# Crypto Apps and Decentralized Social by Linda Xie - Devconnect

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-12-09
- Duration: 29:20
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-4vl8eZEOwqk
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vl8eZEOwqk

## Description

Speaker: Linda Xie
Event: Ethereum Day (Devconnect Argentina 2025)  
Keywords: 

Crypto Apps and Decentralized Social 
Linda Xie gives an overview of why decentralized social networks matter and the type of crypto apps they uniquely enable. 

About Devconnect  
Devconnect is a week-long gathering of the Ethereum community with events for developers, researchers, artists and creators. It’s organized by the Ethereum Foundation and took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Nov 2025, with ~20,000 attendees. 

What’s next  
The next major Ethereum community event is Devcon 8, happening in 2026. 
For updates visit: https://devcon.org

More  
Follow us: @efdevcon · @ethereum 
Learn more about Ethereum: https://ethereum.org
And the Ethereum Foundation: https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

All right, thanks so much. Um, here to talk today about crypto apps and decentralized social. Uh, I've been working in the crypto space for 11 years now and on the Farcaster team. Prior to that was building on top of Farcaster. So really passionate about crypto and decentralized social and what it can do for society. So I think it's really helpful to first frame like what are the issues with traditional social right now. I think we've all experienced a similar kind of problem where you start on one platform and then you end up having to create an account on another platform and completely start over from scratch and so your audience actually belongs to the platform itself in that scenario. And when you are kicked off a platform or the platform ends up um getting banned by a country, you end up having to not have access to any of your audience distribution. So it's really important for uh a user and a content creator to be able to have access to their audience. And lastly, if an account um and data is owned by the platform, that means that once the company itself shuts down that you won't be able to have access to that information. And we've seen that time and time again. I mean in the US we had Tik Tok uh potentially be banned and we've had a lot of creators be concerned by that and then there's plenty of uh countries where they have many of these uh platforms ban themselves. So this is a problem that people actually experience day-to-day. Uh so one of the benefits of decentralized social means that you can have access to the social graph at any point in time. There's no uh permission that you uh need in order to use this data. So what's really great is that uh you see at the bottom here there's an open social graph. So all of this data can be pulled by any client, any developer, any platform and you can use this data to build on top of uh this platform. And so I think a great example is you've got Farcaster app and then you also have base app which is the app built by Coinbase and Bass. And so you have the similar number of followers and there's a slight discrepancy between uh the two of that because each client's going to have their own spam filtering and what they're classifying as followers. But I was able to build up a following on fire caster immediately start using base app and I was able to not have to start over from scratch. And that's a really magical moment when you experience that. And it's going to be the same for all other fire caster clients. So, we have Zapper and Uno and and a few others where when you decide to use this platform, you no longer have to start from scratch. You're able to keep your own audience. And what's really cool is you post once and then you're able to get distribution across multiple clients on the network. And so, you can be a Firecaster user and still get more distribution through base app as they're onboarding more and more users and creators. So, this is ultimately the best user experience for people. And then you also have in the in the state where clients are now um competing for these users because the switching cost is really low in order to move from one app to another. You don't have to start from scratch. You keep your audience and so now clients have to compete to build better user experiences to make sure that the user is continuing to use your app. So ultimately builds for a better experience. Then you also have the builder side where you have builders that are getting consistently kicked off platforms and we've seen that with Twitter that it's it's kicking off a lot of these like crypto apps and builders and that's a a single point of failure for their companies and I think it's a problem that you see all the time and banker recently on the same day was booted off of um Twitter and Telegram and fortunately they were able to get reinstated a few days later but it really goes to show that there are these like single points of failure and if you're a builder and you're spending all your time and resources really trying to build out your app it's a really extremely painful experience to just have your distribution cut off immediately. And we've also seen historically where these there are apps like Reddit where uh you they change their API pricing and all of a sudden becomes extremely expensive in order to operate your business. And so there have been many apps in the past that have shut down because they can no longer afford to operate their app using Reddit's new API pricing. And there was like a huge like uproar about that amongst the community. And this just happens time and time again with these platforms. They can kick you off also just for arbitrary reasons. They don't have to actually say this is the exact reason you kick uh they kicked you off. And also if they just view you as a competitor, they can remove you from the platform. And I've uh personally talked to several teams that have experienced that directly. So this is a a painful experience for both users and builders. And so one thing that is really amazing about decentralized social is that in the same way that you as a user can post once on the network, you also can build on the network without permission. And this is now going to get distributed across clients. So you have developers that are able to build permissionlessly without having to go to each platform and say, "Hey, am I allowed to build on on your platform?" I was just at the Farcaster booth earlier today and people were asking like oh how do I like whitelist myself to be able to build on top of Farcaster and I was able to just say like it's permissionless you can use any of this data you can incorporate any into your app directly and you don't need to talk to the team and that is the future of how things should be built and you can build these many apps and you can see here you uh as a user can post once on the network and I've posted this like uh crossword puzzle called miniword it's this application that's really fun. every single day like people compete on this like New York Times cross word puzzle and you can see I posted here what's my time and I posted once on fire caster it also goes on to base app and all other clients as well and you're able to get that boost of distribution as a builder and you can see here if I tap to open the mini app I'm able to then open up this cross word puzzle start interacting with it and then because the social data is permissionless to leverage you can actually pull in all of the times of different people on the network and people can compete for the best score. One of our best um users uh of this and fastest is right here, horsefax. So, it's really fun because you actually compete regularly on the network and it becomes more of a social experience versus just like a New York Times cross puzzle where you're doing this by yourself and so you can get more virality by leveraging the social graph. But decentralized social exists. I mean, we've seen it with Blue Sky and they've done a great job of pulling in users as like these um platforms get banned in different countries. However, I think the the really special thing is when you combine crypto and decentralized social because you're now creating experiences that you would never get on a traditional platform. And so that's something that our team is really leaning into and that's something I'm really excited to see. And so every user on Farcaster is going to have a crypto address by default. And so within Farcaster app, you have a embedded wallet where a user can easily send and receive funds to other people on the network. Obviously, it's crypto, so you can just paste in an address and you can send funds to people from anywhere in the world. And that is what makes crypto so special and unique. And so by really leaning into that, combining with it with um open social graphs, we feel like this is going to lead to like the next wave of growth within the decentralized social space. And so what's really powerful is users can also interact with these mini apps on chain because they have their embedded wallet. And so you can see here there's EIM mini app that's built by uh card ticket ETH global. Um, and so you can just in Argentina or any other country, you can purchase an EIM, pay with USDC using your embedded wallet, and it's just a really seamless experience. And you can now build apps that have just like never existed before. And that's the part that like really truly excites me. And we're going to go over some examples. Um, and you can also have agents interacting the feed. If you really believe in this uh agentic future where there's a lot of agents interacting with each other, crypto is the natural uh source that they're actually using for sending funds to and from each other or to other people because you don't have to coordinate uh addresses. You don't have to coordinate like how someone's getting paid. You automatically know this user's address. You have all of the information. It doesn't matter where they live in the world. You you're able to interact with them directly. So really believe that um crypto and agents and open social graphs are going to be playing a a much much larger role. So one of my favorite examples of uh of what's really unique about these like open social graphs in crypto is actually micro tipping. So, in the really early days of crypto, people were always talking about like, oh, it'd be amazing to do micro tipping and like if you're a creator and you're posting really great content, like being able to send like a really small amount of funds to the creator. And I would use these like early like Bitcoin tipping apps. But the problem in the early days was it was actually quite slow and expensive in order to send really really small amounts of funds. And so you actually have this ability to send transactions that are one cent or even lower because of L2s and how cheap and fast it is. And so there's um many apps tip in and noise that enable you to automatically tip for enter every interaction. So it could be a follow, it could be recast, uh liking a post, uh replying, and you're able to set an allowance for the amount that you want to give to the user. So in this case um in tipin like I've set up one cents for every time I'm liking someone's post and in the background it's automatically happening where every time I'm liking content on the network I'm then sending one sent automatically to the user and you can see on the right is my uh wallet activity history and you can see I'm sending funds to other users on the network and I'm also receiving funds for other users that have set these allowances on tip and noise and so you can see like there's even below low onecent transactions, which is a pretty wild concept, I think, just if you just see where like how far crypto has come in order to enable this. And these are people that live all over the world. And these are people that don't even have to be that cryptonative. So, one really amazing part is if you're brand new to crypto and you go join Farcaster and you have a wallet by default, once you start posting high quality content, people can just start automatically tipping you and you can build up a balance of your crypto wallet without ever having to purchase crypto. So, I've talked to so many users where they were saying, "This is actually the first crypto that I've earned for creating content or interacting with mini apps and receiving it directly to their address." And I think that that is going to um make for a really great experience for a lot of these uh newcomers to crypto. And so, I also want to talk about mini apps. Um so one of uh my favorite mini apps that I think just showcases uh using the embedded wallet crypto transactions and um the open social graph really well is uh is emerge built by a town and the team. And so um this enables uh creators to put together a prompt that is going to transform your profile picture on the network into some version of the prompt. So an example here is Peachy. She's a very popular creator on the network. wrote this prompt to transform the profile picture uh into um a tarot card. And so she wrote this like simple prompt. Um I'm able to then um I'm able to then generate my an image using my profile picture. You can see on the right side that is what ended up getting generated and I'm also able to share additionally um the mini app that comes along with it. And so others who are interested in doing the same thing are able to then generate their own profile picture and you can create any prompt. So, this is just one example of a prompt. There's uh many other creators that are writing their prompts and having it be a fun experience. And there's even like leaderboards of like which prompts have um done really well. So, if you're um if you're just in a creative person and you want to have like more of these like um prompts, you can just create your own and you actually can start earning for um creating a good prompt. And so, um, I've paid 25 cents for this, uh, prompt transaction. And you can see there's 418 other users that have generated the, uh, prompt. And so, Pachy is earning for creating this content. And it's able to go viral in the feed itself. So, I wanted to share recently, we actually had one of our highest daily active user um, days on Farcaster because of this um, virality that happened recently. So, I'll walk through it. So, first we have this uh like unofficial mascot of Farcaster called Warplet. Um Dan, the co-founder of Farcaster had created it. Um the team uh including me just like maybe didn't think it was the cutest to be like the official mascot and so he released it into the community and said like, "Hey, people can do whatever they want with it. Um you know, feel free to use this." And we had a developer say Angel who took that um and decided to build a mini app with it and was able to build a a really similar experience to the the previous example I talked about where you can now mint a version of this warplet creature but mixed with the DNA of your own profile picture. And so there's Nish Prof. she shared like here's the custom warlet from her profile picture and now you can um share that in the feed to all of her followers and they can discover this mini app as well and we had Jesse and like I mean 49,000 plus accounts generate their warplet that was tied just to their account and it went completely viral um and the the say Angel was able to make almost $100,000 from creating this mini app with just just a few days from that many mints. So, it really goes to show like when you have this embedded wallet where anyone can just like easily make a transaction, you're able to then um earn as a builder for building apps that end up going viral within the social feed. Um, and then what was also really cool to see is you had uh different um remix culture. So, there was all these like builders that were saying like, "Okay, you each have your warplets now and so like let's build games and fun experiences on top." And so we had this like ranking of like what's the ugliest uh warplet? What's um what what are like what would a baby warplet look like if you combine these two warplets. Um and so there was all these like fun games and things uh created on the network which I think just like goes to show like when you leverage the social graph you can really like make for a much more um engaging experience as an app developer. Um, and so here is an example of a mini app. Uh, actually Horsefax built this on the team. And so you can, um, you I think this is really important where you can support Roman Storm's legal defense fund tap. Uh, we used Daimo Pay and pay with any token and contribute to the legal defense fund. Because it's an embedded wallet, you're never getting kicked out and having to use um, another app. and you can immediately share that within your feed and say I contributed and now this goes out to all of my followers and they're able to then discover this app and then continue to donate as well. So this is a mechanism to further share your app within um the follower and audience that everyone has built themselves. And so here's another similar example of crowdfund built by Nicholas at seed club. And this is like a GoFundMe Kickstarter type platform where you can see these are all the different users that have contributed to this uh crowdfund of a creator that wanted to raise funds for a production they're doing. And so you can tap in your embedded wallet and contribute funds directly through the Farcaster app and you never again have to get kicked out and then you're able to um share that in your feed once that's complete. So, it really goes to show that these kind of crowdfunds and like social experiences do really well on the network and this creator was able to raise well past their goal and I can share that in my feed and you can see that now all my followers are able to see that I pitched in and they can discover this mini app as well. So all of this is uh really awesome and decentralized social sounds great and crypto is great but like want to be really honest about the challenges uh of decentralized social in crypto. So uh one thing to note is that uh it is small very small relative to all these like major traditional social platforms. I mean you can see here the users are in the billions and hundreds of millions. However, I really want to emphasize like I've been working in the crypto space for 11 years now and the early days of Bitcoin. You're comparing something like gold and how big gold is and look look at how far Bitcoin has come and you can also look at DeFi and when it was talking about all this like TVL and we want to have like swap volume and like look how much that has grown as well. So like all of it is very possible by the community and the builders and the users. So, I really like very strongly believe social is going to be going through another thing like that within the crypto space because as you can see, it just makes sense. It's a better experience for users, better experience for builders, and you can now create things that just didn't exist before. And as crypto becomes a more and more important part of society and becomes more mainstream, we're going to hopefully grow with it. But that is um one of the big challenges uh in the space is really trying to you know grow a number of users with Farcaster specifically we found that people really resonated with Farcaster wallet the embedded wallet and so we're really leaning into those features and really trying to um make it a better experience and that we feel like that is going to be like a big driver of growth for us. Um and then onboarding non-crypto participants. Um that is something I think just any crypto app is experiencing where uh if you're a complete newcomer to crypto like having to uh understand what a wallet is and how to keep things secure. So I think we're we're have improved a lot since the early days of crypto but still as always just like have um a lot to improve upon especially when you compare to like traditional consumer experiences. Um then you also have um spam as an issue. I think this exists on social platforms that are centralized as you can probably experience on uh Twitter or X like you you basically have this like spam problem where tons of users are replying, tons of bots are replying that uh it's hard to tell like what's a genuine account or not. And so this is something that's going to exist on every social platform. And at the far caster level um there's uh you can either have uh spam um services that help uh clients like do some spam filtering at the protocol level. So you can um also be a client itself and do your own spam filtering. So there's a a bunch of different ways to approach this. Um but it is something that is going to exist as a challenge. And then lastly is just moderation. Also a problem and challenge within traditional social platforms of making sure that users are having a good experience and um they are discovering content that they're actually interested in and is not a very negative experience. So um these are some things that we're always continuing to work on. So I want to talk about um okay so decentralized social has existed for for a while but like why now? like what's a unique moment in time of why this will take off and I think it's all these like primitives coming together. So first you have these like open social graphs that anyone can use and leverage. I'm talking to teams all the time where I didn't even know them before and they were just all of a sudden building these uh fire caster mini apps um and because they're just able to leverage it without us. So um L2s are also a critical piece of this. It's making transactions really cheap and fast. And so you can see uh experiences like the micro tipping that we shared earlier and then embedded wallets. I really want to emphasize like how much of a better experience embedded wallets are when you're using these like consumer apps. Like I think we've so many of us have experienced like getting kicked out to you know a wallet which then you have to be brought back in and sometimes it doesn't work. So you have to go back and forth to fix that problem. And embedded wallets, you're just staying within the app experience and there's like a a far uh like less drop off in that point. And then these like new building blocks of like mini apps and some of the examples I shared plus agents are like completely new like building blocks that you're able to then use that we haven't necessarily seen like at scale before. So really excited to see like all the different apps and agents that get created. And then also a a big meta that's happening like outside of just crypto as a whole is like how much better AI has gotten. And so in a with AI now like you can just create all of these apps like using these prompts. And I think it's really lowering the cost and barrier for people to actually build. So you're going to have more and more builders that are going to be building apps on these networks. And so I think that this is going to grow the entire space as a whole of people that are creating content that is not ne necessarily just writing a post or uploading a photo, but it's like they're actually creating content through many apps. And so this is going to be like I I feel like another explosion of um of content creation. And we have different services like nanar that enable you to create fire caster mini apps that you don't have to actually be a developer to be able to create it. So that's going to be another really uh huge growth moment in my opinion. And then where this all plays out, I think that um I think that email is a really good analogy here. So uh when you uh send emails to other people, uh you don't have to make a AOL account to talk to someone who has an AOL email, right? Like you can use Gmail, you can use Yahoo, Outlook, whatever you want. And you're all able to communicate with each other. And it's all at the protocol level that emails are being sent and received to each other. And so that is the way that I think these like protocols in decentralized social should be playing out where it's all this network data, all this social graph that is at the protocol level and each client can build on top and really build features that are specific to the their user base. So they could have different algorithms, they can have different features uh that what their user actually likes. And so in um a bunch of different cases where like you have Farcaster is uh increasingly spending more time on like trading features and if you're not interested in trading base app and UNO are really really great about showcasing a lot of these like social features. So to me that is the way that that social is supposed to be in the long run and we're just going to have to um work hard to get there. But um hopefully this gives you a glimpse into seeing the ecosystem that Farcaster has built. Um we have a long way to go but I I really think that this is the future of where social should be headed. So thanks for your time and uh feel free to reach out to me if you have questions about Farcaster. I'm just lindoncaster um and then LJXIE on Twitter. Um yeah, thank you. >> [applause] >> Thank you so much, Linda. Uh, we have some questions from the audience that would love to cover. Um, first of all, I mean, I think I think what's really cool is in the real world, I can go outside in my neighborhood and there's so many things I can do, you know, freely as a like a person who's free to explore their life. Um, and digital neighborhoods aren't always the same, which is why like the decentralized social thesis is very very compelling, especially as more of our lives come online. Um so you know but in that t time like there's a current shift where there's all these people on centralized social media platforms and they need to move to decentralized social media platforms. Um from your experience how can we ease the migration from centralized social platforms uh to something like custer. Yeah, it's a good question and I think that it's on us to create experiences that are better than existing traditional experiences and I think that crypto is going to enable things that you literally can't even do on traditional social platforms and you actually come to start earning crypto. You you come to um like experience all these like crypto apps that are built on these like crypto social rails. So I think that that's the way we attract. It's like, hey, you like are a really great builder and you want distribution. Like crypto is going to be the way that you can earn and social is going to be the way that your app gets distributed. As a user, you're able to now receive like a ton of tips for posting good content which you're not receiving on these like traditional platforms and like I just think that you created just a better experience. >> Awesome. Thank you. Um and you know crypto crypto kind of enables these model modern forms of revenue almost like different ways to find revenue sources because like she level composability she levels things you can add. Um Farcaster recently acquired Clanker for example and that provides like an alternate revenue stream to what maybe a centralized social media has offer. Um but you know centralized social medias do have ads um and that's a core part of their business I guess like how do you view ads within a decentralized social network? such as Farcaster. >> Yeah, that's interesting. So, each client is able to do what they want with um how they're monetizing. And so, you can actually be a client and you can decide to use ads as a way of monetizing, but then other clients can decide, hey, that's actually not the route we want to go and we're monetizing in a different way. For Farcaster app specifically, we have like Farcaster Pro and so people can pay $120 for a year to get access to additional features. And so that's the way that we're monetizing, but any client could be like, "Yeah, we're leaning full on to ads and we want to do that instead." And I think Bassap even like has like some like ad formats, especially with like spindle acquisition. So um that's the that's the beauty of it is like each client can do what they want, but we don't have like ads necessarily um like built into the protocol level, but uh clients can decide to turn it on. >> Um a key term that we throw around in the EF a lot now is reflexivity. Uh, and what we mean by it is like how do we kind of react to feedback of like end users um end users for Ethereum potentially being apps, developers, um, etc. and L2s. Um, I think Farcaster is one of the companies that have the most reflexivity because you have like literally like everyday social media participants, uh, wallet transacting users, builders, right? And you have obviously Farcaster itself. um what are like tenants that you guys live by when it comes to actually like sourcing feedback from your community and implementing it um within the protocol in itself or within the products in itself? >> Yeah, I would say that sourcing feedback's like probably one of the easier things within the community because people are very vocal and they're able to post like what they want to see. Um but also just like DMing people directly. Um one thing that is amazing about Firecaster is that um people are really nice on the network and they're always willing to like help out and give feedback. So like you as a builder or us as builders, we can just be like hey what did you think of this experience or you know what are your pain points and people are very willing to get feedback. So we have like DMs um within the app itself. So not only can we see like feedback that people are posting, we can also just like DM people directly. So feedback's like probably one of the easiest things and then implementing it. I mean it's um our team ships like crazy. So we're shipping like pretty much daily. Um and so uh yeah, we really want to implement like the features that people care about. >> Awesome. Um, now final question. I'm just going to ask this personally. Um, thank you all for all the questions. Um, as someone who's been around in crypto for a really long time, there's a lot bunch of people listening and in the audience that are new as well who are exploring this industry. Um, what keeps you going? Like what do you do you have any bits of advice for someone just beginning to explore right now? >> Yeah, I mean it's just like I think like taking a step back and being like how incredible this technology is. Like I'm able to own my own money. I'm able to send to anyone else in the world and I don't have to ask for permission. I'm not getting like a centralized platform takes some extreme fee and cut of that. And so like all of these like technologies ex extend to like DeFi and social and like think about just like how life-changing this kind of stuff is. So I I the fact that we can like be part of this like forefront of working on this technology to me like drives me every day. And like yeah, it's like filled with like craziness and ups and downs, but like ultimately like what an amazing moment in time that we can like spend working on this. Like I wish I had been part of the early days of the internet as like being able to build in that space, but I was very lucky to be able to do crypto. So that's how I feel about it. Yeah. >> Awesome. Thank you so much, Linda. Yeah. [applause] Cool. Thanks,