# Farcaster Fever: What People Are Building on Web3 Social's New Hit |

- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2024-10-09
- Duration: 25:45
- Topics: blockchain, web3, ethereum, Entertainment
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-yVNvQpDGu5g
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVNvQpDGu5g

## Description

Carl Fluke - Base

David Furlong - frames.js

Rish Mukherji - Neynar

Johanna Fransson - Liquality.io

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## Transcript

can you hear me yeah okay I love eth Denver but I don't love panels and so we're going to mix it up a little bit and the whole vibe here is that we're just like four friends at happy hour chitchatting over a beer and that's kind of what forecaster devb ecosystem and user ecosystem is like anyway so it's a little bit on brand um I got a good intro but I would love for each of you to introduce yourself be very you know succinct precise about what you do and then we can take it from there yeah hi I'm R uh co-founder of Nar we provide infrastructure for forecaster and no code frame tools hey I'm uh I'm David I'm working on frames JS and also open frames and I've been building on farter for a while as well and I'm Johanna I'm a full stack developer at Li quality I am originally a wallet developer doing all things wallets and right now we're doing Collective account abstracted wallets for frames and forecaster daps awesome okay so I actually know all of them for the past two years more so we were all on forecaster kind of i' say early 2021 ear late 2021 early 2022 and Beyond but um I'm really interested to know why did you choose to build on forecaster given the other options in terms of decentralized Social and at what moment were you like okay this is the now I'm committing to building on foraster vers anywhere else yeah um so my co-founder and I we were both at coinbase for the last four years um and part of our work at coinbase was to uh build and develop on social protocols um like my team worked on xmt integration on wallet for example and Mo and I spent a lot of time um just learning about the protocols in the space like all the way from peo to bitcloud which later became d um uh lens from a forecaster um and when forecaster came around it was the first time we felt like there was a plan for a protocol that could actually scale to mainstream audience um and both of us were coming up on our four years and thinking about what to do next and after going through some ideas we were just like let's just build on forecaster and see what happens and you initially started building an app correct like a client on foraster right yeah yeah we started building an app back when hub exist I I remember that stick to building infra you're you're better at the infra um so we we started building an app that had like you know a few people beta testing it um Ted uh David and uh we had built our own infra in-house running hubs indexers and all of that and one of the evenings as a random experiment we threw out a landing page that said hey if you pay us we'll give you access to the infra and people paid us immediately so we were like okay maybe we should build the infra so there's yeah you're like like there's demand here for infra and I'd love to hear from David and Johanna as well because I know both of you also tried to build early and did build early in David's case so how was how was that experience yeah so so in in 2022 early 2022 I decided that I wanted to get into decentralized social I decided that this was like the most important mission for the open internet is to have a credible sort of decentralized social protocol um and I looked at a bunch of the things that were happening and a lot of it felt like it was building for a crypto audience where the transaction costs and the gas costs were were just magnitudes too high um and then I came across farcaster um and I think two things really resonated for me um one was that they were very much designing the architecture to reach a mass consumer audience um and then the second thing was that they were being very thoughtful around uh the effects of financialization and social and trying to avoid it and sort of cultivating an early sort of high quality Community um in their app um and so those two things really drew me in um where you know other things that had been sort of financialized social didn't um and so I started building um in late 2022 and um I had to sort of reverse engineer the the warp cast sort of um the the apis that they were using for their own app in order to get data CU this was like pre pre sort of decentralized just to make sure everyone understands what he had to do there was no documentation and so he literally had to go and inspect the source code to figure out what forecaster or how forecaster was built and then reverse engineer it back like hey that's gigabrain stuff but also that's not easy for the developer ecosystem right like how are you supposed to build apps efficiently and quickly and you know have fun with it when that that that's the uphill battle you're against but yeah I remember like search cter that xyc was like the first API and everyone was super excited but like now looking back it's super limited you can't really get much data from it right I mean still it's the bit best search client out there for what it's wor um also really quick coinbase Carl Welcome to our we're doing a little happy hour chitchat here instead of a panel uh do you want to take two seconds to introduce yourself um yeah hello sorry for being late um I'm Carl I'm with base developer relations I actually was super honed in on doing like hackathon judging so super excited to see people building on frames um and short and sweet I'm here to help build the Bas ecosystem incredible um okay so again reverse engineering search cter was the first API for farcaster still one of the best shout out to Greg skoff who is another OG um and then kind of Johanna you want to talk more about what what you were seeing as terms of issues a years ago uh sure like well a few years ago yeah I think I think it was just like the the biggest thing was like the lack of apis because you basically had to build your own indexer and your own database and also your like little dap or client or whatever you were spinning up and you had to have all the infrastructure on it on your computer and on your machine like you had to spin up a local Hub and then or or something like this or rely on hubs that then went down all of a sudden and you didn't know what was going on so that was B the basically the the biggest uh the thing and that's why I'm also like very happy for Nar and other apis to exess now which makes it so much easier and faster because you can kind of just give them that layer and focus on the client stuff so so then fast forward this is kind of let's say 2022 early 2022 fast forward 2 years and as of a month ago me non-technical person baby engineer am able to code or no code something a product and deploy it on foraster through a new feature called foraster frames um this is is what base and I think coinbase coinbase Corey no sorry just B just Bas just Bas um has also done Nar has a no code David ultimately really leaned into frames too and so maybe we can take a step back and talk about how frames are perhaps what I believe to be one of the most exciting features uh Primitives for decentralized social and consumer social more generally and then even if you think about social as kind of the infrastructure a pathway to economics as well go from there so anyone can take it yeah I I think I'm the right person to take this one um the the context on that is um um Mid last year I pivoted to trying to um build uh mini apps on top of farcaster um and I I think frames are really powerful because the the thing we've seen is that users really want to use one app and that's actually the best way to deliver an experience and so farcaster is really like a distribution layer for everything else and so far it's been links so you distribute links you get the user to follow the link and connect their wallet and do the things but that's a lot of friction and there's also a safety assumption there when you go to an unknown domain and so frames really pull that experience into the client um and that also gives developers now a rich interface with which to sort of build new experiences so that the social apps aren't just you know Tex image link but there's actually like Rich experiences right there um and I think there's some like Nostalgia towards like the Facebook days when when you sort of had you know Farmville in your feet and all sorts of poking and um would love to see that sort of flourishing of of experimentation and and playfulness again and there's like a lot of such Games built on frames already um and I think everybody on well in basis case Jesse launched super based on n and everybody else on the stage already uses Nar to build frames to some extent from developer to no code frames and there's a rich uh developer ecosystem you can also provide for building frames um and that cons like you built a frame that I didn't even know could be built using our frame studio and that was like a crazy experience yeah so uh yeah not to I love Nar frame studio uh I'm pretty sure that within the first 48 Hours of you launching it you probably wanted to kill me because I had feature St for feature request but I would also love to hear from Bass about I think the bass team galvanized around frames as soon as it was launched on Friday the entire weekend was just a frenzy of frame development and the base team out of any other um Network on there really Rose to the occasion and helped support the dev ecosystem so I'd love for you to just share what it was like on the inside because we all saw what it was like on the outside um yeah definitely so literally Friday we got the news the same time as everybody and it was uh like probably 10 of us had a good 3 days of doing stuff that entire weekend um so we made onchain kit pretty quickly which was like our kind of helper um and that started do really well one of the other things that we had was like the girl girl scout cookies Commerce integration so you know be able to buy Girl Scout cookies from a frame um that's still super fun yeah I've never spent crypto that fast so sorry I was saying I've never spent crypto that fast as Like That Girl Scout cookie yeah I even ordered them even though I don't live in the US so I didn't get any cookies I I just I just felt like I was missing out yeah um it definitely helped just bases distribution we got to both help like um people that we've known before and also net new developers so I think that was our my favorite part was that we did kind of Empower and help give our base distribution to all the forecaster users that were experimenting doing new things and helping push kind of like what is possible forward there were defin defitely um one of my good friends Brandon built one of the first generative uh nft frames and I remember we went surfing right after he like shipped it we went surfing he was like I'm really afraid I think my gas like all of my like gas like I'm not going to be able to cover gas costs for Everyone by the time he came back the base team had already completely filled the contract so that the mint could continue throughout it so just huge shout out to the base team for being huge supporters of all of the dev activity um johanah I would love to hear what you are thinking in terms of frames forecasting what you're building as well so we are right now actually using frames as like a go to market and we've seen like huge Su success because there's like a lot of noise on foraster and on every social media but you kind of have to ask yourself like how do we like disregard that noise and tap into a user's attention span right and frames are great for that because they are still so limited and simple that it makes it very easy for users to interact with them because it's literally just usually like two button clicks right so yeah we've seen like the numbers like uh grow uh like much faster using a frame than like redirecting them to our original dab so that's kind of how we are using forecaster and Frames right now so excited to see like how we can uh add more wallet stuff into that because one thing I I think is really interesting right now is also like forecaster clients that have a wallet integrated in them where you can enable more of like the economy aspect with a wallet UI I know a lot of people are building that right now maybe Corbin at patch wallet is the most famous one so yeah excited for that as well yeah I will say too uh I don't know if this I don't think it's it's my point of view personally is that uh I think what David said at the beginning is that what we all appreciate about the forecaster ecosystem was that it built intentionally with like long-term term value and it was focused on what value does a social network offer us as users and as humans and how is that different than like peer speculation or financialization of a personality or of content and I think that long-term view enabled us all now to build products with that same kind of long-term view value focused um approach and I would even say like as a as a user or as users here my question is like okay if you're a developer that's that's one thing but for people here who aren't Dev Vel opers but care about their social network or care about their social profiles what value or like how can they add value to what you are building so for instance I know I use no code uh Nar no code frame studio all the time love it um you can see all my frames on my profile if you want but otherwise like what what should users be doing and then I also want on the other side to talk about how can Brands leverage the data from frames uh as we think about signal to noise but let's first anyone who here in the audience by the way has a warp cast profile or forecast profile hell yeah that's a lot people that's like the majority of the crowd granted this is a forecaster panel so of course you would be here but um anyways um who wants to take it yeah I'll I'll start with the user side and maybe somebody else can pick up the brand side so I think on the user side like it's it's pretty simple and standard which is like um come in engage meaningfully thoughtfully uh find other people who you have common interest with come join a channel that you can contribute to or learn from and the whole ecosystem and the user um interactions are built on top of like meaningful engagement uh not over financialization or any kind of other things we have seen in the past in web3 Social protocols and I think brands have recently started engaging with that meaningfully as well I think Bas is a great example that has a very strong presence on forecaster um and maybe David or Carl you guys can show um yeah I I think uh farasa channels are a great opportunity for Brands to build a far a native Community that's an alternative to telegram or Discord um and I think it's a better alternative because it has native discoverability of their content into their home feeds which Discord and telegram don't have and telegram groups or Discord groups that become too big become very noisy and immediately users mute them and then they have no hook to come back into your community the difference with faraa Channel is that if you keep posting the user if they follow your channel will see those posts if they're popular enough in their home feeds and so there's a great distribution hook the other really great opportunity for um for brands with this is um is frames of course right like it's a great way to distribute your product and on board new users um in a way that you know we're seeing across the board brands do 10x volume on on nft mints on signups on subscriptions across the board and everyone I've spoken to at e Denver is is building a frame pretty much it's it's it's kind of blowing my mind yeah uh also as a brand you think about let's say these 10,000 you're getting 10,000 mints whereas before you would maybe get 10 on forecast or you just didn't have the distribution now you're getting 10,000 10,000 mints but you have the onchain and offchain data to then look at who is minting and what they care about what they're kind of what content what channels they're posting in what their activity is on chain and you have a much better way to Think Through like the entire conversion funnel how can you then pinpoint and figure out who do we care about minting this and how do we reach them whereas anywhere else if you post it in telegram you can't really do that like you don't have the way to track it in the same way um I'm curious from the base side too is you're enabling I mean you're basically an outsourced support team for anyone building and so I would love to hear like okay if I decided hey I want to build a frame and I want to incorporate and and kind of have transactions on it what's the best way for me to go about working with base on that um yeah definitely so like we have our own bass channel uh for in farcaster that's kind of a great entry point we have our support Discord um but I think a big part of it is that like the base team just goes out and find things as well so sometimes like we come come into a situation without ever talking to that Creator just cuz we want to see that economy kind of grow um I do think going back to that data question I just want to add from the base Point um something that we think about a lot um is as we move towards like an account abstraction World in 4337 that offchain data of your activity and what you're doing is very much going to be input to like should we be sponsoring gas for what projects and what people um and I think that's going to create a really interesting future of bringing more people on chain because some of that complexity disappears and it's just a a web two interaction yeah go for it I see like a world in the future where like the forecaster protocol has many clients like many and all of those clients have like different uh tasks or problems that they solve right so we could have like a ftic has a client that is a a wallet where you pay stuff and then you have the social feed and then you can it's kind of like um wehat but decentralized you know like vhat takes care of payments but it's also social feed also a messaging Network and we could have the same with a farcaster protocol with different clients doing different things or maybe one day one client that does all the things but ideally many clients so we don't rely too much on one right yeah like in an Ideal World if foraster succeeds that means it has 1 billion users of the protocol at least and then hundreds of clients built on top of it with thousands of developers building those clients yeah I I think a really interesting point here that's sort of underappreciated is that right now warcast and all the farcast clients look very similar and that's a result not of the technical constraints but really of the content that's being shared and just the sort of earliness of the scene you can build Twitter on faras you can build um Reddit you can build Instagram you can build YouTube all of these social apps can be built on top of farcaster as a technology and so we're going to see a lot of that come um as farcast grows and I think uh I don't know who else in here I have Instagram I have you know Twitter I have all these other things and the beauty for me is you hear a big a big pain point I think a lot of people who are on Twitter all the time is like I can't believe I have to restart to build a warp cast following and I'm like yes but once you do that you never have to hit that cold start problem again because the account and the profile you build on far or on warcast right now you can then use it for whatever Instagram equivalent whatever venmo equivalent all of these other things so your followers come with you and you don't have to start over ever again when you're building on a decentralized social network like that um I don't know if you guys like what opportunities do you see thinking let's say 5 years in the future I know we're talking about I think there will be like a billion users and Etc like what are what what excites you thinking about the future I think there's a couple of like uh technical improvements that I you know just being more on the engineering side of things as an infrastructure company have been excited about which is um forecaster kind of changes the web from just an open web to an open and signed web where every action you do is signed with your like private key ed25519 signer and you can now prove things about user actions that couldn't be proved before and this is going to be increasingly important in the world of like AI generated content where you can like now put reputation behind a signature and then you know the signature is from a human that says hey AI signed it um and also increasingly important against like AI Bots where now you know what is a bot versus not because which signer signed what and that I think is going to take us into a different shape of the web and we'll be better prepared for the next set of changes that we are seeing generally in the tech World um I'll go from the base perspective definitely Jesse's favorite tagline is uh on chain is the next online and very much so if we're signing everything with private key or even web 2 now is moving to pass key right I think like Target and Playstation all of them have passy signin now which is much closer to the crypto World um so I'm looking forward to having truly onchain interactions where we can pass value back and forth rather than trust all of these intermediaries and Brokers that we deal with today and I'm excited actually to just like build uh on both on top the forecaster protocol but also like getting more engagement of like the Community Builders like Ted and David uh proposing fips and everything like that I know David you especially have been quite active in that right you proposed the channels and uh also most recently the mod protocol if you if you don't mind like I have a question for you about that like um you said that they um declined your mod protocol offer FIP offer and then buil frames instead how did you feel and like how did the I love the stirring of the pot oh boy okay um how do I answer this um so honestly yeah so I was building a client until mid last year and um I realized that one of the constraints was if you wanted to innovate on the content format if you want to do video if you want to do games you want to do polls you actually need these things to work in all the clients and there was no good way to do that and so I was experimenting individually but I decided to Pivot and start working on mod protocol and so I was building mod protocol Building open source software for farcaster and had it integrated in a bunch of clients and um and it came time for like a big launch and we were like okay like we're going to like pitch warp cast like hey you guys going to come on board with us for this and um and then we also wrote a Improvement proposal around how we envisioned extending open graph with with Rich metadata and how clients would use that um I did I did get a bit of more of a notice on frames than everyone else um but yeah frames was was similar and it solved the same problem it it was better in some ways um and we sort of realized that frames was an opportunity for us to sort of realize the vision we we'd been trying to do and so we just jumped on board and and sort of warcast helped with distribution a lot more than than we would be able to so in many ways it's it's great for the ecosystem and great for us as well mhm and I will shout out David DF he is definitely pushing the boundaries and pushing for fips and proposals to think about how do we get make it better for users and for developers and I think just as we wrap here it's like a a good Testament to the community and to the ecosystem and to the protocol is that feedback and descent and criticism is encouraged and actually sought out um because at the end of the day everybody's looking to make it better and for us to realize this vision of having you know multi-billion users using the protocol uh you kind of need to listen to the people using it today as well so anyways just to wrap I would say um yeah just like give a closing word one thing that you want everyone to know about warp cast or what you're building and then we'll sign off louder I think I think your mic cut out do you want to go here I was saying I think it's the consumer something like that was good like we're going to a break we could like listen to you for another half an hour for sure this mic works this might work so all right work so hold on have your say this is your moment I was saying I think forecaster is slated to be the consumer crypto protocol and we are here we have been talking about consumer crypto and I think there's something to be built on top of this protocol that's awesome anything else