What do you think of the decentralized social protocol Farcaster?

What do you think of Paradigm leading the investment in decentralized social protocol @farcaster_xyz? I believe many people will have questions: 1) Is a Series A valuation of US$1 billion expensive? 2) How does it differ from social protocols such as Nostr and Lens? 3) What is the technical architecture principle behind it? 4) What opportunities will it bring to the Social sector? Next, let me briefly talk about my understanding:

1) Although many high FDV and low circulation tokens have been controversial recently, there is a voice saying that VC has encouraged this kind of "online is the peak" "The vampire project exists. Ignoring other projects for the time being, Farcaster is valued at US$1 billion and raised US$150 million in Series A funding. Is it expensive? I think it's not expensive.

Because Farcster is not just a protocol limited to the web3 field, it has the potential to rush to Web2 to solve the privacy protection and data ownership of social platforms, especially the problem of flooding of advertising information. From the perspective of the web2 valuation system, it is not expensive at all. Projects with high FDV but bleak reality are mostly caused by the contrast between established expectations and realized value. In my opinion, Farcaster currently exhibits expected value that supports a $1B VC valuation.

2) Farcaster and the familiar Nostr, Lens, etc. are three different decentralized social network protocols. Through observation and analysis, I personally believe that Farcaster is easier to implement and can capture a wider range of market value.

Nostr is a minimalist P2P messaging system that is designed more towards the technical upstream communication architecture layer. It has great disruptive value for the future, but it lacks a strong application market driver and is still in the conceptual stage;

Lens puts more emphasis on the ownership and interoperability of user data, and is deeply bound to the current framework of the blockchain. However, it relies too much on Tokenomics to inspire expectations, resulting in a relatively slow development of its application ecosystem;

Farcaster uses a decentralized identity layer (on-chain) and an interoperable application layer (off-chain). Putting aside the message storage rental and communication incentives at the protocol layer, only the first Warpcast client has accumulated With nearly 400,000 users, the growth potential is evident.

Nostr once made many developers obsessed and then helpless. Lens has been controversial because of the delay in implementing Tokenomics. In contrast, the Farcaster protocol mixes on-chain and off-chain environments and has better social Alpha platform fundamentals. Whether it is the experience of early users or the emergence of community assets such as $DEGEN, it makes people feel "full of value". full of growth expectations.

3) Farcaster’s technical operation architecture is simple to understand. It is built on the OP Stack and consists of two parts: the on-chain protocol (ID) and the off-chain protocol (storage + communication + client):

The on-chain part is mainly responsible for the creation, management and storage of user identities. The purpose is to generate a key pair for the account on the chain linked to its Ethereum address, to facilitate data matching after the user transfers the client later. and retrieval;

The off-chain part is divided into a back-end information storage system and a front-end user interaction system:

The back-end is equivalent to Nostr's Relay information storage and forwarding operation system, which is operated by many Hubs nodes. Store user data and distribute it between node networks;

The front end is operated by some clients similar to Warpcast, with the help of the innovation of Frams interactive applications, as well as operating mechanisms such as paid registration and Channel creation subscription It has achieved healthy growth and aims to provide users with an interactive experience comparable to web2 social platforms.

It should be said that Farcaster’s overall technical architecture framework is not complicated, and it draws on the strengths of others. It not only adopts the essence of Nostr’s back-end communication decentralized architecture, but also adopts the Warps points system to avoid the growth sustainability of pure Token incentives. question. In particular, Frams' mini-program-like front-end interactive experience innovation is particularly in line with the preferences of the web3 user group, and the payment end is naturally connected to the web3 wallet environment, making it easier to onboard high-quality user groups with paying habits.

Overall, the growth expectations and potential shown by Farcaster will accelerate the implementation of the decentralized social protocol ecosystem, and I am personally very optimistic about it.

Above

I think Farcaster should not be classified as SocialFI, and DeSoc may be more suitable.

In the short term, Farcaster will not be too popular in the spotlight, because its registration threshold and paid usage experience will block the inflow of most ordinary users, but in the long term, this will To prevent it from falling into the vicious circle of SocialFI's short-term explosion and then decline, and to truly attract long-term retained users who have real social needs and care about data privacy and data ownership, it is worth continuing to lock in and pay attention to its development.

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