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Conversation with Farcaster Co-Founder: How Decentralized Social Media Can Grow from 100,000 to 1 Billion Users

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ChaincatcherChaincatcher2024/05/23 02:37
By:作者: Sage D . Young , Unchained (曾就职于 Coin D esk)

Farcaster co-founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan shared their views on a range of topics.

Author: Sage D. Young, Unchained (formerly at CoinDesk)

Translated by: Yangz, Techub News

Dan Romero, co-founder of the decentralized social network Farcaster, announced on Wednesday that Farcaster has completed a $150 million Series A funding round at a valuation of $1 billion, led by Paradigm, with participation from a16z Crypto, Haun Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Variant Fund, and Standard Crypto. Since becoming a permissionless social network in October 2023, Farcaster's paid registered users have reached 350,000, and network activity has increased 50-fold. This year, Farcaster will focus on growing daily active users and adding developer primitives such as channels and direct messaging to the protocol. Dan Romero stated, "In the coming years, we will double down on Farcaster's vision to truly develop it into an internet-scale protocol."

According to Dune Analytics data created by Pixelhack, Farcaster's daily active users reached nearly 45,000 on May 20, a 30% increase compared to the activity surge triggered by the launch of Frames (a feature that turns posts into interactive applications) on February 11. However, this figure is far from the numbers of mainstream social media giants like Facebook, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter).

As a leader in decentralized social media protocols, how will Farcaster achieve this goal? To this end, Unchained interviewed Farcaster's two co-founders, Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan. The two founders shared their views on a range of topics, including their upcoming decentralization plans, their current views on the cryptocurrency social network landscape, and their experiences working at Coinbase. Here are the key points from the interview.

Q: Farcaster's decentralized channels are about to launch. Can you tell us more about them?

Dan Romero: We believe it is necessary to allow channel creators to choose whether to set up some economic model for the community, whether in the form of subscriptions or requiring users to purchase specific assets for access. This flexibility can lead to higher quality output. Being a community mod is no longer a thankless job; producing high-quality content can be rewarded accordingly.

This is the advantage of channels. It is similar to a subreddit, but the creator owns the channel and can manage it flexibly, increasing economic benefits in any suitable way.

Q: What is the difference between the current channels and the decentralized channels being developed?

Dan Romero: The current channels are centrally managed and stored in the Warpcast database. However, the content of the channels and casts (similar to tweets or Reddit posts) are on the protocol, so they are permissionless, but the metadata and curation capabilities of the channels are not part of the protocol. They only exist in Warpcast.

Varun Srinivasan: If you create and set up a (decentralized) channel, then all data, everything, including the channel icon and feed, can run on multiple different clients. All data is decentralized, and any application developed by anyone can display the same version of the channel. Moreover, the channel creator can actually control their own channel, meaning if the creator wants to transfer its ownership to a friend, they can. Or, after accumulating a batch of fans, if the creator wants to sell it to someone else, that's okay too. Channel creators have the freedom to do so.

Q: How much effort have you put into Farcaster's decentralized governance?

Varun Srinivasan: Our decentralized governance model is very effective, known as rough consensus and running code. The IETF uses it to create all network standards like TCP-IP. It is so powerful because it has no rigid structure. The logic is very simple: if you can create something useful and convince most people that it is useful, then you can release it.

Someone is responsible for managing the Farcaster Hub (nodes that store data in the network). Someone is responsible for developing applications that interact with the Hub to extract and generate data. And there are users who use these applications. These three groups balance each other. ... (Therefore) you must release something that most people in these three groups think is good. Otherwise, they will show their preferences through their actions. Hub operators can run old versions. Applications can choose different Hubs. Users can also choose different applications. All these ultimately play a balancing role, preventing anyone from forcibly passing something that is detrimental to the broad interests of the network.

Dan Romero: Currently, we are focused on keeping governance simple, increasing the total number of daily active users, and then launching truly useful development. We could spend a lot of time building complex and convoluted governance structures, but that would not help achieve our goals.

Q: What was the most important idea during the transition from a centralized exchange like Coinbase to deciding to build a decentralized social network?

Dan Romero: Despite concerns about Twitter's development after Musk took over, Twitter's network effects are stickier than I initially thought. We entered the market in 2021, and we found that "people in the cryptocurrency space talk a lot about decentralization and the need for other applications in the ecosystem." Then we naively thought, "Great, there will really be people who want to play with new things." However, it turned out that (users) would rather continue using existing products.

We really want to provide people with truly useful products. This has deeply changed our thinking over the past few years... Ultimately, the only way we will win will not be because of the architecture, but largely because we build products that people love.

Varun Srinivasan: At the beginning, we realized that we would spend the same amount of time attracting users and developers. We quickly realized that developing applications and social products is really, really hard. Just developing Warpcast (the Farcaster client) took us about 20 person-years. Without users, expecting other teams to appear on the first day and decide to spend 100% of their time developing Farcaster is unrealistic.

Only by building clients, telling stories, and attracting users can Farcaster's value to developers increase day by day, which is the most useful. Of course, this does not mean building an SDK, a toolchain, or adding a feature for me. Instead, can you increase the number of people using this product tenfold? This has been the biggest shift in our thinking since the early days.

Q: What did you learn from your experience at Coinbase that can guide Farcaster's development?

Dan Romero: Based on my experience at Coinbase, I firmly believe that ordinary people do not care about everything you are building. They just want a good application, and it all starts with user login. In fact, it starts even before that, with how you position the product and explain it to them.

We can do better in this regard. The current issues with Farcaster and Warpcast can confuse people. We are not even competing with fintech applications; we have to compete with the best social media applications in the world.

So, once users enter the application, is it interesting enough to make them want to come back? Many cryptocurrency users like to compare cryptocurrency applications, but the reality is, if your application is not that interesting, they will go back to TikTok or YouTube.

Varun Srinivasan: Another thing I learned from Brian Armstrong is to always focus on building things people want, no matter what changes occur in the primitives. He said things will never be as good as they seem, nor as bad as they seem. One reason Coinbase has always been successful is that whether the market is in a trough or a peak, Coinbase has always insisted on output and building. We have experienced multiple cycles in the cryptocurrency field and witnessed the implementation of this strategy. We know that long-term focus is the real key to success.

Q: The current cryptocurrency social media ecosystem includes participants like Farcaster, Lens, Nostr, and Friend.Tech. How do you view the current landscape?

Dan Romero: Compared to platforms with billions of users like Fac...

Compared to centralized social media, the total number of cryptocurrency users is not significant. We are talking about tens of thousands of users across all decentralized social media (combined), who might be the same group of people as the 100,000 users who use cryptocurrency daily.

We are interested in how to gradually grow the user base of cryptocurrency applications from 100,000 to 1 billion. I don't think focusing on competitors is useful. The key question is: What do people want? What do people find interesting? If you can make users find the content interesting and fun, so they come back every day, then developers will follow. Nothing else matters.

Varun Srinivasan: These competitors are taking slightly different paths, and our goal is very clear, which is to conduct business in the cryptocurrency field, allowing users to build their own communities and developers to create applications for these users.

In-depth Interviews and Conversations: In-depth interviews and observations for blockchain business leaders
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Farcaster Decentralized Social Media Funding 1 Billion Users User Growth
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Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.

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