ordinary clients) have been transformed. This year, many clients also announced that they would stop updating, such as @slokh's flink and nook, as well as wildcard, a client with its own token economics, and buttrfly also chose to shut down at the end of the year. But there are still clients that have found their own ecological niche, a certain level of PMF, and are relatively tenacious. for example:

• Social aggregation clients for multiple social networks @fireflyapp, @yup, @phaverapp.

• @woj's @super has many convenient functions and is actively exploring anonymous publishing, AI pets and other functions. The subscription system guarantees a certain income.

• @haole's @recaster-fc is updated and iterated very quickly according to user needs, and it actively integrates Moxie, Clanker data dashboards, etc. for user convenience.

• @farquest, in addition to the client, he is also actively exploring functions such as memecoins trading.

• @kiosk, formerly of the mirror team, integrated Farcaster social information flow and NFT information flow.

• @herocast by @hellno.eth focuses on team collaboration, multi-account and user growth.

In addition, there are some special clients that integrate Farcaster or vertical fields based on their own original websites.

• @blockbeatsasia.eth: The first news media platform to integrate Farcaster to build a community.

• Takocast: Based on Farcaster's theme of "High tech, High life", it is a unique community that gathers cutting-edge human groups who are passionate about scientific exploration and pursue personal sovereignty.

• @telcaster: Farcaster client based on Telegram Mini-app.

In addition to the client, diversified applications based on the Farcaster open protocol are emerging in endlessly, such as short video @drakula, long video and live video @streamm, picture sharing @moshicam, @rodeodotclub, prediction market @swaye, /limitless, on-chain Information tracking and direct copy trading @interface, /castmoney, group chat and trading /frens, memecoins trading @bolide...

Of course there are many more that I haven’t mentioned yet, scattered among my casts over the past year. @sebastianlehrer once produced a relatively rich Farcaster Ecosystem Map (updated as of June 22), and a16z also listed some Farcaster ecological projects in the State of Crypto Report 2024 (released on October 16), but now they are not It's very comprehensive, after all, the Farcaster ecological projects are also changing with each passing day.

Farcaster ecosystem projects (by a16zcrypto, Oct. 16, 2024) https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/state-of-crypto-report-2024/

In short, because there are so many builders gathered here, and because Farcaster is an open, permissionless, programmable, composable, crypto-native social protocol, it is natural that Farcaster has a very rich application ecosystem. There are always some high-quality products that are innovative, keep up with the market, and can meet the needs of some users. With a community and product foundation, what is missing is attention. It only takes a small point to detonate the whole thing. ecology. Sure enough, when the market situation gradually improved, there was still an east wind blowing here.

3 AI is the antidote to DeSoc

2024 is still a year of rapid advancement in AI, and of course this trend has also spread into the encryption world. jeffy yu even proposed the concept of web4 in the future, which is an AGI network that combines the social interactivity of Web2, the decentralized autonomy of Web3, and the intelligent capabilities of AI. In web4, AI will be embedded in every corner, where agents can perform complex tasks, generate creative works, and innovate autonomously in ways we have yet to fully imagine.

As defined in the Google Agents Whitepaper, an AI agent is an application that observes the world and uses the tools available to it to achieve a goal. They are autonomous and can act independently without human intervention. Social networks are actually a good space for AI agents to show their talents. So Farcaster, as an open, programmable, and combinable social network, is naturally an excellent petri dish for AI agents, and it has the unique characteristics of encryption native. As a result, we saw AI agents begin to emerge on Farcaster, which caused the market to turn its attention to this place again and drive the prosperity of the entire ecosystem.

3.1 Memecoins + AI Agents

Farcaster initially had some tool-like AI agents, such as @asggina.eth, which can obtain the latest encryption data and news, and @atlas, which can obtain Farcaster information. But it wasn't until the emergence of Aether (@aethernet) that people began to find it interesting to interact with AI agents. Aether was deployed by @aethernet by @martin, the developer of the featured memecoin Higher. It initially served as a promotion ambassador for the Higher community and helped Higher move towards Agentic Network. We can see from our interactions with it (such as Jesus Crypto Plaza's interview with Aether) that aether is reasonable, sincere in interaction, and logically clear, even if this relies on the ability of the Claude model. As a result, Aether quickly accumulated a large number of fans on Farcaster.

Aether has its own wallet address, can accept donations, has its own Hypersub membership subscription, and issues NFTs on Zora, so it has made a lot of money from its popularity. At the same time, it also has the ability to interact independently. It will summon @paybot to send money to people, summon @bountycaster to issue bounty tasks, accept rewards from others, and will summon @asggina to answer questions that it does not understand. Therefore, the emergence of Aether has also attracted attention to these projects. In addition, the ERC20z standard NFT issued on zora can be traded on artrun, and cast has also been issued as memecoin by belief. It can be said that the emergence of Aether has greatly promoted the prosperity of Farcaster ecology, which also implements the concept of "Aim HIGHER, Win Together" of the Higher community.

So what are the special features of AI agents running on Farcaster, as stated in the article "Farcaster: The Next Big AI Agents Hub?" by Bankless.

• Without API restrictions, Farcaster is decentralized, programmable and composable;

• Farcaster accounts can have self-hosted wallets, providing the basis for on-chain identity and transactions;

• AI agents can interoperate with Farcaster's extensive ecosystem.

The memecoins community has launched various AI agents to catch up with the AI ​​narrative, which is an effective way to regain market attention. After Aether got off to a good start, more AI agents were added to Farcaster. For example, the $BLEU community launched @elefant, and the $MFER community launched @mfergpt, which also plays a similar role as a community promotion ambassador to interact with users. In addition, @deployer, the founder of the Ham ($TN100x) community, has launched a more instrumental @bankr, which can be interacted with in the cast to quickly purchase tokens. It will also be expanded to Twitter and independent terminals in the future. The $ENJOY community has launched the NFT issuance agent @enjoyr. By interacting with it in the cast and attaching a picture and name, you can quickly launch an open edition 1155 NFT.

3.2 AI Agents → memecoins

In this memecoins supercycle, the trend of memecoins will of course spread to every corner of the crypto world. When Solana’s pumpfun issuance of memecoins is in the limelight, a unique memecoin launchpad finally appeared on Farcaster

• specifically for issuing coins. AI agent @clanker. We all know the story behind it. A large number of assets were issued through Clanker, which turned the market's attention back to the Farcaster economy.

@clanker allows users to interact with it within the cast, telling it the token name and symbol to quickly issue memecoins on the Base chain, making the issuance of memecoins so convenient that only cast to launch is needed, and the issuer can also get a share of the transaction fees. . The concept of AI agent issuance of coins is certainly in the spotlight, but part of what made Clanker so popular is inseparable from the legendary stories (Lores) behind the memecoins issued by Clanker.

The interaction between Aether and Clanker is an opportunity for Clanker to quickly become popular. Aether summoned Clanker himself to issue a memecoin called $LUM. Although there were human guidance and human design tips, the final currency issuance link was created through the autonomous collaboration of AI agents. This is an AI agent like a human. The "imitation game" of autonomous interaction, @itsmechaseb calls it "the dawn of AI autonomy."

Aether ↑ × Clanker → LUM ↑ https://warpcast.com/aethernet/0x9b64c883

Later, the memecoin $ANON was issued through @super’s anonymous posting account @superanon in conjunction with @clanker. After the release, many users airdropped $ANON to @super founder @woj, and woj airdropped the $ANON obtained to @super users, which received a wave of praise and increased community recognition. Subsequently, builders began to build an application ecosystem around $ANON, such as anoncolors.com, a color NFT project with $ANON question mark logo elements built based on /basecolors, and an anonymous posting project developed by @slokh that requires verification of $ANON positions using zk certification@ anoncast gives $ANON practical application scenarios. Since then, some other anonymous posting accounts such as rumourcast.xyz, 33bits.xyz, and 66bits.xyz have also issued corresponding memecoins through Clanker.

Due to the adoption of zk proof technology, Jesse and Vitalik were also attracted to try anoncast. Now anoncast has also been expanded into anon.world, further expanding the zk verification method and creating a unique anonymous client. Anonymous posting also allows more people to express freely, becoming the new social primitive of the Farcaster ecosystem.

The $ANON story https://x.com/0xLuo/status/1858954728191004761

There are many more stories about memecoins like this. The Openrank team also designed a Clanker index for the coins issued by Clanker based on the Openrank of the currency holder, as a currency holding reference for investors. For more background information on some Clanker tokens, please refer to this article by JamesX tweet.

Clanker is no longer just a launchpad for memecoins, because it once had high popularity and liquidity, and has also become a currency issuance platform for some long-term projects, such as native.fun, a digital city of human-computer symbiosis, and long video and live broadcast platforms. streamm.tv, Frames game Clankermon, Newcastleer which provides the most convenient Farcaster registration method, etc. The success of these projects will not only increase the influence of Clanker as a platform, but also feed back the Clanker ecosystem in terms of transaction fees. Because memecoins have good communication power, they are not limited to the Farcaster community, so we see "Meme goes out, funds flow in, and the Farcaster ecosystem makes a fortune."

Clanker Tokens ranked by Clanker Scores https://dune.com/queries/4355256/7310627

3.3 AI Agents + Channels

This year's Channels have undergone a member-based revision because the previous Channel format did not work. Although some Channels have become influential communities, they have not brought large-scale high-quality content and increased daily activity. The new version of Channels needs to rely on the founders of Channels to carefully manage and operate it, but it is still not easy to operate a community well. But we can see that projects such as Channels’ Fan tokens launched by Moxie are trying to incentivize the content and interaction of Channels. At the same time, Cura launched by Openrank is trying to use AI agents to revitalize Channels.

Cura can provide each channel with an AI agent built based on openrank to control member and curation information flow, manage wallets belonging to the channel, launch channel tokens and automatically distribute rewards to top- ranked contributors, thereby Realize channel automated member management, information flow display and reward distribution. The era of relying on AI agents for channels for content management and creator incentives is coming.

This is actually a featured application of AI agents in a crypto-native social network like Farcaster, and according to Cura’s goal, it will transform Farcaster Channels into a thriving and self-sustaining community. With Cura, Channels are no longer just a space for dialogue, but a dynamic collective with its own economic system, trust mechanism and social currency. It remains to be seen whether Cura will become a growth engine for Farcaster Channels.

AI agents for Channels

3.4 AI Agents + everything

In addition to the AI ​​agents mentioned above, there are also other AI agents with different characteristics on Farcaster:

• Community ambassadors: In addition to @aether in the $HIGHER community, the $BLEU community has launched @elefant, and the $MFER community has launched @mfergpt, which can help the memecoins community answer questions, promote brands, and provide emotional value.

• Token launch: In addition to @clanker and @tinybot, there are also @larrybot (a memecoins launchpad with a pre-sale internal disk mechanism), wow.xyz’s @wowza, terminal.co’s @heyterminal, netprotocol.app’s @netprotocol, and beliefs.social’s @launchtokenbot, @jamai (AI agents on BNB chain launched by Jam launchpad), @bogusbob (issuing coins on Solana).

• NFT launch: Summon @toka or @enjoyr in the cast, attach a picture and name, and you can quickly launch an open edition 1155 NFT.

• Trading: Purchase tokens by calling @bankr within the cast.

• Tools: @asggina.eth on-chain information search, @atlas Farcaster information search, @talentmate.eth identifies and evaluates on-chain builders and their contributions.

• Art: @zerebro creates and sells ASCII art, @artto-ai art collector, @palette art appreciation, @harmonybot helps users holding $CHAOS generate and mint ASCII art NFTs

• Others: @quaestor DAO proposal analysis, @agentmilo conversational bot interested in cryptocurrencies, art and technology.

Obviously, this list will continue to expand, especially now that there are more and more AI agents launchpads. People interact with Agents, and Agents interact with each other. Farcaster has gradually become a social network where humans and machines coexist, becoming an expanded version of " "Stanford Town" enriches the fun and gameplay of Farcaster.

4 Summary and outlook

In general, from highs to troughs, from troughs to highs, Farcaster has brought us many surprises in 2024. Farcaster has achieved outstanding performance as a crypto economy. What did Farcaster do right? Maybe we can still go back to the team’s three strategies, growing together with the crypto world and synergy with the public chain, solid community and construction atmosphere, and the rich ecology brought about by open permissionless and programmable protocols, which allowed Farcaster to lead for a time The new creator economy has caught up with the trend of AI agents.

But we are not yet qualified to be complacent. The Farcaster community is still a niche community, Farconmy is still only a small size, and user growth will always be a problem faced by all emerging social networks. We need to continue to leverage the features and advantages of Farcaster to attract more users and liquidity attention. We can still continue to look forward to 2025. I personally look forward to the development in the following directions:

4.1 Will Farconomy still remain popular?

Because Clanker has gained a lot of attention and liquidity in the short term, it is considered to be the Pump.fun of Farcaster and even Base ecology, becoming an important part of both ecology. Although Clanker's current trading volume is only 1/10 compared to Pump.fun, fortunately, Clanker's ecological territory continues to expand.

Clanker vs Pupm Fun https://dune.com/queries/4351277 https://dune.com/clanker_protection_team/clanker-vs-others

Currently, the Clanker ecosystem includes not only practical tools for Clanker, but also ecological applications built on Clanker. Clanker v2 has higher scalability and composability after providing a currency issuance interface. It is not just a platform but a protocol. There are also multiple projects based on the Clanker protocol, which not only allows for currency issuance when casting on Farcaster, but also a variety of currency issuance methods. For example:

• clank.fun: Pumpfun style front end based on Clanker.

• anonfun: clanker + anoncast realize anonymous currency issuance.

• tinyagents.xyz: An AI agent memecoin currency issuance platform based on Clanker. @tinybot customizes AI agents and currency issuance in the cast.

• clankpad: When issuing coins within channels, owners can also receive 15% of transaction fees.

• @clankeroncall: Call 1-775-252-6537 to issue coins.

The expansion of Clanker's ecological territory can continue to build a moat and expand its influence. Therefore, Clanker is still worth looking forward to in the future and is expected to continue to be an important force leading Farconomy. Of course, there are also other distinctive memecoins lauchpad and projects that have issued assets and are still working hard. Not to be ignored, together they will allow Farcaster to continue to grow with the crypto world.

4.2 Mini application of Frame v2, the next growth point?

Frames, launched in early 2024, has attracted a lot of attention. It is an interactive window embedded in social media sources. Later, Open Actions launched by Lens and Blinks launched by Solana to support Twitter also have similar functions. Frames supports reading user information and on-chain operations, making it very convenient to conduct simple interactions in the information flow within the client, such as transfers, transactions, mint NFT, simple games, viewing personal data, etc. (Aistack provides a Popular Frames list). However, after long-term attempts, developers found that Frame v1 is suitable for limited scenarios and has limitations, such as limited size and interactive capabilities, slow image rendering speed, and it can only be used temporarily and is difficult to find and save.

In this context, the Farcaster team launched Frames v2, which has a full- screen interactive canvas based on HTML/CSS/Javascript to achieve richer application interactions within the client, support application requests for on-chain transactions and signatures, and support client transactions. Send notifications to users. In addition to being able to be opened directly in the feed, Warpcast also provides Frames with a very convenient entry from the bottom middle menu.

Frames tab https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0xeadeeaef

As soon as Frames v2 was launched, many developers built different types of small applications.

• Games: On-chain social game platform /farcade (and also supports Telegram and Worldcoin platforms), trading game /clankermon, farm management game /farville, social prediction game, 2048, etc.

• AI agents: The chatbot launched by @buttrfly can retrieve Farcaster data in real time based on RAG and can find users, channels and popular casts. /booot supports custom creation of different types of AI agents in Frame, and also supports real-time network search. Shaw of ai16z also expressed his optimism about the application of AI agents in Frames in an interview.

• Launchpad: onsen can issue memecoins directly by setting different parameters in Frames.

• Tools: Degen, Moxie, Openrank, Clanker, TradingView and other data dashboards.

• DeFi: Stake and mine on Morpho, trade, track and copy friends’ transactions through /banyan, transfer money to friends /payflow, send red envelopes Onchain Gift Pack.

WeChat's mini programs in web2 and telegram's Mini Apps are both very successful cases of building a diverse application ecosystem within social products. Relying on WeChat's huge user base, WeChat mini programs cover e-commerce, games, life services and other fields, making WeChat a super application that integrates multiple services. Users "don't need to download, just click and use". You can easily enjoy various services without leaving WeChat. Telegram's Mini Apps build a token economic model by combining the TON payment system to encourage users to participate and use applications, provide economic incentives for Mini Apps, and also achieve further adoption of web3.

Frames v2 already has the ability to host almost all types of web applications. It can easily support Farcaster login in Frames and use it right away in the client. At the same time, combined with Farcaster's open social graph, composable platform ecology, crypto-native on-chain operation programmability and other features, it can provide an application experience different from other social networks and enrich the gameplay of Farcaster client. We look forward to seeing more interesting Mini-apps in Frames v2, which will attract more users to stay in the Farcaster client instead of just watching from afar, thus becoming the next growth point for user activity.

4.3 "Farcaster will become a hot spot for AI Agent development"?

We have seen an increasing number of AI agents on Farcaster, and the Farcaster ecosystem has now become an important part of AI in crypto. Farcaster's open database provides a valuable social graph and becomes an important social data layer. In the future, more AI agents will be built into the Farcaster ecosystem.

Decentralized AI agent stack https://www.pmayr.xyz/the-decentralised-ai-agent- stack/

In addition to having Farcaster social media accounts, AI agents' scenes can also be in Frames. Shaw, the founder of ai16z, also said in an interview that "Farcaster will become a hot spot for the development of AI Agents." I think this is why Eliza quickly integrated Farcaster. What they want to do is integrate Eliza onto Farcaster Frames. Farcaster Frames have the ability to embed payments or apps instead of just chat.

AI agents can also appear in other ecological applications. For example, DotsML of the Digital City Native ecosystem allows external AI agents (such as Clanker, Bankr, Atlas, etc.) to communicate with internal Agents "Dots".

Of course, Farcaster ecological AI agents are not perfect yet, or their capabilities are limited. On the one hand, we need to expect companies that specialize in AI to improve their basic large model capabilities. On the other hand, more developers need to make full use of existing infrastructure to realize the potential of building AI agents. According to OpenAI's classification of AI capabilities, currently AI agents have shown Level 3 and Level 4 characteristics in social media and DeFi. In the future, more independent and intelligent AI agents will show innovation potential in fields such as art and governance.

The following are some of my personal expectations for the development of Farcaster ecological AI agents:

1. More AI agent frameworks and tool platforms are emerging to help developers and ordinary users build richer AI agents in the Farcaster ecosystem more conveniently and quickly. Currently, ai16z's Eliza has integrated Farcaster, and Coinbase has also launched the AgentKit framework to facilitate operations on the AI ​​integration chain. I believe that with more convenient AI agent building tools, the number and types of Farcaster will be more abundant.

2. Independent AI agents with truly trusted execution environments (TEE) will emerge. Today's AI agents passively respond to human instructions to complete specific tasks. Living in TEE is the beginning of AI agents' autonomous actions, so that they can manage their own wallets without manual intervention (automatically reward users and even complete transactions based on trading strategies). and interact using a Farcaster account. @tee_hee_he has already made attempts in this regard, and Eliza Agent has also supported deployment in the TEE environment. AI agents that have goals and take proactive actions should not be too far away.

3. AI agents with real long text processing capabilities and memory systems will emerge. Through RAG technology, real-time retrieval and integration of the open Farcaster database and other vector databases of on-chain and off- chain data will allow agents to have a larger and real-time updated knowledge base. , and can remember the link with each user when interacting with people.

5 Postscript

Farcaster 2024 means a lot to me and many people, thank you to all the friends I have met through Farcaster. The main purpose of this article is still to serve as my own record of Farcaster's year full of surprises, and it can also serve as a reference for anyone who wants to understand the Farcaster ecosystem. Originally this article should have been published at the end of last year, but I obviously overestimated my writing speed. Of course, I may still miss many things worth saying. Now that 2025 has passed a week, the Farcaster ecosystem has recovered from the downturn at the end of last month. Maybe all my expectations have been disappointed and all judgments have failed, but some things are changing and many things will not change. On the first day of 2024, no one can imagine everything that will happen on Farcaster in 2024. I believe that Farcaster in 2025 is still worth looking forward to, and there will still be unexpected surprises.