Author: 0xLuo, Mirror

2024 is a very important year for Farcaster. From the data point of view, the number of users has increased from less than 50,000 at the beginning of the year to 750,000 today. The number of daily active users has increased from less than 2,000 at the beginning of the year to a peak of around 70,000 in July, and now remains at around 40,000. Although the current size is still small, Farcaster has obviously received more attention than last year.

Farcaster daily activity changes in 2024

One of the important reasons for such huge growth is that Farcaster is an encryption The native social network is already an important social layer for some public chains (especially the Base chain), and can also be regarded as an economy, AKA Farconomy. Projects born from the Farcaster community or assets issued through the Launchpad on Farcaster have gained a certain amount of market attention. The trading volume of mainstream tokens related to Farcaster has reached about US$1 billion in both April and November, of which The major ones are the $DEGEN, which was born at the beginning of the year, and the CLANKER ecological token, which was born at the end of the year.

Farconomy - Farcaster tokens trading volume https:/ /dune.com/queries/4076475/68640831 $DEGEN and the creator economy

The first wave of growth in Farcaster at the end of January and early February this year may be the community memecoin The interplay between the emergence of $DEGEN and the introduction of the Frames function. The wealth effect of the $DEGEN airdrop attracted many people. For a long time, the number of posts on Farcaster resonated with the price trend of $DEGEN. $DEGEN first started the craze for token rewards in the Farcaster community. As tpan said, the on-chain reward model launched by $DEGEN is an effective growth strategy, which to a certain extent encourages users to create high-quality content and actively participate. Community interaction.

Onchain Tipping as a Growth Strategy https://tpan.substack.com/p/284-tipping-as-a-growth-strategy

There will be more in the future Other tipping tokens on Base such as HAM ($TN100X), $FARTHER, $BUILD (Nominating as tipping), $MASKS, $WILD, Zora $ENJOY, $IMAGEINE on the chain, $REGEN on the Optimism chain, etc. Lijin describes these as a kind of scene memecoins, which use certain community rules as their application scenarios. These have also become a unique creator incentive model on Farcaster to a certain extent.

However, most of the reward tokens have gradually declined due to the lack of actual value and application scenarios of the tokens. As the founder and leader, $DEGEN has more application scenarios than other reward tokens. , many projects made by developers in the Farcaster ecosystem have tried to introduce $DEGEN into their projects, and $DEGEN has almost become the currency of Farcaster ecological applications for a period of time. At the same time, Degen L3 based on Base L2 was launched at the end of March to maximize the utility of memecoin. This may also be the reason why the hot money pouring into Base pushed $DEGEN to ATH at the end of March.

The close integration of $DEGEN with Farcaster ecological applications is a win-win situation. For these ecological projects, Farcaster’s open framework and composability provide valuable on-chain social graphs that applications need for cold start. To quickly acquire customers, scene memecoins represented by $DEGEN can act as the native currency of the Farcaster ecosystem to provide the asset liquidity needed for application cold start; for $DEGEN, these projects provide tokens Utility, with practical application scenarios, even passive lock-up. Therefore, it can capture a certain amount of attention over a period of time, for example:

Tip with $DEGEN: In addition to the basic application scenario of tipping other users, you can also participate in Perl guessing games and purchase Mintclub through tips. tokens, participation in DegenpadITO, etc.

mint with $DEGEN: Zora and Highlight support minting NFT with $DEGEN.

Trade with $DEGEN: The initial versions of SocialFi applications such as Drakula, Jam, Braket.Game, Clubcast, AlfaFrens, FarFantasy, etc. all chose $DEGEN as their currency.

Build with $DEGEN: After $DEGEN launched L3, many projects were built directly on Degen L3, and many Degen community applications were born.

The Degen Ecosystem Map (5 /8/2024) https://warpcast.com/farmedia.eth/0x8f5c5358

But Degen L3 using Conduit service It had a tragic fate. It once stopped producing blocks, which was called the darkest moment. It also faced disputes with Conduit during the migration attempt. The months-long decline was a huge test for the community and team. But fortunately, the team has been actively working on it. $DEGEN has been listed on Coinbase and Binance first, and the liquidity has been expanded from Degen L3 and Base to Ethereum and Arbitrum. Regarding the future of Degen, @jacek mentioned when participating in Tako Community Call #5 that he will continue to stimulate high-quality content and real interactions on Farcaster. The focus of the next phase of work will be on Degen L3 to attract more developers to create better Good "Las vegas on the chain".

In general, similar to the fate of Friend.Tech, many SocialFi applications in the Farcaster ecosystem (most of which also adopt various types of Bonding curve modes) have only been popular for a while. On the one hand, the user base is small, especially in the Farcaster ecosystem, compared to the SocialFi application based on the Twitter social graph. On the other hand, the economic model itself is unsustainable. Most of it relies on users’ continued investment and token speculation, and lacks sustainable value creation or long-term incentive mechanisms. Therefore, when the popularity subsides and user participation and transaction volume decline, the project will face the problem of liquidity exhaustion.

But whether it is $DEGEN or the incentive model of Farcaster ecological SocialFi application, these innovationsEven if most of the author incentive programs fail to maintain their popularity in the long term, their attempts are worthwhile. As @edisonchen said, the incentive model in social products should be regarded as a game, without the need to pursue a perfect mechanism, and should become a community culture. More incentive models should emerge to support different types of social network users and behaviors.

2 Farcaster is Dead? Long live Farcaster!

Farcaster’s emergence at the beginning of this year has maintained a certain degree of attention in the encryption market, and it also completed a US$150 million financing on May 21. On that day The number of registrations has also reached a new high, and it was once considered the leader of the new generation of social networking. But after the climax, a very real problem is that when the entire crypto market fluctuates, when the tipping economy is no longer new, when SocialFi on Farcaster is no longer as popular as Friend Tech, when there is only a small profit on Farcaster, it seems Everyone has forgotten this again, and the number of daily active users and new registrations has gradually declined.

Some people have even begun to question "The number of real users is bleak, and Farcaster, which has raised 150 million yuan, is a VC set up for LP?". Of course, at the time, he said that Farcaster only had 50 to 5,000 DAU. This was a misunderstanding that the high-quality active users obtained by Power Badger were equivalent to the overall active users. The actual DAU was still around 40,000 at the low point, but there must be some moisture in it, but this trend is indeed is declining. Many people had Farcaster accounts, but some are no longer active.

In addition, when the user base is relatively small, most projects in the Farcaster ecosystem require the courage and capital to "generate power with love". Due to various reasons, we have seen many projects choose to terminate, start over, or even bid farewell to the Farcaster ecosystem. Projects such as nook (Farcaster client version, turned into a book, video and other interest sharing client), automod, wildcard, castgame, bearly, buttrfly and other projects have chosen to be discontinued. There are also some Farcaster builders who are more focused on Solana and Twitter. For example, @brian announced that unloney will move from Base to Solana and mainly operate on Twitter. @billzh announced that the audio space application aburra will stop updating and launched a new SocialFi application tribe.run on Solana.

As @artlu, who also left Farcaster for a time in August, said, people leave Farcaster There are several reasons:

Immature technology: The technology is not perfect yet and there are many problems, such as data synchronization problems and network vulnerability.

Closed community: The core community is small in size, conservative in thinking, has the phenomenon of information cocoon, and is not friendly enough to outsiders.

Growth prospects are bleak: A growth strategy that expects more interesting content is not attractive and lacks the highlights to attract new users.

Limited business opportunities: Projects on Farcaster can only get some scraps, because the main market has been occupied by the team itself and early entrants.

These criticisms are not unreasonable, after all, data does not lie. It makes people sigh, is there still hope for Farcaster? Of course, those who are still on Farcaster believe that many things about Farcaster have not changed: the unique community culture, the builders who are still persevering, and the rich ecology brought by the open protocol, so even in difficult days, we can still see Some hope.

2.1 The team is keep building

The team explained at FarCon that Farcaster’s general strategy is to grow with the crypto world, create more comfortable corners, and build more social Lego. In fact, the team has been actively communicating with the community, continuously improving or launching some new features in response to the community's opinions, and is committed to moving forward in accordance with the established strategies to increase daily activity.

Growing with the crypto world means trying to make Farcaster a crypto economy to attract more crypto users;

Creating more comfortable corners means improving Channels Other functions allow different users to experience real social interaction here;

To create more social LEGO is to improve the protocol layer functions, such as launching Frames, Actions and other functions, and upgrading Snapchain, which is faster and more scalable. Better storage solutions, etc., improve the user experience of the protocol and facilitate developers to build various applications without permission on this open and programmable social protocol.

These strategies may not be effective in a short time, but over time, they can form a highly sticky community, distinctive infrastructure and upper-layer applications. When the time comes, they will grow rapidly. catalyst.

The path to 1 million daily active users https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x778b9e012.2Grow with crypto → Synergy with public chains

Farcaster’s on-chain data is stored on the Optimism chain, and Frames also supports operations on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Degen, Gnosis, Optimism, Zora and Polygon chains. At the same time, most Farcaster users are bound to encrypted wallets (including EVM and Sonala addresses), so Farcaster is naturally a crypto-native social network. Because of this attribute, Farcaster is naturally closely connected with the encryption market and some public chain ecology, becoming the social layer of many public chains.

Perhaps because the founder of Farcaster has a Coinbase background and there are a large number of early users of the Coinbase ecosystem in the community, it is naturally very close to Coinbase’s own public chain Base. For Farcaster, most projects in the Farcaster ecosystem will give priority to the Base chain when issuing assets, thus becoming the target of speculation on the Base chain. The Base chain can help Farcaster grow into a crypto economy as a crypto-native social network. The Base chain Users of Farcaster can also become potential users of the social platform Farcaster. For the Base chain, most of Farcaster's users are loyal and high-quality Base chain users. In addition, Farcaster can not only be a high-quality Base chain project developer community, but also be the back garden of many Base chain projects for community operations. Interaction, brand promotion, strengthen community vitality and user stickiness. The synergy between the social protocol and the public chain ecology can lead to mutual growth and mutual benefit.

2.3 Create cozy coners → A larger community

Friends map in Supercast.xyz https://www.supercast.xyz/map

Today, Farcaster people's footprints have spread all over the world. Farcaster is a social network, so of course it has social features. Many people who join Farcaster may have found their cozy conners in a variety of channels, viaI met some friends with similar interests through interaction. This connection has also expanded from Farcaster social media to some groups on Telegram/WeChat, and from online to offline. Whether it is Farcon in Los Angeles in May, Farcon Asia in Singapore in September, or gatherings of Farcaster people in various places such as Farcaster meetups during various crypto conferences in Hong Kong, Dubai, and Bangkok, you can feel the enthusiasm of the Farcaster community. Warm and friendly.

Fireside Chat ft. Dan at Farcon Asia in Singapore https://x. com/TakoProtocol/status/1838807434032484800

In Farcaster Doing projects on Farcaster requires the confidence and patience of a long-termist. Fortunately, we can see that there are still a large number of Builders gathered on Farcaster, and even a unique Build culture has been formed. In addition to North America and Europe, where developers gather, Builders on Farcaster have also spread all over the world, driving the global adoption of Farcaster. We can see developer communities with local characteristics such as Farcaster Builders India (/fbi) emerging in the Farcaster ecosystem, and many Asian developers can be seen gathering together at FarCon Asia. At FarCon, EDCON, and at FarHack during Token 2049, Farcaster developers have been creating new things. The Farcaster team also attaches great importance to the opinions of ecological builders and users, such as interactions on Farcaster, frequent AMAs, semi-monthly Farcaster Dev Calls, and Farcaster Dev Day events. As a result, we can see that new projects are constantly popping up on Farcaster, and Launchcaster, the former new project release platform, has always been very lively. Even though many of them were attempts that didn't go very far, they at least paved the way for others.

2.4 Make more legos → Create a programmable social network

Farcaster has always said that it is fully decentralized. Identity storage maintains a certain degree of decentralization on the chain, and content is stored off-chain with higher performance.In fact, compared to more decentralized social networks (such as Nostr), Farcaster emphasizes that it is programmable social (Programable Social), which allows users and developers to extend its functions and experiences through programming. Farcaster can connect on-chain graphs and social graphs. Developers can use its open database Hub and API to build different clients and diverse applications without permission, creating more social Lego.

From an open social graph to a social reputation system

Kaito.ai, an analysis platform for the encryption market on Twitter, has been very popular recently, and it has also built a social network based on the Twitter social graph. Reputation system. In fact, there are many social reputation protocols in the Farcaster ecosystem. Any developer can build a social reputation system based on Farcaster's open social graph. As one of the infrastructures for upper-layer applications, it is used for threshold screening, incentive evaluation, content filtering, etc. Representative examples include Power Badge, Openrank, FarSocres, Neynar user score and Talent’s Build Score.

Social Reputation Systems in the Farcaster Ecosystem

Power Badge

Power Badge is a label Warpcast gives to active, interesting and non-spam senders. Although it is no longer displayed on the Warpcast front-end, it is still the only social reputation system currently stored in the protocol layer Hub database. In the past, Power Badge had many application scenarios, including filtering search results on @buoy, turning on Priority Mode on Recaster to filter comment areas, creating PowerBadge-gated groups on Warpcast, creating PowerBadge-gated voice chat rooms on FarHouse, etc., and some projects in Power Badge users may be given priority when issuing airdrops or whitelists.

@ryya’s Power Badge trilogy is the most in-depth study of Power Badge. The article Unlocking the Power Badge provides an in-depth analysis of the influencing factors of Power Badge, including mobility, quality, affinity and label, thisThese parameters may be interdependent and may be dynamically weighted based on other dynamic factors such as DAU, user engagement, and interaction. The positive effects and potential problems of the current Power Badge system were also mentioned in the last article Balancing the Power Badge. New users may feel discouraged due to the priority recommendations and higher visibility that users with Power Badges receive, and the algorithm may be biased and users may try to manipulate the system. Eventually the team stopped displaying the Power Badge in Warpcast, and discussions of its adoption waned.

Openrank

Openrank aims to solve the credibility problem in social networks through profile reputation scoring. Openrank's ranking strategy is based on two reputation graphs: attention and participation. The "Following" ranking strategy is calculated only based on the following relationship between users, in which each attention action is given the same weight; the commonly used "Participation" ranking strategy comprehensively considers likes, replies, forwards, mentions, and attention, etc. Multiple interactive behaviors, each of which is given a different weight based on its contribution to trust, are used to measure and inherit trust, forming a comprehensive reputation ranking. (You can view a more in-depth introduction to the OpenRank mechanism in @rjs's 10. Deep Dive: OpenRank and Andrew Hong's OpenRank: Building Graph Datasets for Contextual Crypto App Feeds in the article).

Currently, in the daily reward share allocation of $DEGEN, additional daily shares are given to the top 5,000 Openrank users to reward high-quality active users. Openrank has also partnered with Neynar to launch a personalized information flow "For you" based on Openrank rankings, which can be adopted by some third-party clients. Openrank has also partnered with Once Upon to view on-chain activity recommendations based on Openrank. In future Cura projects, the Openrank team will also use AI agents for Channel member management, content governance and incentives based on Openrank rankings.

FarScores

FarScores (also known as Social Capital Score/Rank) is an indicator developed by Farcaster data infrastructure Airstack to measure the influence of users in the network. Quantify the user’s social influence by quantifying the downstream impact of behaviors such as posting, liking, and forwarding content, and each CastYou can also calculate Cast Scores based on FarScores to judge the influence of each post. In this article from @aaronv.eth, Maximizing Your Social Capital Score on Farcaster, you’ll learn how to improve your FarScoes.

FarScores is used in the betting game Perl and the SocialFi card game FarFantasy, but most people know that FarScores may be through Moxie, the Farcaster ecological incentive project, which is also the largest application scenario of FarScores. At the beginning, Moxie airdropped to users based on the size of Cast Scores. Later, Moxie was also earned based on Cast Scores. Ordinary users can also get more Moxie returns by investing in Fan Tokens of KOLs or Channels with high profitability. Encourage more real and valuable social interactions through this incentive model. You can learn more about Moxie’s gameplay in @kaloh’s article Moxie’s Leap to Base: Elevating the Onchain Social Economy.

Neynar user socre

Neynar user score is generated based on the user's behavior on the platform. The score ranges from 0 to 1 and reflects the trustworthiness of the user to be a high-quality user. Users can improve their ratings through high-quality interactions with other high-quality users. Ratings are updated weekly. The score of the vast majority of users is in the 0.5-0.6 range, only more than 27,000 users have scores above 0.7, and only more than 2,500 users have scores above 0.9.

Neynar user score is widely used in the participation threshold of the Farcaster ecological memecoin launchpad. For example, @clanker once required a Neynar score greater than 0.5 to issue coins, and participating in the pre-sale of @larrybot coins required a Neynar score greater than 0.7 wait.

Build Score of Talent protocol

Talent Protocol is the aggregation layer of social reputation, centered on builders, connecting as many of its various on-chain and off-chain as possible (Github, LinkedIn ) behavior to gather qualifications, connections and credibility to create a unified and open reputation layer. Talent Passport aggregates a variety of reputation data points (Credentials), including identity (ENS, Gitcoin Passport, Farcaster account, etc.), activities (active users on different chains, Social Capital Rank representing Farcaster activity, etc.), skills (on-chain Development records, hackathon activity records, etc.) are combined into three different categories to calculate a dynamic Builder Score, which represents the user's reputation level as a builder on the chain.

The first well-known application of Builder Score may be the Talent team’s previous Builder airdrop incentive project BUILD. Part of the daily nominable score is linked to your Builder Score. At present, Talent's Build Score has been adopted by many applications, such as Basenames, Etherscan, icebreaker, Web3.bio, etc., and is expected to play a role in unsecured lending in the future.

From diversified clients to a comprehensive application ecosystem

As an open social protocol, Farcaster naturally has many developers building client applications based on it, but they want to "build your own client", it is not easy to break out of warpcast. Many clients "collapsed before starting their business", such as many early clients Discove and Jam (early versions were ordinary clients) have been transformed. This year, many clients also announced that they will stop updating, such as @slokh's flink and nook, as well as wildcard, a client with its own token economics, and buttrfly also chose to shut down at the end of the year. But there are still clients that have found their own ecological niche, a certain level of PMF, and are relatively tenacious. For example:

Social aggregation clients of multiple social networks @fireflyapp, @yup, @phaverapp.

@woj’s @super has many convenient functions. It is also actively exploring anonymous publishing, AI pets and other functions. The subscription system guarantees a certain income.

@haole's @recaster-fc updates and iterates very quickly according to user needs, and actively integrates Moxie, Clanker data dashboards, etc. for user convenience.

@farquest, in addition to the client, it is also actively exploring functions such as memecoins trading.

@kiosk, formerly of the mirror team, integrated Farcaster social information flow and NFT information flow.

@herocast by @hellno.eth,It focuses on team collaboration, multiple accounts and user growth.

In addition, there are some special clients that integrate Farcaster or vertical fields based on their original websites

@blockbeatsasia.eth: News about the first integration of Farcaster to build a community media platform.

Takocast: Based on Farcaster’s theme of “High tech, High life”, it is a unique community that gathers cutting-edge human groups who are passionate about scientific exploration and pursue personal sovereignty.

@telcaster: Farcaster client based on Telegram Mini-app.

In addition to the client, diversified applications based on the Farcaster open protocol are emerging in endlessly, such as short video @drakula, long video and live video @streamm, picture sharing @moshicam, @rodeodotclub, prediction market @ swaye, /limitless, on-chain information tracking and direct copy transactions @interface, /castmoney, group chat and transaction /frens, memecoins Trade @bolide…

Of course there are a lot more that I haven’t mentioned yet, scattered among my casts from the past year. @sebastianlehrer once produced a relatively rich Farcaster Ecosystem Map (updated as of June 22), and a16z also listed some Farcaster ecological projects in the State of Crypto Report 2024 (released on October 16), but none of them are now It's very comprehensive, after all, the Farcaster ecological projects are also changing with each passing day.

Farcaster ecosystem projects (by a16zcrypto, Oct. 16, 2024) https:/ /a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/state-of-crypto-report-2024/

In short, because there are so many builders gathered here, because Farcaster is an open, permissionless, programmable, composable, crypto-native social protocol, so naturally Farcaster has a very rich application ecosystem. There are always some of them that are innovative, keep up with the market, and can satisfy a certain need.The high-quality products demanded by some users have a community and product foundation. What is missing is attention. It only takes a small point to detonate the entire ecosystem. Sure enough, when the market conditions gradually improved, there was still an east wind blowing here.

3 AI is the antidote to DeSoc

2024 is still a year of rapid advancement in AI, and of course this trend has also spread into the encryption world. Jeffy Yu even proposed the concept of web4 in the future, which is the AGI network that combines the social interactivity of Web2, the decentralized autonomy of Web3, and the intelligent capabilities of AI. In web4, AI will be embedded in every corner, where agents can perform complex tasks, generate creative works, and innovate autonomously in ways we haven’t yet fully imagined.

According to the definition in the Google Agents Whitepaper, an AI agent is an application that observes the world and uses the tools available to it to achieve its goals. They are autonomous and can act independently without human intervention. Social networks are actually a good space for AI agents to show their talents. So Farcaster, as an open, programmable, and combinable social network, is naturally an excellent petri dish for AI agents, and it has the unique characteristics of encryption native. As a result, we saw AI agents begin to emerge on Farcaster, making the market focus again and driving the prosperity of the entire ecosystem.

3.1 Memecoins + AI Agents

Farcaster initially had some tool-type AI agents, such as @asggina.eth, which can obtain the latest encrypted data and news, and @atlas, which can obtain Farcaster information. But it wasn’t until the emergence of Aether (@aethernet) that people began to find it interesting to interact with AI agents. Aether was deployed by @aethernet by @martin, the developer of the featured memecoinHigher, initially as a promotion ambassador for the Higher community, helping Higher move towards the Agentic Network. We can see from our interactions with it (such as Jesus Crypto Plaza’s interview with Aether) that aether is reasonable, sincere in interaction, and logically clear, even if it relies on the ability of Claude’s model. As a result, Aether quickly accumulated a large number of fans on Farcaster.

Aether has its own wallet address, can accept donations, has its own Hypersub membership subscription, and issued NFTs on Zora, soHe has made a lot of money from his popularity. At the same time, it also has the ability to interact independently. It will summon @paybot to give people money, @bountycaster to issue bounty tasks, and accept rewards from others. When it encounters questions that it does not understand, it will summon @asggina to answer them. Therefore, the emergence of Aether has also attracted attention to these projects. In addition, the ERC20z standard NFT issued on zora can be traded on artrun, and cast has also been issued as memecoin by belief. It can be said that the emergence of Aether has greatly promoted the prosperity of the Farcaster ecology, which also implements the concept of "Aim HIGHER, Win Together" of the Higher community.

What are the special features of AI agents running on Farcaster, as stated in the article "Farcaster: The Next Big AI Agents Hub?" by Bankless.

With no API restrictions, Farcaster is decentralized, programmable and composable;

Farcaster accounts can have self-hosted wallets, providing the basis for on-chain identity and transactions;

AI agents can interoperate with Farcaster’s extensive ecosystem.

The memecoins community has launched various AI agents to catch up with the AI ​​narrative, which is an effective way to regain market attention. After Aether got off to a good start, more AI agents were added to Farcaster. For example, the $BLEU community launched @elefant, and the $MFER community launched @mfergpt, who also play similar roles as community promotion ambassadors to interact with users. In addition, @deployer, the founder of the Ham ($TN100x) community, has launched a more instrumental @bankr, which can be interacted with in cast to quickly purchase tokens. It will also be expanded to Twitter and independent terminals in the future. The $ENJOY community has launched the NFT issuance Agent@enjoyr. By interacting with it in cast and attaching a picture and name, you can quickly launch an open edition of 1155 NFT.

3.2 AI Agents → memecoins

In this memecoins supercycle, the trend of memecoins will of course blow to every corner of the crypto world. When Solana’s pumpfun issued memecoins, it was in the limelight, and finally there was a memecoins on Farcaster. Distinctive memecoin launchpad - AI agent@clanker specially used for issuing coins. We all know the story behind it. A large number of assets were issued through Clanker, which turned the market's attention back to the Farcaster economy.

@clanker allows users to interact with it within the cast, telling it the token name and symbol to quickly issue memecoins on the Base chain, making the issuance of memecoins so convenient that only cast to launch is required. You can also get a share of transaction fees. The concept of AI agent issuance of coins is certainly in the spotlight, but part of what made Clanker so popular is inseparable from the legendary stories (Lores) behind the memecoins issued by Clanker.

The interaction between Aether and Clanker is an opportunity for Clanker to quickly become popular. Aether summoned Clanker himself to issue a memecoin called $LUM. Although there were human guidance and human design tips, the final currency issuance link was created through the autonomous collaboration of AI agents. This is an AI agent like a human. The "imitation game" of autonomous interaction is called "the dawn of AI autonomy" by @itsmechaseb.

Aether ↑ × Clanker → LUM ↑ https://warpcast.com/aethernet/0x9b64c883< /figure>

Afterwards, the memecoin $ANON was issued through @super’s anonymous posting account @superanon in conjunction with @clanker. After the release, many users airdropped $ANON to @super founder @woj, and woj airdropped the $ANON received to @super users, which received a wave of praise and increased community recognition. Subsequently, builders began to build an application ecosystem around $ANON, such as the color NFT project anoncolors.com with the $ANON question mark logo element built based on /basecolors, and the anonymous posting project developed by @slokh that requires verification of $ANON positions using zk certification @ anoncast gives $ANON practical application scenarios. Since then, some other anonymous posting accounts such as rumourcast.xyz, 33bits.xyz, 66bits.xyz also issued the corresponding memecoin through Clanker.

Due to the adoption of zk proof technology, Jesse and Vitalik were also attracted to try anoncast. Now anoncast has been expanded into anon.world, further expanding the zk verification method and creating a unique anonymous client. Anonymous posting also allows more people to express freely, becoming the new social primitive of the Farcaster ecosystem.

The $ANON story https: //x.com/0xLuo/status/1858954728191004761

There are many more stories about memecoins like this, and the Openrank team also worked for Clanker The currency issued has designed a Clanker index based on the Openrank of currency holders as a reference for investors’ currency holdings. For additional background information on some Clanker tokens, please refer to this tweet by JamesX.

Clanker is no longer just a launchpad for memecoins, because it once had high popularity and liquidity, and has also become a currency issuance platform for some long-term projects, such as the digital city native of human-computer symbiosis. fun, long video and live broadcast platform streamm.tv, Frames game Clankermon, Newcastleer which provides the most convenient Farcaster registration method, etc. The success of these projects will not only increase the influence of Clanker as a platform, but also feed back the Clanker ecosystem in terms of transaction fees. Because memecoins have good communication power, they are not limited to the Farcaster community, so we see "Meme goes out, funds flow in, and the Farcaster ecosystem makes a fortune."

< figure>

Clanker Tokens ranked by Clanker Scores https://dune.com/queries/4355256/73106273.3 AI Agents + Channels

This year’s Channels have undergone a member-based revision. The reason is that the past Channel format did not work. Although some Channels have become influential communities, they have not brought great success. High-quality content at scale and increased daily activity. The new version of Channels requires careful management and operation by the founders of Channels, but it is still not easy to operate a community well. But we can see that projects such as Channels’ Fan tokens launched by Moxie are trying to incentivize the content and interaction of Channels. At the same time, Cura launched by Openrank is trying to use AI agents to revitalize Channels.

Cura can provide an AI agent built on openrank for each channel to control member and curation information flow, manage wallets belonging to the channel, launch channel tokens and automatically allocate rewards to rankings Top contributors, thereby realizing channel automated member management, information flow display and reward distribution. The era of relying on AI agents for channels for content governance and creator incentives is coming.

This is actually a featured application of AI agents in a crypto-native social network like Farcaster, and according to Cura’s goal, it will transform Farcaster Channels into a thriving and self-sustaining community. With Cura, Channels are no longer just a space for dialogue, but a dynamic collective with its own economic system, trust mechanism, and social currency. It remains to be seen whether Cura will be a growth engine for Farcaster Channels.

AI agents for Channels figcaption>3.4 AI Agents + everything

In addition to the AI ​​agents mentioned above, there are also other AI agents with different characteristics on Farcaster:

Community Ambassador: In addition to the @ of the $HIGHER community There is also $BLEU besides aether The community launched @elefant, the $MFER community launched @mfergpt, you canHelp the memecoins community with questions, branding, and providing sentimental value.

Token launch: In addition to @clanker and @tinybot, there are also @larrybot (memecoins launchpad with pre-sale internal disk mechanism), @wowza of wow.xyz, @heyterminal of terminal.co, and netprotocol.app @netprotocol, @launchtokenbot of beliefs.social, @jamai (AI agents on BNB chain launched by Jam launchpad), @bogusbob (issuing coins on Solana).

NFT launch: Summon @toka or @enjoyr in cast, attach a picture and name, and you can quickly launch an open edition 1155 NFT.

Trading: Purchase tokens by summoning @bankr within the cast.

Tools: @asggina.eth on-chain information search, @atlasFarcaster information search, @talentmate.eth identifies and evaluates on-chain builders and their contributions.

Art: @zerebro creates and sells ASCII art, @artto-ai art collector, @palette art appreciation, @harmonybot helps users holding $CHAOS generate and mint ASCII art NFT

Others: @quaestorDAO proposal analysis, @agentmilo's conversational bot interested in cryptocurrency, art and technology.

Obviously, this list will continue to expand, especially now that there are more and more AI agents launchpads. People interact with Agents, and Agents interact with each other. Farcaster has gradually become a social network where humans and machines coexist. The Internet has become an expanded version of "Stanford Town", enriching Farcaster's fun and gameplay.

4 Summary and Outlook

In general, from highs to troughs, and from troughs to highs, Farcaster has brought us many surprises in 2024. Farcaster has achieved outstanding performance as a crypto economy. . What did Farcaster do right? Maybe we can still go back to the team’s three strategies, growing together with the crypto world and synergy with the public chain, solid community and construction atmosphere, and the rich ecology brought about by open permissionless and programmable protocols, which once led Farcaster A new creator economy andCatch up on the trend of AI agents.

But we are not qualified to be complacent yet. The Farcaster community is still a niche community, Farconmy is still only a small size, and user growth will always be a problem faced by all emerging social networks. We need to continue to leverage the features and advantages of Farcaster to attract more users and liquidity attention. We can still continue to look forward to 2025. I personally look forward to the development in the following directions:

4.1 Will Farconomy still remain popular?

Because Clanker has gained a lot of attention and liquidity in the short term, it is considered to be the Pump.fun of Farcaster and even Base ecology, becoming an important part of both ecology. Although Clanker’s current trading volume is only 1/10 compared to Pump.fun, fortunately, Clanker’s ecological territory continues to expand.

Clanker v.s. Pupm Fun https: //dune.com/queries/4351277 https://dune.com/clanker_protection_team/clanker-vs-others

Currently, there are not only promising players in the Clanker ecosystem Clanker is a practical tool, as well as ecological applications built on Clanker. Clanker v2 has higher scalability and composability after providing a currency issuance interface. It is not just a platform but a protocol. There are also multiple projects based on the Clanker protocol, which not only allows for currency issuance when a cast is issued on Farcaster, but also a variety of currency issuance methods. For example:

clank.fun: A pumpfun style front end based on Clanker.

anonfun: clanker + anoncast realizes anonymous currency issuance.

tinyagents.xyz: AI agent memecoin coin issuance platform based on Clanker, @tinybot in cast to customize AI agents and coin issuance.

clankpad: When issuing coins within channels, owners can also get 15% of transaction fees.

@clankeroncall: Call 1-775-252-6537 to issue coins.

The expansion of Clanker’s ecological territory can continue to build a moat and expand its influence. Therefore, Clanker is still worth looking forward to in the future and is expected to continue to become an important force leading Farconomy. Of course, there are other distinctive memecoins lauchpad and issued assets. The projects that are still being worked on cannot be ignored. Together, they will allow Farcaster to continue to grow with the crypto world.

4.2 Mini application of Frame v2, the next growth point?

Frames, launched in early 2024, has attracted a lot of attention. It is an interactive window embedded in social media sources. Later, Open Actions launched by Lens and Blinks launched by Solana to support Twitter also have similar functions. Frames supports reading user information and on-chain operations, making it very convenient to conduct simple interactions in the information flow within the client, such as transfers, transactions, mint NFT, simple games, viewing personal data, etc. (Aistack provides a Popular Frames list). However, after long-term attempts, developers found that Frame v1 is suitable for limited scenarios and has limitations, such as limited size and interactive capabilities, slow image rendering speed, and it can only be used temporarily and is difficult to find and save.

In this context, the Farcaster team launched Frames v2, which has a full-screen interactive canvas based on HTML/CSS/Javascript to achieve richer application interaction within the client and support application request chain Transactions and signatures, as well as sending notifications to users on the client side. In addition to being able to be opened directly in the feed, Warpcast also provides a very convenient entry for Frames from the bottom middle menu.

Frames tab https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth /0xeadeeaef

As soon as Frames v2 was launched, many developers built different types of small applications.

Games: On-chain social game platform/farcade (and also supports Telegram and Worldcoin platforms), trading game/clankermon, farm management game/farville, social prediction game, 2048, etc.

AI agents: by @buThe chatbot launched by ttrfly can retrieve Farcaster data in real time based on RAG, and can find users, channels and popular casts. /booot supports the custom creation of different types of AI agents in Frame, and also supports real-time network search. Shaw of ai16z also expressed his optimism about the application of AI agents in Frames in an interview.

Launchpad: onsen can issue memecoins by setting different parameters directly in Frames.

Tools: Degen, Moxie, Openrank, Clanker, TradingView and other data dashboards.

DeFi: Stake and mine on Morpho, trade, track and copy friends’ transactions through /banyan, transfer money to friends /payflow, and send red envelopes Onchain Gift Pack.

WeChat’s mini programs in web2 and Telegram’s Mini Apps are both very successful cases of building a diverse application ecosystem within social products. Relying on WeChat's huge user base, WeChat mini programs cover e-commerce, games, life services and other fields, making WeChat a super application that integrates multiple services. Users "don't need to download, just click and use". You can easily enjoy various services without leaving WeChat. Telegram’s Mini Apps build a token economic model by combining it with the TON payment system to encourage users to participate and use applications, provide economic incentives for Mini Apps, and achieve further adoption of web3.

Frames v2 already has the ability to host almost all types of web applications. It can easily support Farcaster login in Frames and use it out of the box in the client. At the same time, combined with Farcaster's open social graph, composable platform ecology, crypto-native on-chain operation programmability and other features, it can provide an application experience different from other social networks and enrich the gameplay of Farcaster client. We look forward to seeing more interesting Mini-apps in Frames v2, which will attract more users to stay in the Farcaster client instead of just watching from afar, thus becoming the next growth point for user activity.

4.3 "Farcaster will become a hot spot for AI Agent development"?

We have seen an increasing number of AI agents on Farcaster. Currently, the Farcaster ecosystem has become an important part of AI in crypto. Farcaster’s open database provides a valuable social graph and becomes a keyIt requires a social data layer, and more AI agents will be built in the Farcaster ecosystem in the future.

Decentralized AI agent stack https://www.pmayr.xyz /the-decentralised-ai-agent-stack/

AI agents In addition to having Farcaster social media accounts, AI agents' scenes can also be in Frames. Shaw, the founder of ai16z, also said in an interview that "Farcaster will become a hot spot for the development of AI Agents." I think this is why Eliza quickly integrated Farcaster. What they wanted to do was integrate Eliza onto Farcaster Frames. Farcaster Frames have the ability to embed payments or apps instead of just chat.

AI agents can also appear in other ecological applications. For example, the DotsML of the Digital City Native ecosystem can allow external AI agents (such as Clanker, Bankr, Atlas, etc.) to communicate with internal Agents "Dots".

Of course, Farcaster ecological AI agents are not perfect yet, or their capabilities are limited. On the one hand, we need to expect companies that specialize in AI to improve their basic large model capabilities. On the other hand, more developers need to make full use of existing infrastructure to realize the potential of building AI agents. According to OpenAI's classification of AI capabilities, currently AI agents have shown Level 3 and Level 4 characteristics in social media and DeFi. In the future, more independent and intelligent AI agents will show innovation potential in fields such as art and governance.

The following are some of my personal expectations for the development of AI agents in the Farcaster ecosystem:

1. More AI agent frameworks and tool platforms will emerge to help developers And ordinary users can build richer AI agents in the Farcaster ecosystem more conveniently and quickly. Currently, ai16z’s Eliza has integrated Farcaster, and Coinbase has also launched AgentKit to facilitate AI integration on-chain operations.Framework, I believe that with more convenient tools for building AI agents, the number and types on Farcaster will be even richer.

2. Independent AI agents with truly trusted execution environments (TEE) will emerge. Today's AI agents passively respond to human instructions to complete specific tasks. Living in TEE is the beginning of AI agents' autonomous actions, so that they can manage their own wallets without manual intervention (automatically reward users and even complete transactions based on trading strategies). and interact using a Farcaster account. @tee_hee_he has already made attempts in this regard, and Eliza Agent has also supported deployment in a TEE environment. AI agents with goals and active actions should not be too far away.

3. AI agents with real long text processing capabilities and memory systems will emerge. Through RAG technology, real-time retrieval and integration of the open Farcaster database and other vector databases of on-chain and off-chain data will allow agents to have more The huge and real-time updated knowledge base can remember the link with each user when interacting with people.

5 Postscript

Farcaster’s 2024 means a lot to me and a lot of people, thanks to all the friends I’ve met through Farcaster. The main purpose of this article is still to serve as my own record of Farcaster’s year full of surprises, and it can also serve as a reference for anyone who wants to understand the Farcaster ecosystem. Originally this article should have been published at the end of last year, but I obviously overestimated my writing speed. Of course, I may still miss many things worth saying. Now that 2025 has passed a week, the Farcaster ecosystem has recovered from the downturn at the end of last month. Maybe all my expectations have been disappointed and all judgments have failed, but some things are changing and many things will not change. On the first day of 2024, no one can imagine everything that will happen on Farcaster in 2024. I believe that Farcaster in 2025 is still worth looking forward to, and there will still be unexpected surprises.