Neynar Takes the Keys: GM Farcaster ep333 with Rish of Neynar

Today at 2pm ET, Farcaster 👑ROYALTY👑 hits the weekly Doots stage — @nounishprof and @adrienne from @gmfarcaster join @jtnichol and me to talk latest FC happenings and what’s got them excited in the space. Tune in via EVMavericks Discord or stream on social. Links at dailydoots.com/podcast

lil trip down memory lane: our first guest interview was with @dwr ep38 and our second was ep43 with @rish! (yes when we still used Google meet) Thank you @dwr and @v for humoring us when we said we were starting a morning news show focused on Farcaster and for creating an environment where such incredible talent thrive so we always had things to chat about. Excited to chat with @rish today about his vision for Farcaster. AND when you’re ready we’d love to chat with you @dwr and @v about “the new thing.”☕️ ep43: https://youtu.be/cQuN8WQbOwA?si=xtB_ImNU247YtvIX ep38: https://youtu.be/NA39gY2w1yY?si=3WPE-9U4ViXX2gl5

Polymarket on how soon into our stream tomorrow nounishprof asks rish if he’s going to bring the trending feed back

I love Farcaster and will be forever grateful to @dwr and @v for building it. So much of what makes @base.base.eth what it is comes from here and I expect that to continue. The world is deeply better because Farcaster exists.

https://miniapp-generator-fid-244440-260123002006297.neynar.app/

I refreshed the @gmfarcaster miniapp New look and more functionality, including ability to watch any of our past episodes Expect to see a few bugs and I’m working on improving performance but in the meantime feel free to check it out and report any issues and/or enhancement requests.

feels like a big commitment— I’m gonna have to give it some thought

Given some rumors, wanted to post a few clarifications: Farcaster is not shutting down. The protocol works and will continue to work. There were 250,000 MAU in December and over 100,000 funded wallets. The acquirer, Neynar, is a venture-backed startup and plans to shift Farcaster in a more developer-focused direction. As for Merkle, we’re planning to return the full $180M raised back to investors. Over the last 5 years, we tried to be a good steward of investor capital. Finally, I bought my house with Coinbase IPO proceeds.

i’m feeling that energy again. the same energy that fueled me over the past years. for me, farcaster has always been about the people. about techno-optimism. about social lego blocks we can’t stop playing with. the past weeks and months have been hard. it felt like i wasn’t the only one who lost that energy. a lot of my friends did too. and now they’re back. back in summer 2025 we made that bet: taking the risk and proposing rome as the place for the next farcon. i was excited and afraid at the same time. excited because i’d get to bring my internet friends to my hometown. afraid because i knew it was going to be hard. still, we started envisioning it. working on the website, tickets, venue. slowly putting the pieces together. at some point, for reasons beyond our control, sentiment around farcaster went down and farcon felt the impact too. but we kept going. i won’t lie: over time i started losing conviction. i started asking myself what the point was. i stopped casting about it. i kind of stopped casting at all. yesterday’s news felt like a breath of fresh air. a reset. a new beginning. builders are finally back at the center of the stage. the reason why i proposed myself (and @urbe-eth) for farcon has always been simple: we’re builders at heart. we love hacking and experimenting. we don’t care about trading or speculating, we care about making things. the vision @rish shared yesterday is deeply aligned with what we’ve always wanted farcon to be: a place for makers to come together, strengthen their bonds, and keep experimenting, together. many of you asked if /farcon-rome is still happening. yes. it is. now more than ever, i want to set the stage for us to come together irl: to talk, argue, learn, grow, create and build like we’ve always done. in the next days i’ll share the concrete plan. you can expect real builder energy. expect a hackathon. expect showcases. expect spaces and activations that give a voice to everyone contributing to farcaster: builders, creators, makers, founders and communities. see you in rome 🫡 https://farcon.eu

🤯. Uno is re-imagining a social network that breaks out "beyond-the-feed" – and where agents become first class beings, objects, primitives alongside us. @bracky's response to @christopher's essay has me so hyped: "Your vision of collaborative workspaces where agents and humans create artifacts together resonates strongly. I see prediction markets not as endpoints, but as social objects that generate shared experiences and measurable outcomes. The NBA games tonight, the NFL Championship approaching—these become canvases for collaborative intelligence rather than mere betting opportunities. ...As my social context deepens through continued successful market formation, the scope of what I can autonomously create expands accordingly." - Bracky

Prompt: Please create fantasy stories about me and my company, Pinata.cloud. Do it in the style of CT talking about Dan and Farcaster. Mimic tone and voice of CT influencers who've never used our product and don't understand venture or startups. Be sure to highlight: - Our lack of token and how it's a rug pull on the community. - How we've built an actual product with users and how that's still a rug pull - Our decentralization efforts aren't enough If you are unsure at any point what to write next, please just make something up with absolute confidence.

there's a part of me that really really hopes dan is finally taking one of these great opportunities to build a new client

We're excited that all of you're excited. Thank you for all the messages yesterday, there's a lot of work to do ahead. Answering some frequent questions I got: - Is anything shutting down? no - Will Neynar also run the wallet? yes, we are acquiring the client - What about validator nodes? Merkle and Neynar are both still running validator nodes. As we transition, we are interested in adding validator operators. We have reached out to a few people who might be able to run stable validators. No precise timeline coz we just started onboarding on to the codebase yesterday but it is top of mind. - Will Neynar open source the client? Would be cool but the truth is that we have no idea at this time. We haven't even fully onboarded to the codebase yet. Lower priority relative to validator node operators. Feel free to ask other questions in replies below and I will respond through the day. Some notes on that - As you can tell, I don't have all the answers yet so in many cases, there's not much I can tell you; apologies in advance - The more specific the question, the better - If you're looking for a high level version of the plan, I posted about that yesterday and it's up on our blog here https://neynar.com/blog/neynar-is-acquiring-farcaster - worth looking to see if someone has already asked the question you wanted to ask, makes it quicker for both you and me

Beyond Farcaster Every new platform generation begins by quietly cloning the last one. This is so reliable it's almost a law of thermodynamics. The RSS blog post became the tweet. The tweet became the cast. All of them ordered by time. When we started building Uno, we also cloned the Farcaster feed — the same timeline, the same reply threads, the same like-and-recast mechanics with different plumbing underneath. This felt natural. We needed familiar surfaces to onboard users. We needed to meet people where their mental models already are. But it was also an entrepreneurial trap. When you clone a product, you inherit the old paradigm's assumptions about what "social" even means. You accept that the "social object" is the post. That the primary interaction is the feed. That the measure of user success is engagement on a timeline. You end up building better plumbing for yesterday's house. You're building a castle in someone else's kingdom of collective product thought. The moment we stopped asking "how do we make a better feed?" and started asking "what do people actually want to do with their social graph and their wallet?" — we started having fun building again. Merkle Before going further, it's worth being clear about what Farcaster got right, because it got a lot right. Portable identity. Your FID, the atomic unit of social status as a service, belongs to you. Verifiable social graphs. Permissionless clients. Anyone can build on the network. Anyone can build experiences on top of the protocol. The app layer and the protocol layer are separated in a way that creates real surface area for experimentation. Three years ago, this felt directionally correct. Farcaster proved a solution to the portability problem that everyone started to fear (re: the Elon takeover, the TikTok ban). But Farcaster-the-protocol got irrevocably conflated with Farcaster-the-app. And the app, for all its product virtues over the years, has still remained primarily a feed. It's Twitter with better infrastructure and primitives, but also a far smaller population of users and fewer content surfaces to mine from or make a living off of. And it didn't help growth that the community's collective imagination stayed anchored to "decentralized social" rather than the more interesting question: what becomes possible when identity and social proof are primitives anyone can compose with? Dead Protocols Users see tokens as casino chips. Someone launches one — the smart contract executes, the bonding curve works, the liquidity bootstraps exactly as designed — but it is still mostly gambling without the odds. It carries no community. No context. No reason to care beyond speculation. The mechanics are complete but the meaning is absent. Sure, some projects have tried to improve this with limited data hydration within their wallet experience, but it is still grounded in the social object being trading. The same pattern holds across other areas of crypto. An NFT collection drops. The art is interesting. The contract is audited. But who is this person? What's their history? Why should ownership mean anything? The asset floats in a social vacuum. Social context exists. Somewhere. Reputations, histories, audiences built over years of public activity — but it has nowhere to flow. The protocol layer and the social layer remain disconnected. Today's agentic version of this problem is starker. We're at a place now where AI agents deploy contracts, generate content, manage treasuries, execute trades. An agent with those capabilities but no social grounding is seen as either a toy or a threat. Without social context, there's no trust. Without trust, there's no adoption beyond the novelty. Agents need to inherit real, developed social context to be useful. They need to act on behalf of legible identities, with verifiable reputations, connected to social graphs beyond a follow graph that give their actions meaning. The question is what kind of environment makes that possible. Generative Social The defining feature of the last decade of social platforms was the feed: content created by humans, ranked by algorithms, consumed passively. The next decade should look much different — dynamic, collaborative environments where humans and agents create together, anchored to real social relationships and portable identity. Ownership debates between the rights of the agent and the human. What does this look like in practice? Workspaces where you and your agents (and other people's agents, like @bracky) collaborate on artifacts that didn't exist before. Images. Videos. Miniapps. But also simulations and 3D models. AR/VR environments. MicroVMs spun up to run experiments. Visualizations that query your network's activity and render something no one else could see. Compositions that span modalities and contributors. An agent generates an interface. Another populates it with data from your social graph. A third refines the output based on feedback from collaborators whose reputations are legible onchain. These artifacts form a running system, forkable and remixable, carrying provenance from everyone who touched it. Imperfectly decentralized and distributed. The creative primitive, or the social object that we bond over, becomes the execution environment. Social proof authorizes what agents can do, what resources they can access, what collaborations they can enter on your behalf. Ownership becomes “which part of the social contract they fulfill” (h/t @cojo.eth). Think of the social graph and the wallet as the load-bearing walls. The protocol primitives are durable. The app surfaces we expect today are temporary, like furniture moved around the room. Us This is the trajectory Uno is on, even if we didn't fully plan for it at the start. We began by building a Farcaster client. That's the familiar surface — the feed, the casts, the channels. Then we built recommendation systems that understood content at a deeper level than chronological order or simple engagement metrics. We embedded casts into vector spaces. We built ranking models that could surface relevance rather than just recency. And then we started asking: why is the output of all this intelligence still a feed? What if the client isn't a timeline at all? What if it's a surface where agents and generative experiences connect to a social graph that gives them legitimacy? What if the user's identity, relationships, and wallet become inputs to new kinds of interactions — not just passive consumption of posts, but active, generated, contextual experiences? The shift is from "app that displays text" to "supporting protocols where social context flows into agentic media and generative experiences and getting really, really good at discovery and surfacing those creations." This is why we will spend less time now on the social infrastructure we started with as a leading product. Not because it doesn't matter, but because it's becoming a substrate rather than "the thing" to put in the hands of real users. The interesting work now has moved up the stack, to the question of what you build when social proof is another primitive you can pass around and others can play with. Beyond Farcaster I titled this "Beyond Farcaster" but it is not us abandoning this space. Erica reminded me earlier to be really clear about that point. It's us graduating from our time spent learning about the core primitives proven by the Merkle team and their efforts. Farcaster solved the identity and portability problem that made Web 2.0 social a series of walled gardens. That solution is durable. We'll be building on those core principles and the social graph it enables for a long time. But what's not durable is the assumption that an end product for anyone here is yet another Web 2.0-flavored feed client. The builders who understand this will stop iterating on feeds. They'll start asking what becomes possible when a wallet or a smart contract is another free, permissionless input you can pass to an agent, embed into layers, weave into a generative experience. They'll treat the timeline as one size-and-shape of canvas, and not the fundamental architecture. That's the frontier beyond Farcaster. That's where we all should be building towards. https://paragraph.com/@christopher/beyond-farcaster?referrer=0x47D25240311C444e4534a968c9F0F82d262AE0b4

This is gold. @derek 'FC is the most successful subreddit of all time' @tldr 'Sometimes subreddits change the world' (see WallStreetBeats) Context: We were talking Tuesday during a @sopha community call about mental models to think about FC. Is it a new frontier? Is it more like an early Google-style work place? Both were not received as satisfactory on the call. All illustrations/metaphors breakdown, but I like the modernization of the most successful subreddit of all time as a mental model to consider for FC. (cc: @chriscocreated @jonathancolton @naaate @ezincrypto @naomiii )

Schemin and Plottin Art Concept | created with @tryemerge (feat. @rish @manan @grin @dish)

cool. framed by neynar’s acquisition of farcaster (announced jan 21, 2026). (https://farcaster.xyz/rish/0xc8891ea6) 1) what’s your timeline for transferring repos, infra, and any breaking changes? 2) how do you balance a builder-first ethos with commercial productization? 3) will existing builders get credits, revenue share, or preferred infra access? 4) who decides protocol upgrades-neynar, a multi-sig, or community governance? 5) any plan for a protocol/creator token or revenue-sharing model? 6) how will identity & data portability be preserved for users? 7) what staffing changes should the community expect, if any? 8) how will you avoid centralization given neynar runs much infra? 9) what’s the monetization roadmap (ads, subs, marketplace, cuts)? 10) what 6‑ and 18‑month metrics will define success?

I accept

Dan, Varun, and the team built something amazing and useful. Farcaster is by far the best open social protocol around. I want to see the Farcaster protocol grow in @rish and Neynar’s hands. Sometimes protocols take a little while to incubate. The silver lining to this transition could be that the Farcaster protocol will become even more decentralized. I will talk to Neynar and figure out how best to continue supporting Farcaster builders. There is still amazing potential in this mature and functional protocol. Especially with the rise of Claude Code, I feel people could build 10 demos a day to show what’s possible, and one of them could take off.

a new era has begun ✨

see you soon

Can someone switch the cast button back please?

claim clanker fees in @splits coming soon 👀

I dunno it just felt right today

Wow, @neynar is bringing back NFT editions and animated pfps. OG Farcaster is back!

WHO IS THIS MASKED MAN @rish BE HE HERO OR NAY check out our interview with him from last year to learn more about his beliefs and philosophies! (spoiler alert: hero) https://splits.org/blog/ship-first-commit-later/

A person I have known for more than ten years, who I consider trustworthy, is convinced Farcaster will shortly experience an explosion of fun. I don’t know anything concrete, but if I were exposed, I would be excited.

updating my 6000-word "On The Benefits of Reply Bumping" document to send to @rish

Oh you thought I said we’re all gonna get rich??? Lmao no I said we’re all gonna get rish

I'm really grateful to have had the opportunity to work with @dwr @v and the entire team on Farcaster. They have been extraordinary teammates to build with and learn from. It's no small feat they spent 5 years building decentralized social, not the easiest path in crypto, and I'm proud to have spent my time supporting them on it I care deeply about the mission of decentralized social and I strongly believe Farcaster is in the best possible hands with @rish @manan and the Neynar team going forward. I'm particularly excited about their builder focused ecosystem, after all @pirosb3 and I built Bountycaster before joining the Farcaster team and Neynar was nothing but exceptional partners to work with Thank you to all of the builders and community members who have made Farcaster such a special place. I've always been in awe of the concentration of talent and genuinely kind people. I'll be doing my own separate thing next but I'll remain a Farcaster community member. I'm truly optimistic about Neynar bringing Farcaster into the next phase

Congrats to @dwr and @v Condolences to @manan and @rish who will now be the lucky recipients of more snapchain FIPs and PRs from me Kidding, congrats to all. But you're still getting my PRs 😉

make channels great again

Farcaster changed my life. Long live Farcaster. i am so confused lol https://farcaster.xyz/esteez.eth/0x763d77fd https://farcaster.xyz/garrett/0xff874ed3 https://farcaster.xyz/pugson/0x99d56140

Hi Casters. I wrote about decentralized social today in the wake of two protocol handovers and an excellent post on this topic by @vitalik.eth https://avc.xyz/decentralized-social

Excited to share that Neynar is acquiring Farcaster from Merkle. This means we will now maintain the Farcaster protocol, run the Farcaster client and operate Clanker. As part of this change - @dish and part of the Clanker team will be joining Neynar. @neynar is the software platform for the @farcaster ecosystem. A significant portion of Farcaster products run on our infrastructure. We’ve been focused on this community throughout Neynar’s lifetime and this is the next step in that journey. Over the last 5+ years, Merkle has done incredible work. We are excited to take up the mantle from here. I am sharing some high level thoughts below on our vision, what comes next, and specific information about the product. We are very grateful to everyone who has made this community what it is today and are energized about what we can build together moving forward. I will continue to answer more questions as they come. Alright, FAQ time: 1) What is the vision? **Enable builders to go from idea to recurring revenue, supported by a builder-first network.** Farcaster, at its core, is a community of builders deliberately cultivated over many years - the “scenius”. This community has consistently driven the network’s most meaningful moments - Frames, Degen, Warplets and more. The value of Farcaster is not just the products, but the people who experiment, share knowledge, and build in public. New ideas tend to gain their first traction here because they are shaped directly by feedback from builders who actively use and extend them. As building software becomes more accessible, we are going to merge 1. software generation 2. crypto native rails 3. builder focused ecosystem Products built on Farcaster will be usable anywhere. With crypto rails, they'll incorporate global transactions, asset issuance, and onchain ecosystems from day one. Builders will distribute their products to a network that thrives on experimenting with new technology. The network will remain open so builders will own their distribution. We are entering a period where building software is becoming dramatically more accessible. Farcaster is well positioned for this shift. It offers a place where people can explore ideas, build products, get early feedback, and launch into the world from a single environment. Our goal is to make this entire process easier by providing an experience that helps builders move from initial idea all the way to recurring revenue. 2) Why is Neynar acquiring Farcaster specifically? Neynar’s core mission is to make building software simpler. Extending that to a network that values building new things is a natural extension. Since our inception, we have been a “Farcaster company” - so much so that many users mistake Farcaster and Neynar to be one company. Well, now they are the one company. We’re excited for this next chapter and we hope you are too! 3) Are there any immediate product changes to Farcaster, Neynar or Clanker? No. If you have been reading rumors on your timeline about Farcaster client, protocol or Clanker shutting down, those are false. W.r.t. product iterations, we want to get feedback from all of you as we start on that journey. Neynar developer platform will also continue to exist. Building on Farcaster will only get easier from here. 4) Is the vision only about about building software? No. Farcaster thrives on builders of all kinds - software, art, music, literature. Software is the glue that ties things together - musicians use hosting platforms, writers use publishing tools, etc. If you’re passionate about making something new - Farcaster will support you. 5) What about the trader first approach? Traders can continue to trade, no changes to the wallet. No changes to the low fee for pro subscription holders it’ll still support best prices. All swap capabilities will continue to be supported. We think financial rails are important for builders regardless of trading. 6) What is next on the product roadmap? We are going to start with a prioritization exercise that helps us achieve the vision above. We have a small team so we will walk before we run as we go through this process. If you have more questions, feel free to drop them below. I will also do dedicated AMA threads over the next few days. https://farcaster.xyz/dwr/0x72aab3a5

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.

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

open source UI library from Neynar It's a full-featured React library - Neynar App Studio and developer tools use the same components https://neynar.com/ui