These questions were asked live at the 2024 Farcon AMA sessions, then edited for brevity.
Q&A Feed
Beta
10
Until decentralized, what will Base do in the event of a sanctioned entity interacting with Base? Yes, forced inclusions exist at the L1, but withdrawals do not work the same way, so for that specific path, what's the response?
/farcon
86
Jesse Pollak 🔵
Shoutout to Cassie - it's important to have people who stand up and ask “When is it going to be decentralized” and “Why is it not good enough right now?” So to get to those two questions - first, Base is open and permissionless. We spent 9 months creating the Law of Chains, a neutrality framework that we constructed with Optimism to specifically ensure block space is neutral and has the same characteristics as Ethereum. On the second question, it's true that there are today limitations in the technology where there are single points of control that could be coerced. In the early stage of decentralization that we're in, we would (if necessary) go to court and fight to make sure those points aren't coerced and Base stays decentralized. Our P0 as a team has been eliminating those points of control as quickly as humanly possible, and we're now within months of doing that. We're not perfect, but it's the best we've been able to do thus far and its going to continue getting better and better.
2
What is the pathway for decentralized social to achieve mainstream adoption? Does the onchain bit need to be hidden behind the platform or is the key to onboard ppl onchain first?
/farcon
72
nis.eth
I think decentralized social will not go mainstream by being a decentralized substitute to what is social. I think it has to provide a fundamentally new experience. And I strongly believe that digital assets will upgrade what it means to be online. I think supporting creators, finding meaning and expressing yourself by digital objects — you own all of these on all dimensions. It will actually make the many hours we spend online more meaningful and more fun.
9
Right now it seems like you put a lot of effort into building something people want to use. Do you think VC funding will eventually put you in a situation where you have to build things users don’t want?
/farcon
69
So a bunch of the VCs are actually here today, but generally: 1. The people we're working with are all great people 2. Varun and I are ultimately the final decision makers on everything There's this meme that somehow the VCs are kind of pulling strings from behind the scenes, but the reality is they ultimately want us to build something that people want. And if we do that, it can be massive and everyone can benefit. And so I think where we are focused - in terms of how we've been building - is on how many people are using Farcaster every day. And we can get into the details on how to measure that and whether everyone is qDAU or whatever. But ultimately, if we can make progress every single week on the number of people that find Farcaster interesting and useful and are willing to use a Farcaster app then that's the only thing that actually matters. And if we can do that over the next 5 to 10 years, it could end up being something really massive.
9
Since you released the Farcaster product ideas list last year, which are you most excited about today? Which ones remain to be built?
/farcon
49
Anything geared towards specific communities is a massive opportunity. I have this pet theory that any subreddit with a million plus members should be a $10 million a year business. And, that’s not to say that all clients or channels should be businesses. But, I genuinely believe that every kind of niche internet community at internet scale can actually be its own social network. And when you have it open and permissionless like Farcaster that makes it really easy.
8
The focus on building towards a protocol that can support 1M users is ambitious and part of why I love building Farcaster. What do you hypothesize the architecture would need to evolve to so it can accommodate 1B users?
/farcon
36
Varun Srinivasan
I think the short answer is a billion is four orders of magnitude away from where we are today and there's a lot we don't know about what's gonna break on the path to getting there. What we've been thinking about is how do we get the next 10X to a million users? And there's a very, very long github issue with all the things on there that we could use help with if anyone wants to participate. But I think the short version - if I had to really condense it into something - consists of two things from the architecture theory. 1. When you have millions and millions of objects that are floating around between different servers, how do you make sure that they all get into sync really, really quickly? 2. It's storage, how do you control the amount of data that people put on the network? And this is one of the biggest questions we get about how storage units work on forecaster, for instance you can only store 2500 casts. There's a lot of balancing that goes into it. We need a a price point that lets you enter Farcaster and still have it be permissionless, then decide how much data you get to keep on the network. And I think balancing these things and figuring it out is gonna be what gets us to a billion users. If we can make the storage scale and if we can make the sync scale, we feel really, really good about getting that right.
3
We keep hearing that infra and UX elements are not good enough yet for consumer crypto. Do you think we're where we need to be right now? Where would you put us on that timeline?
/farcon
35
Jesse Pollak 🔵
I think we're close. It goes back to those three thing I talked about. First we need cheaper everything, and we've been making progress on that. With 404, we saw cost go down 10x and usage go up 5X. We need it to be really cheap and easy for everyone to be on chain. The second thing is identity and social substrate. Apps integrated into social networks are just an order of magnitude more interesting. The third part that's been missing is wallets. They're not good enough. We came up with something called the Smart Wallet that's launching really soon, so you won't need a separate app or another extension - this will play a big role.
3
Who will steward the Farcaster protocol in the far future when you both stop working at Merkle Manufactory?
/farcon
33
I think it's just I think that there's this thing in crypto where people love focusing on the decentralized governance before they've actually built something valuable. And I'm like, okay, let's get to something that is actually sustainable where you have 10 million people using it every day. And if we stop working on it, 10 million people would still continue working on it every day. That's the threshold where you actually have to start worrying about, okay, how do you put this in place? We're still so early, right? And small. So let's earn the right to worry about the kind of fun, decentralized governance stuff where you've actually built something that, that is Lindy and that is sustainable. And, and I think that is, that's very much our mentality. The problem right now is to get more people to use Farcaster.
3
A lot of amazing products are going to require reputation. What should onchain reputation be based on and who do you think should own it?
/farcon
30
Jesse Pollak 🔵
I don't think it should be owned by anyone, to be clear. The important thing about onchain is that for the first time, we own everything ourselves. I think it's going to become much more heterogeneous and emergent. There's not going to be a reputation protocol. Instead, there are going to be millions of applications that add their own filters of information to your identity on chain - so you can control how it shows up. Some of those things will be financial, some will be social, but they'll all come together to represent who you are on chain. It's going to let you go experience all of these applications that are built and customized to you.
4
What is the hardest lesson learned in building on Farcaster?
/farcon
29
We tried to contribute to a protocol without distribution of product and then we sort of lost to a product that HAD distribution. So I think Dan’s advice of product-led protocols and being close to your user and getting your product out is one of our key learnings.
4
Despite the protocol being open, Warpcast is by far the dominant client and will likely remain so for a while. How do you both think about network and client diversity?
/farcon
28
Fundamentally if you ask any of the developers who are here today, the number one thing that they want for their app is users and if the protocol doesn't have users then they're not actually getting what they want from Farcaster. So I think of the Ronnie Coleman point - everyone wanna be a bodybuilder, but nobody wanna lift no heavy ass weight. Ultimately, you have to actually grow the number of users on the protocol before you get to a thriving ecosystem. So roughly 100,000 people using the network today; I think we need to be closer to 10 million. You all are taking an early bet and I think it's great, but when you get to 10 million, you can have a pretty robust ecosystem where people can actually have thriving independent, sustainable businesses alongside Warpcast. And so I don't think anyone else is gonna go do that. So fundamentally, we have to drive that forward and maybe when we get to that 10 million point, we can kind of reassess how we interact with others in the space.
4
What is one piece of commonly repeated advice (or assumption) in crypto that you think is wrong?
/farcon
28
Jacek 🎩
It kind of seems like a lot of people follow these grandiose plans to do a crazy startup idea that's gonna change like the world or like Tesla or SpaceX, and the thing that I found out with Degen is that we just created a hat coin that’s now breaking new grounds with Layer 3s. I was just messing around on my computer trying to do something fun. So I think maybe the advice is: don't reach out for those crazy ideas that are so out there, try to do something for yourself and for your friends.
7
With some of you building Farcaster clients, how do you think about competition with Warpcast? Is it good/bad/neutral for Farcaster that we don't yet have any clients at Warpcast's scale and traction (or close)?
/farcon
26
woj — q/dau
The more clients we have the more avenues people have to interact with the protocol and the more ways in which we can onboard people. I'm very excited for Supercast to onboard more people and I'm also very excited for what Warpcast is doing to onboard more people. The more clients that we have the better as long as the pie is growing.
3
Wen $Base token?
/farcon
25
Jesse Pollak 🔵
We have no plans for a token, and I think that's been one of the greatest things about Base thus far. It allows a lot of emergent creativity to happen. You've seen a lot of other people filling the space. That's also forced us to just do things better. In the last nine months we didn't have $100M or $200M worth of tokens to spend willy nilly. Instead, we had to go look at how our spend is having an impact. If we're being inefficient, we'll know about it.
1
What was the moment you realized that Farcaster was worth building upon?
/farcon
25
Linda Xie
When I was leaving my fund Scalar Capital to transition to go back to building something, we were excited by bounties as a whole because we really love the idea that people can globally earn crypto seamlessly for doing work. But one of the big issues is the cold start problem. It's so hard building a separate platform and just convincing users to come onto it - to create an account and sign up. So that was something that Farcaster really enabled for us.
1
Aside from your own products, what are the products or services you think we should be building to help everyday people experience communities on chain?
/farcon
23
ian
With L3s, apps can now sponsor up to hundreds of millions of transactions and so you can now onboard people into those applications and onchain with them never having to bridge over. And so I think that gets uniquely unlocked because the design space is so constrained by right now L2 gas space. When that goes away with things like Degen chain, it opens up totally new onboarding and user experiences. So I think social, I think consumer, I think gaming in particular and even with Degen, you know, already, we've seen a lot of games that fundamentally could never exist on an L2 because of Degen chain's low gas fees.
4
What are some mistakes that Base has made and what can we learn from them?
/farcon
22
Jesse Pollak 🔵
During Onchain summer last year, we went in feeling like we had to have something really good every day or it was going to fail. But when I look at what was the most inspiring and generative, it was actually the stuff that emerged organically that people around the world made in a matter of days. In decentralized economies, sometimes you want to err more on the side of chaos than order.
3
Base seems to be Farcasters institutional darling - why do you think Base has captured the trust of the Farcaster community more than any other Coinbase product?
/farcon
21
Jesse Pollak 🔵
It's because we've been able to combine two things in a way no one else really has. First, Coinbase is a trusted brand that's been around for literally twelve years. We had to figure out how to carry that brand into a maximally decentralized context. A key piece was deciding to build on the OP stack [rather than a new one] so that the contributions we made would serve everyone else. Second, we needed it to be clear that the people who would benefit are the ones who are building on base. Those things in addition to a pretty well executed go-to-market strategy is really what's led to people saying yes.
2
How will Farcaster separate itself from web2 competitors that will inevitably copy any successful Farcaster strategies once they pan out?
/farcon
21
nis.eth
It's this classic thing with network effects and exponential growth before it blows up, they look so small and not interesting to someone who is already at scale. So I think it's extremely hard to time, and when they will see Farcater as an inflection point, it will be too late because I think it's gonna have enough momentum on its own at that point.
4
As our industry scales, how do we keep onchain ecosystems like Farcaster as equitable and open for latecomers as early adopters?
/farcon
20
Will Papper
There's a fundamental problem which is that most networks tend to ossify and the original contributors get set in stone, and it's really hard for anyone who's later to get into that in the same way. And I think that there is a powerful counter to that, which is to have a lot of different interfaces for the same thing. The reason why is because the people who are good at Twitter are different from the people who are good at Reddit and that's different from the people who are good at Instagram. The more open the data is and the more data there is for people to compose with the more interfaces they can make that offer different social hierarchies for a specific use case.
2
We sent you 100K DAU please respond with wizard costume on stage
/farcon
12