BREAKING NEWS mid stream – Neynar acquires Farcater: GM Farcaster ep332

Neynar is acquiring Farcaster. Over the next few weeks, we’ll transfer ownership of the protocol contracts and code repositories, the Farcaster app, and Clanker to Neynar. They will run and maintain everything going forward. Some members of the Merkle team, Varun, and I will step back from day-to-day work on Farcaster and move on to something new. Rish, Manan, and the rest of the Neynar team have been building on Farcaster from the start. Neynar was one of the first Farcaster clients, and its infrastructure now powers much of the developer ecosystem. We think they are the right people to take over leadership of Farcaster and they’ll share their new builder-focused vision soon. This wasn’t an easy decision. Farcaster and the people building on it mean a lot to us. We’re proud of what our team built, and what the community built alongside us. But after five years, it’s clear Farcaster needs a new approach and leadership to reach its full potential. We’re excited to see what Farcaster becomes under Neynar, and we’re looking forward to this next chapter. Varun & Dan *** FAQ What’s changing? To start, almost nothing. The Farcaster app and Clanker operate as normal with most of the features you are using today. There should be no interruption to your day-to-day experience. For developers, we’re transitioning the protocol contracts and code repositories over to Neynar. They will also start running the developer calls. What is Merkle doing? The Clanker team is continuing on with Neynar, some of the team is joining another company and some of the team is planning to do something different.

so binance is buying farcaster?

Lotry is the first limited loss lottery Exprmnt! We put lotteries on a bonding curve so you can trade them, while trying to win the pot. This video takes you through everything you need to know. We’re clanking our platform token $LOTRY on the 21st of Jan 2026, at 5:30 PM UTC. The first daily lotry goes live on the lotry.fun miniapp at 9:30 PM UTC, 4 hours after launch. May luck forever be in your favour! 🍀 p.s - dive deeper at docs.lotry.fun

History will remember how you acted during The Great Merkle Silence of 2026

In 2026, I plan to be fully back to decentralized social. If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools. We need mass communication tools that surface the best information and arguments and help people find points of agreement. We need mass communication tools that serve the user's long-term interest, not maximize short-term engagement. There is no simple trick that solves these problems. But there is one important place to start: more competition. Decentralization is the way to enable that: a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top. In fact, since the start of the year I've been back to decentralized social already. Every post I've made this year, or read this year, I made or read with https://firefly.social/, a multi-client that covers reading and posting to X, Lens, Farcaster and Bluesky (though bluesky has a 300 char limit, so they don't get to see my beautiful long rants). But crypto social projects has often gone the wrong way. Too often, we in crypto think that if you insert a speculative coin into something, that counts as "innovating", and moves the world forward. Mixing money and social is not inherently wrong: Substack shows that it's possible to create an economy that supports very high-quality content. But Substack is about _subscribing to creators_, not _creating price bubbles around them_. Over the past decade, we have seen many many attempts at incentivizing creators by creating price bubbles around them, and all fail by (i) rewarding not content quality, but pre-existing social capital, and (ii) the tokens all going to zero after one or two years anyway. Too many people make galaxy-brained arguments that creating new markets and new assets is automatically good because it "elicits information", when the rest of their product development actions clearly betray that they're not actually interested in maximizing people's ability to benefit from that information. That is not Hayekian info-utopia, that is corposlop. Hence, decentralized social should be run by people who deeply believe in the "social" part, and are motivated first and foremost by solving the problems of social. The Aave team has done a great job stewarding Lens up to this point. I'm excited about what will happen to Lens over the next year, because I think the new team coming in are people who actually are interested in the "social": even back when the decentralized social space barely existed, they were trying to figure out how to do encrypted tweets. I plan to post more there this year. I encourage everyone to spend more time in Lens, Farcaster and the broader decentralized social world this year. We need to move beyond everyone constantly tweeting inside a single global info warzone, and into a reopened frontier, where new and better forms of interaction become possible. https://firefly.social/post/x/2013614839705612290

Leaderboard rewards featuring over $900 in $mintedmerch presented by @mintedmerch are now live! The Top 50 performers will split rewards when the campaign concludes next Tuesday (1/27) Stake $25 in $mintedmerch to unlock a 2x reward boost Make sure to add the Leaderboard miniapp to be eligible for rewards https://farcaster.xyz/miniapps/tqsdJuGiDUXR/leaderboard-by-quotient

alex, I'll take "things e e cummings might write if he were a crypto bro having a stroke" for $500

Thanks @quotient & @betrmint 🙌 I just claimed my $BETR tokens for my performance on the Quotient Creators Weekly Leaderboard!

It's official, we are taking the snapshot for the $RNBW Airdrop on Monday January 26th at 4:20pm EST. You still have a chance to accumulate Rainbow Points before the $RNBW Airdrop on February 5th 🌈⏰

It looks like @masknetwork is acquiring /lens. it feels like a move toward consolidating resources and focusing on building better products. I’ve talked about this many times before. It’s honestly a shame that so many big Lens clients have shut down one by one. @phaverapp, Hey.xyz, @buttrfly... and now only orb.club remains, plus @fireflyapp as an aggregator. Whether it was launching a token, memberships, or experimenting with other monetization models, none of these attempts really proved sustainable in the long run. Part of the reason is that Lens’s user base was simply too small. another is that the ecosystem was extremely fragmented. Different clients didn’t interoperate well, features weren’t shared, and users ended up scattered across apps, which only made each individual client weaker. That’s why I think Farcaster’s Product-led protocol development makes a lot of sense. If Mask becomes the new "steward" of Lens, there may finally be an opportunity to consolidate resources across the ecosystem and truly double down on making Orb and Firefly even better products. And, perhaps most importantly, there’s little reason to doubt Mask’s commitment to the ideals of decentralization. Maybe one day we’ll see Farcaster gain a new "steward" as well. There are already some rumors along those lines. If that happens, I wouldn’t be surprised, and I’d be inclined to believe it would be for the same reason: concentrating resources to build better products, attract more users, and ultimately help the protocol grow stronger as a whole. DeSoc can only go mainstream once there are great products that people genuinely use.

Just arrived in Davos for WEF. Three main goals this week: 1) Talk to world leaders about economic freedom and how crypto can update their financial systems 2) Continue the push for market structure legislation,without letting tradfi ban their competition 3) Keep pushing for tokenization to democratize access to capital markets The future of finance is here, and this time it's built for the people.

Coinbase CEO Seeks ‘Win-Win’ on Market Structure Bill in Davos Charm Offensive Brian Armstrong is set to meet bank CEOs a week after Coinbase pulled support for the crypto market structure bill.

what if merkle is quiet because they're acquiring the only base sequencer?

Read between the lines folks

"hey Grok what was the coolest thing accomplished by a DAO in the last year"

Ok so the “keep calm and carry on” didn’t take and speculation ramped up Streisand Effect style, so how ‘bout this … (please read the following with this emoji in mind 😏)* Maybe what they’re really doing is getting ready to launch a farcaster token AND they are going to launch it on clanker AND they are going to use quotient SO only those who cast QUALITY CONTENT not written by ai or bots that contribute to conversational liquidity will be rewarded. So y’all should really work hard to cast really good content until instructed otherwise. So that @adrienne and I have better things to talk about than whatever this is. Sound good? *DISCLAIMER CUZ Y’ALL CRAZY: NFA/NLA/I know nothing and this should be taken as a shitpost

Schrödinger’s App

Sonar is now a full farcaster client ✨ with farcaster and base apps prioritizing tokens and trading, there's a need for more social and content focused clients. sonar gives you a clean interface to experience the protocol, prioritizing content, media, and discovery: - sign in with your farcaster account to check your following feed and notifications and interact with posts - media gallery views for users and channels - custom pinned feeds soon - global ban list for spammy accounts - historical posting stats for users and channels - global farcaster stats (dau and new users) - fully open source check it out and let me know what you'd like to see added. available for web/pwa, miniapp (read only for now), and mobile soon. sonarr.cc ⚡️⚡️⚡️

https://x.com/bankrbot/status/2013305146403627513