Farcaster's New Feature "Frames": Praised by Silicon Valley Startup Guru Paul Graham

Introduction

Farcaster, a decentralized social platform led by a16z, recently launched a new feature called “Frames,” igniting an unprecedented frenzy of application development and bringing about a new high in DAU (Daily Active Users). Unlike most hotspots in the crypto industry, this time Farcaster primarily attracted developers, which in turn fostered more interaction from end users and even earned praise and recognition from Paul Graham, a startup mentor in Silicon Valley.

What is “Frames”?

Before understanding Frames, let’s get acquainted with Farcaster.

Farcaster is a decentralized social network founded by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan.

Farcaster itself is a protocol, much like the underlying protocol SMTP for email. Farcaster is responsible for storing user handles, casts (tweets in Farcaster), and other interactive behaviors such as likes and reposts. For end users, accessing this social network requires building a client similar to Warpcast.

The client is the interface through which users access the information feed. Nowadays, the term “client” is no longer used, as in most modern centralized social networks, the protocol and the client are the same thing. Twitter used to have clients like Tweebot, Tweetdeck, and Twitterific until it shut down API access, ending the era of clients. Now, Twitter is just Twitter (or, you could call it by its new name, X).

The Farcaster team built their official client, Warpcast, but third-party developers are also encouraged to develop their own clients. Anyone can build a client on top of Farcaster for free, using Farcaster’s data but providing a different frontend experience. A16z crypto lists a range of general and vertical clients in the Awesome-farcaster repository, including Supercast, Yup, Searchcaster, Launchcaster, Kiwi News, and Casthose.

A few months ago, Farcaster introduced a new feature - Channels - for organizing conversations based on topics, similar to Douban’s groups or Reddit’s subreddits. Currently, any user is allowed to pay WARP to create different themed channels.

What is Frames?

Last Friday, Farcaster introduced Frames, which allows building small applications within casts (tweets).

True to its name, Frames are small interactive iframes embedded within casts, allowing users to embed custom interactive actions in their published content, such as voting, galleries, surveys, prediction markets, etc. Users can engage in interactions directly in the Farcaster feed without the need to navigate to third-party platforms. Opening a Frame is like opening the door to another app, allowing other apps to access the user directly. From a Web 2 perspective, it may seem no different from embedding another website in a website using <iframe>, but the difference lies in the shared state of the blockchain, making this embedded experience as native as the app itself.

Compared to Web 2, Frames offer a new Web 3 primitive, a simple way for Y application to run when the user is in X application, with almost no need for additional coordination between X and Y. The interoperable identities and transaction records of the blockchain, as well as the seamless handling of currency and digital ownership, make it possible for cross-consumer applications to have a real and universal user operation graph, something even Facebook in its heyday could not achieve.

At the underlying logic level, each interaction is an EdDSA key signature operation for Farcaster users, thus supporting automatic identity verification, compatibility with all other Farcaster clients, and no risk of fund loss.

Unprecedented Frames Development Frenzy

Frames provide a canvas, and developers draw content on it.

Just 5 days after its launch, this seemingly simple feature has already sparked incredible creativity among developers. For example, minting NFTs directly in the Farcaster feed stream, subscribing to newsletters directly in the Farcaster feed stream, and claiming faucet test coins directly in the Farcaster feed stream. Other developments include generating artwork, text-based adventure games, an application that automatically checks for unclaimed airdrops, an on-chain shopping cart and checkout process that supports token payments, and creating wallets and tipping directly through the command line. Currently, the Farcaster frames developer hackathon event in New York is in full swing.

Degen Jeeves is an automated bot for $DEGEN that allows users to directly tip specific amounts of $DEGEN tokens to specific Farcaster users via the command line !tip. Before tipping, users need to use !create to automatically create a base wallet.

Farcaster Community Token $DEGEN

In fact, one key reason for Farcaster’s record high DAU is the recent launch of the second round of airdrops for the community token $DEGEN.

$DEGEN is a token initiated in the Farcaster Degen channel. In the recent second round of airdrops, users earn Farcaster points by receiving tip amounts from others. Each Farcaster user (who has published at least 3 original casts) receives an initial tipping allowance, the amount of which depends on the ratio of replies/tweets. To tip a specific post, simply comment below with the amount followed by “$DEGEN”, for example, “420 $DEGEN”. Tipping in specific channels will result in a greater weighting for the airdrop. Since the start of the second round of the airdrop campaign, the price of $DEGEN tokens has increased by 230%. Due to the wide distribution method resulting in widespread airdrop farming, $DEGEN developers are working on an automated detection system.

$DEGEN is the most successful meme coin to emerge from Farcaster to date, representing a truly community-driven meme project. Its fair distribution, grassroots atmosphere, bottom-up expansion, and promotion of organic community growth, along with its loose unofficial DAO organization and Build, give it a natural integration-friendly advantage. Developers on Farcaster are experimenting with various use cases around $DEGEN, showcasing a rare consumer use case in the crypto industry.

Today, as the hub of social interaction within Farcaster, Degen has become the most active channel on Farcaster, with the Degentlemen and Degentlewomen communities contributing to Degen’s DAU. Data shows that $Degen is the most active channel on Farcaster, even surpassing the sum of all other thematic channels.

It can be said that by creating Frames, Farcaster provides a seamless crypto native social networking experience on the blockchain, an experience that makes users hardly aware of the existence of blockchain. While Twitter, under Musk’s leadership, faces increasing criticism for its restrictions on third-party developers, Farcaster, on the other hand, offers developers a mobile-first, distribution (cold start) friendly, crypto-native development experience without requiring permission, showing the true potential of “Farcaster will flip Twitter”.

Like Silicon Valley startup master Paul Graham, who sees long-term value in Farcaster because it is not just about the future of the crypto industry but also about preserving the increasingly closed-off internet.

Hopefully, Farcaster will bring us closer to the original vision of the World Wide Web.

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1. This article is reprinted from [Notion]. All copyrights belong to the original author [Cobo Argus]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
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