Farcaster Records Surge in Daily Users with Frames Launch

The number of daily active users on the decentralized social protocol Farcaster surged to nearly 30,000 on February 4, 2024, according to on-chain data by Dune Analytics.

The nearly tenfold increase since January 26 is due to the launch of the Frames feature across Farcaster’s protocols. Much of the excitement occurred on its Twitter/X-esque client Warpcast.

Frames enables users to take any post, aka ‘Cast’ in the protocol’s terminology, and turn it into an interactive application, allowing them to superimpose polls, live feeds, mint NFTs, play games and perform many other interactions, according to Farcaster documents.

The feature taps the EdDSA authentication system. This is a cryptographic digital signature algorithm that eliminates “wallet drain risk,” says Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero.

The launch and sudden spike in traffic was not without a hitch. On Sunday, Romero tweeted that there was “degraded performance” on the Warpcast application.

Protocol Farcaster brings social media on-chain.

Two executive Coinbase alumni, former Vice President Dan Romero and ex-Senior Director Varul Srinivasan, co-founded Farcaster in 2020.

It’s a decentralized protocol that powers a number of clients, including the microblogging app Warpcast, which is by far the most popular.

It accounts for 44.8% of Farcaster’s current user base. Although people often confuse the two, Warpcast is a centralized protocol built on top of Farcaster. Recently, the latter was touted by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin for its security features.

The advantages of Farcaster’s decentralized structure include user ownership over their data and censorship-free content.

The majority of Farcaster users link their Ethereum wallets to access the full suite of features across Farcaster’s applications. However, basic in-app features don’t require constant transactions.

One of the biggest divergences between Farcaster and its competitors is the concept of storage, according to X crypto guru Cygaar (@0xCygaar).

He explained in a thread on Sunday that to send posts and messages on Farcaster, users must rent storage space. While this may not sound appealing, the utility is to help reduce clutter like spam and bot activity.

https://twitter.com/0xCygaar/status/1754227118828105791