 | 2/8/24 |
Farcaster is a decentralized social media platform that has grown rapidly in the last two weeks. [Image via Farcaster]
What’s up? It’s Coinbase Bytes
There’s never a dull moment on the blockchain. Here’s what you need to know this week:
- A look at Farcaster, crypto’s buzziest community. The decentralized social media platform is growing like crazy.
- This week in numbers. Bitcoin’s massive onchain transaction volume in January, the amount of users that joined crypto in 2023, and more stats to know.
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Price changes are for the past week, ending on Feb 8, 2024 at 07:52 PM UTC
 | SOCIAL STUDIES |
Crypto is buzzing about Farcaster. Here’s what you need to know.
Social media drove the web2 revolution, but can it do the same for web3? So far this year, the buzziest name in web3 is a social media protocol called Farcaster.
In less than two weeks, the number of daily users of the platform — which was founded in 2020 by a pair of former Coinbase employees — jumped more than 900% as the protocol showed its potential to reshape the relationship people have with their own data. Let’s dive in.
What is decentralized social media, anyway?
Decentralized social protocols like Farcaster and Friend.tech aim to bring the benefits of web3 to social media, while also eliminating some of the “walled gardens” and pitfalls that come with centralized giants like Facebook and X.
In practice, that means giving users greater control over their data, the ability to build custom experiences, and a deeper level of censorship resistance. The recent success of Farcaster, which saw its seven-day trailing average of daily active users grow from 2,200 to more than 20,000 in about two weeks, highlights a growing interest in social media alternatives.
How does Farcaster work?
“Farcaster is a social media protocol built on Optimism, the Ethereum scaling network,” writes Decrypt. “On top of the public and decentralized Farcaster ecosystem, users can create (and have created) a slew of integrated apps that perform various social media functions.”
As a result, Farcaster already offers access to a large collection of applications, including Warpcast (which is similar to X and currently accounts for around half of all sign ups), Farcord (similar to Discord), and Tiles (similar to the image-sharing app VSCO).
You can switch from one app to another with a single login and your social connections migrate with you. As part of the protocol’s efforts to discourage spambots, new accounts require either a phone number or cost $5.
Why did Farcaster suddenly enter the crypto conversation?
Activity on Farcaster exploded after a late-January upgrade introduced a new feature called “Frames,” which allows users to easily build interactive experiences within a post.
Frames make Farcaster apps hugely flexible — allowing users to mint NFTs, play video games, sign up for subscription services, and more – all without ever leaving their feed.
Paragraph, a decentralized newsletter platform, built a Frame that allows followers to subscribe to newsletters and receive them directly in their wallets. Other popular Frames offer features that range from a playable version of the 1993 first-person shooter game “Doom” to ordering Girl Scout cookies. Right now, the majority of developer activity for Frames is happening on Base, the Coinbase-incubated Ethereum layer 2 blockchain.
The bottom line…
Farcaster’s rapidly-growing user base qualifies it as a hit in the still burgeoning space of decentralized social media, but it’s not exactly a household name. Instead, it offers a glimpse into what social media could look like if it weren’t controlled by a handful of corporations.
| NUMBERS TO KNOW |
$1.21 trillion
Bitcoin’s onchain transaction volume for January, the highest monthly total since September 2022, according to the Block. January marked the fourth straight month of increases, with more than triple the volume in September, when the uptrend began.
$1 billion
Amount of revenue that Meta’s Reality Labs reported in its most recent earnings announcement, up from $727 million for the same period last year. At the same time, the metaverse-focused part of the business saw $4.6 billion in losses, which the company anticipated to grow due to “ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality.”
62.1 million
Number of new crypto users in 2023, according to a recent report from onchain analytics platform Flipside Crypto. As the Defiant notes, Ethereum attracted the most new users at 15.4 million, Polygon followed closely with 15.2 million, and Bitcoin acquired 10.7 million.
60,000
Number of preorders for the “Solana Mobile Chapter 2,” the successor to Solana’s crypto-enabled Saga phone (which sold out last December as the price of a Solana token included on the phone called BONK soared at the end of 2023). The Chapter 2, which includes features like self-custody, and easy access to dapps, is expected to launch in 2025 with a $450 price tag.
| TOKEN TRIVIA |
Which of the following is not a stablecoin?
| A | LINK |
| B | USDC |
| C | DAI |
| D | USDT |
Find the answer at the end of the email.
| NOW TRADING ON COINBASE |
| ONDO |  |  |
Ondo Finance was created to bring institutional-grade financial products onchain, including tokens backed by U.S.
| ZETA |  | |
ZetaChain is a blockchain built on the Cosmos SDK focused on enabling interoperability among all blockchains.
| HONEY |  | |
Hivemapper is a decentralized mapping network that aggregates road-level imagery and data.
| VELO |  | |
Velodrome Finance is an automated market maker on Optimism.
Trivia answer
| A | LINK |
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