FarCon NYC Keynote: The Future of Farcaster

so first of all i i wanted to thank everyone who you know kinda organized far con but i let's give a round of applause for emma i mean she's like

in in many ways it's a very thankless job to have an entire social network just like kind of descend on you and like all these different things so she's held it like total grace and and an amazing venue today we wanna start with two questions so do you wanna do the first one

yeah second question raise your hand if you've made money on farcaster okay so yeah so themes today wanted to just go through a couple of quick slides last year the slides didn't quite work for us but i think this year seems like it it's it's going to work we've come a long way in the last year so last year we're talking about frames this year we have mini apps i think we also now have the wallet which is pretty cool i think most of you probably had raise of hands if you have a funded warpcast wallet okay yeah warplet yeah so you know made a lot of progress on that and then and raise your hand if you've received a weekly reward at one point or another okay so you know people are actually using the network it's good so i i think the the big thing that we wanna focus on kind of this year and and going forward is continuing to grow the number of daily active users but with funded wallets and and the reason this is important is it's taken us a while over the last couple of years to to get to this point but we really wanna be focused on what makes farcaster different and the reality is crypto actually is the thing that makes farcaster different than other social networks and having kind of an economy built into the social network where you can kind of do anything right you can launch a cryptocurrency and have it tip as a bot right and and like build this massive new community like dgen or you can you know do something like flanker or you can build a mini app or tip or any of these kind of economic things that you can do only with crypto it's it's only possible in forecaster and so the only way that that works though is if you actually have money

being pretty vocal about that because i think that is gonna be the thing that will attract people who wanna build kind of new interesting experiences because it's the only place they can actually go do that and and so how we're planning on doing that is four four things so the first thing and and veron talked a little bit about this at the the builder night but we're gonna make sign ups free and so technically at the protocol it actually won't be free it'll be close to free but we're gonna be doing a bunch of stuff to make it so that any app if they wanna bring their user base to farcaster they can and then that will be a way of helping grow grow the network and that brings us into the second point where you know coinbase wallet you know base a bunch of people here from the team they're gonna be bringing their millions of users to farcaster so this is the first time we're having an app with an existing user base integrate into the protocol so that that's really exciting zapper is also building forecaster functionality into their wallet and i think the rest of this year we're gonna be spending a lot of time trying to convince other apps with existing user bases to integrate into the protocol last two things which are related rewards which we kind of talked about it seems like a lot of you have received some we're planning to dial up the size of the rewards right so right now we're doing about $25,000 a week in usdc for casting we've we've done some experiments on the developer side and and then for invites but i think we're gonna meaningfully increase the amount of money that we are actually putting out into the network and money that our app is generating across whatever we're doing right so swap revenue i think we aspirationally wanna put as much of that back into the ecosystem to create the flywheel around rewards and i think earning your first dollar on chain on farcaster may actually be our equivalent of find your 10 friends on facebook and so it'll it'll i think rewards is a really powerful way for people to onboard into crypto and not actually have to use a crypto on ramp and then the last thing is creator onboarding ted who ran farcon last year now is on the team and

yeah and she's actually leading the kind of like creator onboarding experiments that we've been running you may

noticed we had a bunch of journalists join in march and that is like the first of many experiments we're gonna be running around targeting specific communities and and you know interest to see if we can get them to come on to farcaster and create some level of density and i and i think one interesting thing here is like murtaza who kind of helped inspire the the journalist onboarding for us he came into the network last year referred by a friend and he actually made enough money on the network through tips rewards dgen that he funded independent journalism trip to syria so when the regime fell there he went to syria on his own strictly because of farcaster and so and and i think you know jan frula is another good example of someone who was on farcaster made some money and was able to move to the united states move to la and pursue a career in art as a result of being a farcaster and so i think leaning into this idea that farcaster provides economic opportunity for those who kind of want to find it across a variety of different ways is is very much something that i think we're going to try to lean into with creators because on on web two point zero social for the most part unless you're kind of like one of the big guys you really don't monetize well and and it's hard to support kind of your livelihood so that that's kind of what we're focused on but we really wanted to spend most of this time for q and a we we got good feedback on that last year and we did a bunch of q and a yesterday for builder day so with that you know if people have questions just it's a little hard to see so just raise hands and we'll kinda call

hi you guys for mini apps the is there any planned ideas around the thumbnails being more dynamic or interesting to showcase what's in the mini apps people click thumbnails not apps similar to youtube

i i think one thing to think about there is there's a trade off between privacy and customization so so the idea that you know it would be cool if you were browsing the feed and the dev could like dynamically serve you up an image but that also means that you're kind of leaking your like viewing data directly to the dev so i i think there's probably some balance that we can think about there but i i agree like in a sense that like obviously youtube is famous for like making the preview is actually the thing you know whatever that face is for youtube like people click through

yeah i i think there's generally always this idea of like is there some one big new thing that you can launch that really makes it better and and you know like really goes viral and i think the reality is that just paying attention to the feedback developers are giving us around like it's too hard to like develop this locally it's like okay figure out how to do a local debugger kind of thing or you know whatever these like small things but if you can kind of accumulate that you you get you let the developer actually be the creative person and and not like get in the way and so i think like really just kind of driving to just like make it as easy as possible for people to build mini apps and and especially with like i think vibe coding like you can actually increase the total number of people who can build a mini app and so i think just like continuing to make it as simple as possible and offer this kind of like rich functionality like that that i think is gonna be our priority for a while

yeah yeah we can we can do the top hat later i i think so search is live on mobile i mean it's relatively rudimentary but i think we'll have a an improved search on web soon i think it's like in the next couple weeks and then you know i'm i'm sure we can iterate on mobile and make it better i think one thing is interesting a lot of people always want to be like how can we make search better like i wanna search for this or that and i think the reality is most people actually don't search like people in this room you you you're probably not the average user and i think you have to just think through it's like the the average person coming on to forecaster they don't really leave the home feed like the only time they leave the home feed is if they have a notification or a direct message like that's it like and so like actually approaching it for the way to discover these things for the most part is going to be you see it in the cast and and so making the algo really good and and kind of like making the the home feed the place that most people at least as the the the primary place of discovery is is probably where we should spend more time versus you know making the world's best search but we should do both

yeah right side hey guys i'm buga first time first time in new york and first time in far con followed already with the vybe what's your like favorite mini app and which mini app you would like to see which is not there yet

yeah so i i'd like to say that like children i don't have a favorite mini app i i i do think tiago's wyatt where you at that is my favorite right now in the sense that i think it's something that i've really wanted for a long time i was like a very big foursquare user back in the day and so the fact that someone actually finally built that on top of the and and there have been a couple of iterations but the fact that it's like really nicely integrated as a mini app and that like i can just check-in when i get to a place it it's pretty great yeah

yeah i i mean mini apps like there's a list linda has posted it there's like 70 different ideas and like yeah just go to someone someone build the channel and like just there's a zillion ideas of what people could go do i think i think like a neopets idea like would do pretty well and i think it would do well beyond just farcaster

yeah there's an opportunity for paper paper clip maximizer or optimizer oh

yeah yeah so someone should build universal paper clip as a mini app if you don't know that game it's pretty good

yeah so i think channels has been a tricky product we've probably spent more time on channels than anything else in the history of like the app and i don't think we've ever cracked it right i think there's just a lot of complexity with channels and they just haven't hit the the kind of product market fit in terms of driving growth and kind of being a primary reason people join farcaster it's ex an extremely good feature for driving like depth of engagement and and people who like really invest in their channels that's like actually really valuable to the network but we haven't kinda bridged the gap with new users i know that open rank has their their kind of cura product that's like focused on channels and so i'm optimistic that you know that can kind of like unlock something there but i think we probably need to kinda get to a place in the next few months of like okay what is the future channels and like making sure that that's really clear for people but i think where we are probably gonna be more focused is like i said those priorities up there of like make sign ups free do this kind of like hand to hand combat style onboarding of creators and then be really focused around mini apps in the wallet because i think that that that is actually the uniquely differentiated feature of farcaster but that said who knows i mean you last year we were talking about channels and this year we're talking about funded vault so things can change pretty dynamically

do you want to answer on snapchain

yeah i i think so one thing that we want to do and is is farcaster should kind of sit agnostic across all of crypto right like the goal is to actually have it be the you know crypto native social network so whatever blockchain you're building something on farcaster should work and i think with embedded wallets now like we have the ability to kind of make that happen and i think it's like worth pointing out is like a lot of people are like oh farcaster is on base or like farcaster is in the base ecosystem i actually think it's the opposite it's farcaster existed and base hustled and did a lot of work to get a lot of developers building on base and like the reason people are building on base is because it's a good product not because there's some like exclusive lock in with farcaster and so my sense is like you know there are going to be other chains monab is like one of them where they're going and trying to find a group of people to build on that chain and like we should support that because if someone builds an interesting app if you're on farcaster you should be able to use it and so i think that is like an important thing of like crypto i've been in crypto a long time it's like very tribal around chains it's almost like a religion and i think that's not a good way to kind of think about it it's like it's it's actually a net positive anytime there's a good crypto app in crypto because it's just increasing the number of people in crypto it's normalizing crypto as actually being useful rather than this kind of thing that's a technology that has a promise but has never been realized

yeah so

anyways i i think the way to think about it is like we want to kind of be an index on everything that's happening in crypto so if people are doing stuff in crypto that's hyper financialized or things that people find distasteful okay then that's gonna exist just like stuff exists on the web or in the app store but i think the the positive side of that and and one of the reasons for example we use stable coins is like it's it's actually very approachable for the average new user right so when you're getting your first dollars on chain and then not having it be kind of fluctuating and it just feels like real money in a in a bank account that's pretty cool right like the the tip feature that we recently released is that that's there's no hyper financialization of it you're you're literally sending a dollar to people as like an appreciation but but so i think i think that kind of stuff is is how we'll balance it and i think ultimately you know if if we do our job well if if you don't wanna see certain types of content or or you know stuff on chain the algo or who you follow can actually give you a lot more control over that and so i i think we've been around for a while now and i think people really know us it's like we're not we're we're not you know degens we're not in the trenches i don't like like ultimately we're trying to build something that that can be for for everyone and i think but everyone also means you know people doing stuff that you might not want anything

yeah i mean a good example of this is you know nicholas and seed club they built this crowd fund mini app in a pretty short period of time and then i think someone's dog like they raised money to like do a life saving surgery like that like that's i could think of feel good story like it's not like you know some some terrible thing and so i think the permissionlessness the programmability and the fact that everyone has a wallet you know with with money in it in in the long term is i think just gonna unlock a lot of really good things in addition to you know some things that are maybe more distasteful

yeah is it is it it's a good question are you familiar with the cobra effect i'll i'll just share so it it it happened in india and they basically wanted to get rid of cobras and every dead cobra they would pay and so naturally what happened is you had people breeding cobras because then you could get paid and so i think like that's like like the idea is like show me the incentive i'll show you the outcome so i i think that there are probably ways to do that but it's it's pretty tricky and i think one thing that's powerful about the caster rewards is like you can kind of come and try to game it great like ultimately if the algo is correct like basically the gaming or farming you're doing of this is a reflection of what the network finds interesting so you are contributing valuable stuff to the network and so like i i think of that actually as a mechanism of something similar to proof of work in bitcoin it's just like you can try to mine bitcoin but ultimately you're actually creating security for the network and so i think that it's a very hard thing to do in a lot of cases and so i think casting i think you can i think reporting spam probably a little harder what what do you think

yep hey good morning i was wanting to know how we should react to the recent district court ruling against apple and how we can build into it yeah so it's a pretty exciting thing for those who aren't aware apple has had a lawsuit with or i guess epic tim sweeney the fortnite developer has had kind of this personal crusade against apple for the last four years globally right like he's fighting them in europe he's fighting them in the us and basically there was an initial ruling from a judge that was like call it like nine out of the 10 points were in favor of apple which was kinda disappointing but that's what the law is but they basically kinda gave one thing and then apple like did the the level of compliance where they like tried to do the least amount if possible and the judge basically came in and said like okay you you explicitly didn't do what i told you and so now i'm gonna like go nuclear on you and so last night if you're an app developer you probably got an email from apple that's like you can add your own payment methods in app like basically you don't have to pay the 30% apple tax and this has been a big issue with crypto apps because nfts fell under this kind of like you had to pay this 30% apple tax now now you're free to do what you want to be clear it still is gonna go through the courts and so there's a version of the world where the supreme court actually says no this district court judge is wrong but for the foreseeable future people are gonna kinda be able to do what they want and i think it's gonna be a little like pandora's box where it's like kind of once this is out there it's gonna be very hard for them to like snap back in two years when the court potentially rules in their favor so i think like people should be really thinking about like can you use crypto in kind of interesting ways in in mobile apps and that was always a big reason like we didn't see a lot of crypto native mobile apps is because of this like kind of in app purchase like obviously we had warps zora did sparks like all these kind of games to get around that but now you can just just use crypto and so i think it's a it's a big opportunity i would have told you like even yesterday like wait but the fact that they sent the email last night is like it's like open season to actually go build interesting payment experiences and apps

yeah i mean this has already happened right so you know people always talk about like pre permissionless fids and not and i mean the the network had a very different vibe before we kind of let anyone sign up and obviously you can't build a network where it's just like permissioned and i think net it's it's better like in the sense that there are more people that anyone can kinda sign up but i think that the and and so that will only frankly get worse like in terms of like the more people on the network people will be like oh the vibe has shifted it's worse the difference between forecaster and any other network where this has happened is you can build your own client i know i said that a lot but like i mean uno you know that erica and and christopher are working on like i think that's gonna have a very different feel and a very kind of social network feel more than maybe what warpcast soon to be forecaster might feel a little bit more you know social media or broadcast and and that's completely fine because you can use both apps simultaneously and you can use one for kind of what you get that feels more like twitter right and then you have one that's that feels more intimate and and i think that that is gonna be the the way that you can actually scale scale the vibes in the sense that you can opt into different social experiences all on the same graph and i think that's that's pretty unique

yeah so i think it's two things it's it's interesting like we we tried an experiment of x cross posting where we took a bunch of people who are already on the network they opted in and then we just took what they were saying on x twitter and then just put it on farcaster and the reality is we got a lot of organ rejection because people on farcaster expect people to reply or engage and so there's this little bit of like we're in this tweener stage of like okay because people expect to reply it's like hard to kind of like syndicate content and then if you're if you're not syndicating content then it's like you have to make this argument it's like hey you should you should be taking the time to go cross post and and and kind of do this i think we'll probably run more experiments on this we may like target it i i think one of the reasons the crossbusting experiment didn't work is because it was people versus maybe like if it's just like a news account like you know walter bloomberg for example just like non crypto but like the idea of like just getting those breaking news things in your feed if you want that you you don't expect him to reply right like it's just like it's it's information so i think i think there are some ways to bridge it in the near term but i do think the other thing is as we bring in more ecosystems and more apps getting them to kind of like build their community i think like base has done a phenomenal job in terms of like making farcaster a place where you get information about base and i think that that probably is a model for a lot of other you know projects communities within crypto