Varun Srinivasan

Sad to hear about Dan Simmons. RIP. Stumbling across Hyperion in a bookstore in a Bangalore mall was an important fork in the road, down into a world of literature and scifi. Ill always be thankful for that.

Steve Yegge taking a detour from building AI orchestrators to cash out his creator coins and then write a long post about it was not on my bingo cards for Jan 2026. I still don't think creator coins in their current iteration make sense for all the stated reasons, but this might be the strongest counter-signal yet. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-249b924a621a

Developer Rewards Update We're pausing the developer rewards program. There is an increasing amount of spam activity, making it harder to reward developers working on valuable apps. We'll bring this back once we have a better model for rewards that is harder to game.

Wrote up some thoughts on passkeys, and why we shouldn't use them for crypto wallets that want a consumer grade ux. Special thanks to @horsefacts.eth and @deodad for all the research that went into this last year. https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2026/01/10/the-problem-with-passkeys

Got a little time this break to touch up the personal website and add a list of favorite technical readings. https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/readings

New: USDC Lending on Farcaster! Earn 5% on USDC by lending on Morpho. Tap "USDC Lending" on your wallet page and deposit to start earning. You can withdraw at any time. Lending powered by Morpho x Steakhouse, the same teams that power Coinbase's lending. It carries risks, read the next post for details.

New: Buy/Sell Improvements We've improved the new buy flow based on your feedback: 1. You can tap the fee icon to see the price impact and token output. 2. If the impact is high, you'll get a big red warning on the buy screen.

New: Farcaster Pulse, Watchlist & Fast Search We're making three big improvements: 1. Watchlist: Keep track of tokens by tapping the star icon, which automatically sets up price alerts and adds it to a watchlist page. 2. Pulse: A new page to keep track of your watchlist, trending tokens, breaking stories and top traders. This replaces the old search page. 3. Search: there's now a floating button that makes it easy to get to search with a single tap on every page. This change is rolling out later today. You may need to restart a few times to get it.

Ive found it. The worst take ever.

dan only listens to the one u2 album they shipped on every iphone

It's sort of crazy that a swap on the average wallet can have: 1. Chain fee (few cents to a few dollars) 2. Interface fee (up to 1%) 3. Relayer fee (up to 0.15%) 4. DEX fee (up to 1%) 5. Slippage (usually 5-10% for tokens) 6. MEV tax (variable) If you don't like paying taxes to all the tax collectors you should get Farcaster Pro. We're already going to be ~1% lower than most wallets, and are working on making this even better over time.

New: Simple USDC Buys When you buy or sell a token, you just input the USD amount and hold to swap. No more complex swap uis where you have to select the input and output currencies every time. The default is selling into and out of USDC, but you can tap and use a different currency if you'd like. This is rolling out to all users today, please try it out and let us know if you run into any bugs.

Are we sufficiently decentralized yet? About four years ago I wrote that a social network can claim to be sufficiently decentralized only if two users can find each other and communicate, even if the rest of the network wants to prevent it. A lot has changed since, and I thought it would be useful to reflect on how much progress we’ve made against this goal, and what's still left to be done.

Thanks for all the responses, here's the best list I have so far. Anything else missing? active: recaster, herocast, firefly, yup, degen, base, zapper, uno, cura, tunecaster inactive: supercast, nook, jam, discove, wildcard, buttrfly

Happy thanksgiving! Grateful for all the people who have chosen to spend their time casting and building here over the last five years. Farcaster wouldn’t be what it is without you.

Buy USDC with Debit Card You can now buy up to $2,500 of USDC every week with your debit card. Go to Wallet -> Deposit -> Buy Crypto to get started. h/t to @pirosb3 for the great work on this!

New: Solana Swap Improvements - No gas needed on txns over $10 - Success rate is now 95%+ Huge shoutout to @slokh for making improvements here!

Clanker Fee Update We are permanently transferring control of fees collected in clanker tokens back to creators. Creators can claim or burn those fees, giving their communities more flexibility to grow. This change better aligns Clanker with its most successful projects. This change will go live on November 13, 2025. If you are a Clanker creator, please read the FAQ below carefully. Clanker v3.1 and earlier charged up to 0.6% in fees, paid in both WETH and the project’s token. Clanker v4 charges 0.2%, paid only in WETH. This update reduces differences between Clanker versions, making fees fairer for the early projects that helped Clanker grow. Finally, this won’t affect $CLANKER buys, which have been funded solely with WETH fees. https://farcasterhq.notion.site/Clanker-Fee-Update-Public-29d6a6c0c101803699bec943651930c1?source=copy_link

New: PnL Stats Find and follow the best traders on Farcaster easily! Token pages now let you see the biggest holders and how profitable their trades are. Tap into any holder and get a detailed breakdown of their trades and profits. Pnl also works for your own portfolio. You can get detailed stats on how much money you've made or lost over time on your positions. Only Base tokens are supported for now, Solana coming soon. Huge shoutout to @deodad @hamdi @gabrielayuso.eth @blockheim for their great work on this!

i opened figma today and saw this, what is @blockheim upto?

FC Dev Call Update - The next dev call is tomorrow at 10am PT - Future calls will be on on the 1st Thursday of the month at 10am PT Why are we making this change? Dev calls used to be for getting feedback from developers and sharing our long term roadmap. Thanks to @linda and others on the team, we now have channels to get feedback directly from devs on a much faster cadence. Dev calls going forward will be focussed more on long term roadmap, and once a month is likely the right cadence for that.

PSA: do not import your FC Wallet into Bitget wallet Bitget automatically "upgrades" your wallet which prevents it from working in wallets like ours. It is possible to undo this, but it is not easy for most users to do. The end result is that your wallet will stop working in Farcaster if you do this. If you want to backup your FC Wallet seed phrase into another wallet, consider Rainbow instead.

Update: Farcaster Rewards are changing Tomorrow will be the last day for current version of creator rewards. This experiment started a year ago and has paid out $1M+ to creators who casted on Farcaster. While this had some success, it's not aligned with our new direction. We will be launching a new experiment soon to replace the current program. A big thank you to everyone who has participated in the creator rewards program for the last year!

New: Dark Mode / Light Mode Selectors Starting today, you'll be able to choose whether the app starts in light mode, dark mode or respects your OS settings. The default will be set to dark mode, but you can change it. This is an improvement from today where we only let you follow your OS settings.

None of these words are in the bible but many are in our roadmap

Deposit Rewards Update The next batch of rewards for deposits will go out this Friday, exactly one week after the last batch.

New: Top Traders! Find and follow the best traders on Farcaster by going to Search -> Top Traders. You can see who has made the most in the last day, week and month. You may need to restart a few times to get the latest updates on mobile.

New on Farcaster: 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️ Price charts on Farcaster now support candlesticks with volumes! Tap the button on the bottom right of the graph to turn them on. Candles give you a sense of how much the price went up and down within a period. The volume bars at the bottom tell you how much trading volume happened within the same period. This gives you much more dimensionality when understand why a token price is changing and makes it easier to trade safely on Farcaster.

I wonder why they don’t invite this guy to parties

New: Deposit with Debit Card Tap Deposit > Debit Card to add funds to your Warplet today. You may need to restart a few times to see this option. Please reply with any bugs you find, I'll send $5 for unique bug reports with helpful screenshots or videos.

Clanker Update Today, we bought 914 $CLANKER for $121,463 using 2/3 of the clanker protocol fees. This brings our total ownership to 4,122 $CLANKER tokens. https://basescan.org/tx/0x6d302f895822cd3025a9217a2abd4ef9fd7a18a6089d45d88ef79da2c65e7543 https://basescan.org/tx/0xfcc53210d60f6ac9c7bdaa88da0e24ae0b373f9def9c1d2780b268bcd3f0a3fb

Clanker Update We just bought ~$65,000 of $CLANKER using 2/3 of the protocol fees generated in the last day. The other 1/3 is being reserved as USDC for tax purposes. Transactions below. The buying process is manual and the schedule will be irregular to start. We will announce buys as soon as we've completed them, and will automate this within a few weeks. https://basescan.org/tx/0x76ccc74fe3e36f4ed7547b54c90dbf869c9812335234501fc36d86af77a868ae https://basescan.org/tx/0xf2967f31a34eb02580c378e6fa6fee066878d5054a83ff1462270ae1a32a924b

@dynemyte rolled out a new, faster pricing system for our wallet. Prices should be a lot more accurate and closer to real time, please reply if you see any issues

Farcaster (the social network) continued to work smoothly through the AWS outage, despite running on AWS. A lot of credit goes to the simple design of the system which made it less reliant on parts of the AWS stack that failed. It’s also easily distributable and we can run validators on GCP in the future to prevent downtime. Lots of credit to @dynemyte @sanjay and @adityapk for their work on this

Deposit Bonus Update We're paying out the first deposit bonuses this Wendesday. As a reminder, you get 1% each week for qualifying deposits for ten weeks. Deposits qualify if they were sent in when the deposit program was open. You can check this by tapping on USDC in your wallet. Deposits will be disqualified if we detect that a single person has created multiple accounts with no activity on the network for the sole purpose of farming rewards. About 25% of deposits are being disqualified under this criteria and you'll get a notification and email tomorrow if this affects your account. Finally, if you didn't qualify for the deposit bonus and you are an active user, we are working on a new iteration of the program to help you earn for keeping USDC on Farcaster. More on this soon!

The ongoing AWS outage is causing issues with our wallet. You may see some errors while trying to use your wallets today until this is resolved. Funds are safe and you'll be able to use the wallet fully once AWS issues are resolved.

Guess who is working on improving token search today

A quick update on deposit bonuses: 1. We crossed our 2 week goal in less than 24 hours! 2. We're pausing new enrollment for bonuses at 3pm Pacific, Oct 14th. 3. If you deposited before 3pm Pacific, you're still eligible for rewards. Thank you all for trusting Farcaster with your funds. We hope to bring back a version of deposit bonuses soon. If you're new, we hope you’ll stick around and keeping swapping in our wallet and hanging out with our community!

I will be at the @nodefoundation opening in Palo Alto this January … if phil gifts me a cryptopunk

New: Deposit Bonus! Deposit USDC on Base and we'll match you up to 10% this October. All you need to do is transfer USDC into your account to start earning.

New Feature: Swap Comments! Swap at least $10 of a token and you can write comments that show up on the token page. Restart your app a few times if you dont see my comments on $HYPE

There's a lot of market volatility right now and many wallets are failing to complete onchain swaps and sends due to fast moving gas prices and asset prices. We're making some quick improvements to Farcaster wallet to mitigate some of this, but expect to see expensive swaps and a higher rate of errors while the volatility lasts.

He literally shipped BSC in < 24 hours

Found him in the corner of the office like this, frozen with a smile on his face, whispering "imagine if we had just stuck with the warplet"

hmm

If Farcaster let you import a wallet and use it privately, would you use that feature? Please reply or dm me if you would, looking for feedback.

Pushed a fix for this, should be coming back to normal soon

Feature Friday: Fast Charts! Charts now load super fast, have better granularity and show your entries and exits. h/t @slokh and @tanishq for the fast ship!

Please help us test referrals! If you reply with a new bug in this feature, I'll collect your cast for $1

Looking for feedback on the wallet. Please share things you like, things that annoy you or feature requests you have. All your input is valuable and helps us keep improving the app!