Farcaster's Big Moment with Founder Dan Romero

We only win and and we only get actually frankly crypto, I think, to a much broader group of people if it stops being just about crypto and more about like what is this, the the kind of cool things that crypto under, especially under the hood, are enabling, right? So you could imagine um every channel could have some type of membership NFT. And Reddit has an example of like people who are in a subreddit, uh, they can have flare. But what if that flare was basically associated with an NFT? One, that's better monetization for the potential creator of that channel. Two, uh, it can't be rugged, right? So Reddit went through a big thing last year with the API, like a bunch of mods were unhappy. Like you can imagine a world where

Forecaster channels, like, okay, I don't like the way Dan and team are headed. My my my user base is actually on chain. I can kind of fork it out and go do something different. And so I think we want to balance the the average user doesn't care about that, but the creator does. And how can you actually merge those two experiences together where you have this amazing consumer experience on mobile in an app?

But the power of of kind of blockchain under foot.

Bankless Nation, Dan Romero on the podcast today. He is the founder of Farcaster. Now, Farcaster is a Twitter-like crypto social media app that launched what could prove to be a killer new feature. At least I think so, and David thinks so. They're called frames. You can think of these as programmable tweets, where each tweet is actually an app in itself. The cool thing is anyone can build a frame. A frame can be built that mints an NFT, that checks an airdrop, that buys a Girl Scout cookie. That was an actual example Dan gave in the podcast today. And basically anything you can program, you can do. And I feel the confidence to call this now and call it early. I think that Farcaster frames could be a breakout use case for crypto this year and a way to understand.

This do not come often from Ryan Trent Adams.

They don't. Um

We're only one week in, so I feel like this is very much a frontier episode and maybe uh an overly confident call. But uh and I wouldn't be surprised, David, if there's some skepticism, but I see this and I just see what feels like the future. Uh for me, David, this was almost like the first time I used Maker Dow. Not quite that impactful, but like in the same order of magnitude. I know. Uh but truly, it's the first time I've been excited by uh crypto social and this this kind of new wave of apps that we're about to see. And I think I'm most excited because I feel like we might be on the cusp of picking up where the internet took a wrong turn back in 2008 with the the Twitter protocol. And this might be an example of crypto getting us back on track. What what was your take going to this episode?

Just very satisfied about the direction that Dan has taken Farcaster. Um, my two main web 2 apps that uh have defined my web 2 activities over the last like five, 10 years, have been Reddit and Twitter. And both of those have aggressively decayed. Yes, they have. And how I experience them and what I use them for. I'm basically never on Reddit anymore. And I'm on Twitter in a more muted fashion. You should see the number of muted words I have. Um, and now Farcaster, built by this crypto native in the year 2023 and four, uh, is building a hybrid of these two things. What the best of what I enjoy about both, uh, and doing it with all my friends in there doing crypto natuff. It's like I feel very blessed that Dan is doing this and building this. Uh, and he's also just um the correct thinker. He's a builder, he's a thinker, uh, and he's he's building in the right direction. And this whole frames thing, I think Farcaster first needed to just optimize for serendipity, get users in, be a replacement to Twitter, uh, build the foundations, and then figure out something with a little bit more magic. They could never have started with frames, for example, but now that they have clay to work with, which are the Farcasters out there, um, now they have something for frames to be able to express themselves. And so um you're very confident. I'm not to say I'm not a bit I'm a bear on this, but uh uh you're the one who I think is like really.

Gas in your break.

You are well no, you're not you're not gas. You're just the the the super mega bull. I'm also bullish on this. I guess I just want to see I just want to see more stuff. I want to see I want to see shelling points emerge around which were some of the best frames out there uh and have those be recycled and reused and reiterated on.

Let's see what the Bankless Nation thinks. Guys, we'll get right to the episode with Dan. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsor that made this one possible. Bankless Nation, we are extremely excited to introduce you once again to Dan Romero. He's the co-founder of Farcaster, which is what? A sufficiently decentralized, that's a key phrase here, social media application. It looks a lot like Twitter, but under the hood, it's actually a lot different. I have used this app increasingly in 2024. I found it a much less toxic place than some of the other social media apps I use out there. And now uh Farcaster has had kind of a almost what looks like the beginning of a killer app type moment with a new feature set called Frames. We're gonna explore all of that with Dan Romero on the conversation today. Dan, how are you doing? Welcome back to Bankless.

Thanks for having me. I'm doing well.

Okay, so it was it's been like a year since we had you on and I think in our first episode we talked a lot about Farcaster under the hood. It was sort of nerdy type technical questions.

Farcaster.

Yeah, and so I think what we want to uh start with maybe Elike is just give us the quick TLDR on what Farcaster is, and then like let's uh go through the last 12 months in uh fast forward, like 2x speed or something, and and get us to where we are today, like everything that's been built. But first, what is Farcaster? How do you explain it like I'm five?

Yeah, so Farcaster is a decentralized social network. And I think for a developer, they grok that immediately. They they understand that, okay, I I can actually go build an application on this network and have a direct relationship with my users. But for the average consumer, they don't care. Decentralization doesn't mean anything to them. They're not at risk of getting deplatformed or in a meaningful way, in the sense that they don't have a big audience. I mean, I think last year we talked about YouTube was a bit of a challenge for you guys at one point. And obviously, your audience is your business. So I think for creators, they also grok that. But I think the average consumer.

Um, they don't care, right? What what does a consumer actually care about when they're using social network? It's probably some combination of

Entertainment, which is the primary, think like TikTok. And then I think there's like kind of a secondary thing, which maybe is like a little bit more Instagram or Snapchat. It's like meeting people, if you're younger, maybe dating people or hooking up with people. But basically, those are your kind of like two primary motivations for using a social network. And so if you take something like Twitter, Twitter is entertainment, right? People can tell themselves that they're following the news or being informed. But the reality is it's very much entertainment. Um, really simple heuristic. Where do people use the app most of the time? So I think Twitter actually released some of these user minutes by device earlier uh in last year.

I think 88% of time spent on Twitter is on mobile.

Right. So we're we're kind of these professionals. We have these like really nice computers. We sit in front of them all day. We're terminally online. And we kind of think everyone else is like us. But the reality is

consumers, they're they're using social media when they're on the couch or waiting in line for coffee. And that happens on mobile. And so

entertainment mobile is kind of the thing a social network is. And so what we've done.

Is a little bit long-winded, but a lot of focus in the last six months for Farcaster is actually trying to get it to a place where I can easily describe it to consumer. And so one thing that we don't do anymore, I I never average person, I'll never describe it as a sufficiently decentralized network. They don't care. I don't talk about the decentralization. I just say Farcaster is a place where you can find interesting people that share similar interests to you online, similar to Reddit. And I think that is actually a much simpler pitch for the average consumer as to why would I care? Why would I want to go sign up on it?

And I don't think we've nailed it in the sense that A, I, you know,

don't think that that's how other people are describing Farcaster at this point. They're still very much being like, oh, it's this cool decentralized social network if you're into crypto, et cetera. But I think the big push for us in 2024 is if I come back on this podcast next year, I should have a very crisp answer on that. And then more importantly, that's how most people should be describing Farcaster is the kind of thing what is it, what need is it solving for a consumer rather than talking about the tech.

And so I think we're very much in a transition, is is to kind of answer that.

I think when when I hop onto Farcaster, um, it's first and foremost familiar to me uh comparing it to Twitter. It like it looks a lot like Twitter, it behaves a lot like Twitter. There's a growing flavor of Farcaster that's also increasingly Reddit-like, which is lovely for me because I'm no longer a Reddit user really ever since, I don't know, maybe two or three years ago. But for someone who's never used Farcaster before but are familiar with the the landscape of Web2 applications, if they were to open up Farcaster and look at it, uh, what would be the first standout difference to them that they would notice? Like, oh, this thing is is new, or what's the new behavior that um Farcaster enables or prioritizes?

Yeah, so that's it's a great way of describing it. Is it's the UX of Twitter on mobile, which I think Twitter really pushed the feed, like Facebook and Twitter and the kind of like early version of web two social media on mobile, like feed is is that's where it kind of emerged. And then I think later Instagram. Um

Reddit never has been a mobile product. Like it kind of existed in the pre-mobile era. Like I think anyone I talk to who uses Reddit seriously, they use it on desktop and it's kind of designed, you know, the threaded conversation view. It feels like a forum, uh hacker news. Like that. So that's very much it. And so I think what we're trying to do is bridge the kind of like familiarity and ease of use of a feed like Twitter.

With the depth and kind of weird esoteric interests that you can find on Reddit. And so we have a feature on Farcaster called Channels Now, which is effectively our version of a subreddit. And so whether you're into gardening or, you know, uh AA wallets in Ethereum, completely different things, you can actually be in one feed consuming content in a way that kind of appeals to all of your interests. And I don't think we've quite figured it out. I think since we launched channels and we launched channels about halfway through last year, had a material increase in types of content people were posting about. Prior to that, it was kind of like

Use you know standard like crypto Twitter is like kind of there was one main conversation. It felt like one big group chat. I mean, granted, the network was pretty small, but people felt like they couldn't express you know the kind of like multifaceted version of themselves. It's like, okay, yeah, I might be really into crypto, but woodworking is also something that I do on the weekend. Like, and and so it's the ability to actually kind of wear many hats uh felt very limited because it's like, well, maybe my followers don't like woodworking. But in a world where channels show up and I can kind of like you can almost think of it as like a hashtag if you're just like a Twitter person, but hashtags are kind of cringe and they get really spammy. And so the goal with channels is to kind of nudge it in more of a subreddit direction where they're actually kind of communities. There's a our version of a mod is called the host, but but there's kind of like building a way that kind of these spaces feel really high quality and an easy way for you to find other like minded individuals.

And so I think um

Again, it kind of like where we want to head this year is get to a place where all that feels really intuitive, which is actually quite challenging in the sense of you show up into an app, there's no one guiding you through it. And so actually, that first run experience of like how does the feed show? Like, do you kind of grok that these are in different, you know, categories and like how those categories work channels? Um, we're we're very far from nailing that. But I think we've made a lot of progress. And that's very much the focus of where we want to be this year because, and I'll just keep reiterating it today. We only win and we only get actually frankly, crypto, I think, to a much broader group of people if it stops being just about crypto and more about like what is this, the the kind of cool things that crypto under, especially under the hood, are enabling, right? So you could imagine um every channel could have some type of membership NFT. And Reddit has an example of like people who are in a subreddit, uh, they can have flare. But what if that flare was basically associated with an NFT? One, that's better monetization for the potential creator of that channel. Two, uh, it can't be rugged, right? So Reddit went through a big thing last year with the API, like a bunch of mods were unhappy. Like you could imagine a world where

Farcaster channels, like, okay, I don't like the way Dan and team are headed. My my my user base is actually on chain. I can kind of fork it out and go do something different. And so I think we want to balance the average user doesn't care about that, but the creator does. And how can you actually merge those two experiences together where you have this amazing consumer experience on mobile in an app,

but the power of kind of blockchain under the hood? Or another way to think about it is like a mullet, right? It's like you know, business in the front, party in the back. And it's like you kind of have this like very clean, nice feeling experience.

When you're using the app and then all of the stuff that can happen on blockchain, and you guys are very well aware of how how things how crazy things could start to get, but like that's all permissionless and it can just happen. And so I think that's kind of the mentality that we want to push. But

to again reiterate, I think anytime we are talking about the crypto as the the appeal of Farcaster, outside of targeting crypto natives, we're kind of losing because we're not thinking bigger picture of like how how can we actually take this to you know a hundred million people or a billion people? And and that certainly is not just going to be harp on the crypto. It's it's more like what can this do for me and why why am I interested? Where's the entertainment value coming?

Yeah, I think I think your framing of like decentralization is not a feature that uh users really care about or normies care about. Like that resonates with me because like very much uh you may maybe uh a creator and also a a user of many of these social media applications, and including being probably terminally online last year uh on on apps like Twitter, right? And um I very much, and of course many bankless listeners, many people are in crypto for kind of the the values. We're here for the tech, we're here for the decentralization, bro, right? That's why we're here. That's kind of the ethos. And yet, it still up to this point hasn't been enough for me to like actually invest in something like Farcaster. And I'll tell you why. It's just because the network effects are so large on the existing social media tools that we use, like a YouTube or like a Twitter, right? I mean, talk to Chris Dixon uh earlier this week. He's like, I've spent years of my life investing, like not as a landlord, but as a surf inside of this application. But like, I don't want to lose all of that network effect. I don't want to lose that distribution. And so even the decentralized features uh haven't been enough for me to like totally push over and convert, except until recently. And I'll share maybe my story.

Dan, so I would I left uh 2023 like really burnt out on um you know it's specifically Twitter. Okay. And like it was becoming a much different platform than when I first started like when I first started in um crypto Twitter, anyway, you know, 2017, it was um it wasn't perfect, it was still toxic in places, but it was a learning engine for me. And I followed people, I I I used it as a tool to level up on crypto, to meet people. David and I met on Twitter, started the bankless podcast that way. It like there were some uh bad parts about it, but the benefits far exceeded the cost. And then I looked at where I spent my time in 2023, and it felt like that was no longer the case. It was actually like increasingly toxic for me to be, and I almost felt like in a strange way, kind of uh maybe addicted to it is like part part of that, but also just um, I don't know. It was this kind of like um a hall of mirrors type of um environment that I felt like I had to engage just to kind of like protect reputation. We get in these, you know, all sorts of chaos. Anyway, I decided to further invest in in Farcaster in crypto social.

After this, just because it was a more wholesome place, I would post something on Farcaster and I wouldn't get drowned out by like clout chasing kind of tweets that just uh are more interested in dunking than engaging the conversation. And so that was the first value proposition for me, is it just felt more wholesome and more refreshing. And I don't know whether that's like Farcaster is using a different algorithm or if that's just because like a whole bunch, it's a smaller community, right? It's a bunch of kind of the nerdy geeks that are interested in that sort of wholesome type of conversation. So it just attracts that community. And that's why I have been dedicating much more time to Farcaster in uh 2024. And that's like the first value proposition. But even still, Dan, I gotta say, that has just kind of like gotten us to parity level with uh the features that existing social media platforms offer. Okay. And it doesn't have the reach or distribution. What has excited me so much was something that happened within actually the last week of time that we're recording, which is Farcaster's introduction of frames. And for me, this is the first time I saw the potential of like a killer app type experience in crypto social.

And the innovation that that unleashes. So maybe I want to talk about both of those things, but could we start with frames? Because that is an exciting new development. And I want to get your take on it. And maybe you could start by explaining what frames is and explaining what um has just sort of exploded on the scene in the last week.

Sure.

So let me can I just go back to one thing you brought up and this is this is the existential problem for us to solve is you know

the both of you you've worked really hard to build audiences on Twitter. Like you've you've ground those numbers up. You have an audience, you have influence, that is, is is your livelihood is is your audience, right?

We are not going to be able to get people to switch over, the people who are generating kind of the content that kind of earns that type of audience, unless we have enough users that the audience is somewhat comparable. Especially in a mode where

the early version of Farcaster you could describe as a Twitter clone, right? So it feels very much like Twitter. So it's like, okay, so it's a worse version of Twitter with fewer people. As a person with limited amount of time who was using an audience to actually drive a business, why would you go invest time there?

And maybe with the exception of a true ideological pure person like Vitalik, who has five million followers on Twitter and basically kind of abandoned it for the most part, I think very few people, and and I don't hold anything against them. At first it used to be a little salty, it'd be like, oh, you talk about crypto, and then you don't want to use the decentralized thing. That was just cope on my part. The reality is the only way we are going to earn people's attention is if we offer something

either comparable, like in turn, and the way to be comparable to Twitter is audience size. So that's really hard for us to do, or start to change the game and offer something different. And I actually think that ties into frames where

Uh up until frames, we really didn't have, you know, we had a few features here and there, some NFT stuff, and but but nothing to kind of like really draw you in. And then in the last week, uh it's it's kind of wild. It was frames, frames is less than a week old. We we launched a very simple um mini app primitive that can exist in a feed. And I think that the simplest way to think about this is if you go to Twitter and you do a poll today. That's a special type of post, right? Like most posts are text, image, video. You have buttons at the bottom, that's how you interact. If you if you kind of want to do more, you either reply or you you you quote tweet.

With a poll, you at least have a couple of kind of options. Obviously the person who created the poll could could define those. And then you click, and then there's kind of some interactivity within the tweet.

So now imagine taking that as kind of like a just a very basic primitive. You have a canvas that you can kind of put an image or whatever you want to render.

And four buttons. That's it. Like we we didn't allow anything else. There's no video. There's no, you know, anything else magic. Um, it's it's it's a hack of um there's some irony here. We're using Open Graph, which

uh for the nerds, it was actually something that Facebook invented back in like 2007, 2008 when Facebook had an app platform. And it's kind of um it's like the tailbone where it's like we we still have a tailbone because at one point we were we were animals that had tails.

Exactly. So Open Graph is this thing. If you Google Open Graph right now, you will see a page that Facebook hosts,

but they're not working on. They haven't been working on for a decade. And actually, Twitter then extended it. So you'll notice that sometimes when you share a link on Twitter, you get the small icon or you get the really big one. And then obviously, since uh the new regime has come in, links have been absolutely nerfed on Twitter. And they've even reduced the amount of space that they give and they only use this big open graph image. But for the developer out there, that's a pretty simple thing to go add to any website. So you can like add the big card for Twitter and the small one for Facebook or LinkedIn.

Yeah, nothing's happened with OpenGraph since since that. So what we did is we actually hacked OpenGraph to make it more interactive so that anytime you click one of these buttons in this little mini app in the feed, we are sending a message back to wherever that OpenGraph is coming and saying, hey, I clicked this button. What what should be the next image we surf? That's it. It was an insanely simple.

And what you get out of that is developers within like an hour of us launching started to have frames. And then it kind of ran into the weekend, and people started to organize grassroots, um,

frame hackathons and all this other kind of stuff because it was just a huh. I have a I have one image I can change, and I have four buttons. How creative can I get?

And and within uh 24 hours, someone had figured out how to put Doom,

the video game.