This post is taking part in the Farcaster 2026 writing contest
With the introduction of Farcaster as the social feed in Coinbase Wallet, it’s worth asking what exactly it means to be a social layer in crypto. If we’re not just the communications and propaganda branch of Coinbase (and hopefully we aren’t) who are we? What are we doing with Farcaster? It’s hard to say, because on the one hand I’m not sure there has been a thing quite like what we want to be - but there are lots of examples of what we are not that we can use as instructive examples.
We Aren’t Mass-Social Media
For a minute in early 2024 it felt like maybe Warpcast would be what people flocked to as Twitter slid into being X which slid into an awful lot of posts that were (rightfully) off-putting to advertisers and people less comfortable with xenophobia. It’s good at times like this to have friends who are very cynical about crypto or friends who participate in things like the Fediverse or Mastodon or Urbit or whatever that is an alternative to the web2 social media giants. That is - some of us have been so obsessed with crypto since 2017 that our perspective is very bent on how much of a niche it is compared to global subcultures. Warpcast was doing a very good job of making the experience of a social protocol not feel tedious: I won’t name names but other apps tried things that meant running wallet transactions for every post and every comment and every interaction - it’s not just tedious, it’s unsafe (you start clicking Confirm way too fast - imagine doing that with a non-hot wallet!).
The initial hype saw a flood of Farcaster users* and the feeling that this might be The Next Big Thing. Some of us had been there before that wave and were content to more or less continue paddling our surfboard whether or not the waves were moving. Later in the year BlueSky suddenly became the heir apparent to a certain demographic of former Twitter users. So the landscape we see now, it seems to me, is that there’s a relatively blue app that doesn’t want to discuss or engage in crypto at all, and a relatively red app that has a legacy crypto culture that is at least somewhat weaponized against its own users to bait them into being exit liquidity for a few memelords and insiders. If we acknowledge that simply by being integrated with crypto we are participating in a niche culture (for now and maybe for the foreseeable future) - I think it’s instructive that we acknowledge we are not either of those other two options.
We do not want to be a social app that is easily leveraged for political rhetoric, botted as a sybil face of mass propaganda. We don’t want to be a social app that is clearly owned by any combination of oligarchs with any particular disposition. In this respect it’s not even about disagreeing with Zuckerberg or Musk - it’s just about acknowledging how insane it is that we spent decades railing against the small group of powerful private interest owned media companies only to have people enthusiastically embrace that as a paradigm in 2025. We probably shouldn’t anticipate the masses joining up on something that is uniquely tooled for security (that is, as opposed to accounts you can recover with emails and phone numbers) and linked with cryptocurrency. So what do we want to be? Something else.
We Aren’t Cypherpunks
This one ruffles me just a little, but a social protocol that isn’t totally zk-secure or something - not to mention the pseudo-anonymous nature of Farcaster culture - we simply aren’t the people on the bleeding edge of encrypted privacy as a priority. With that said, one of the really interesting developments within Warpcast has been the SuperAnon bot and how it gets used. People use it to call out grifters, crack off-color jokes, sometimes to bullpost or bearpost.
When I say that we aren’t cypherpunks what I mean is that I don’t really think we should aspire to be one of the internet subcultures that is completely anonymous. On the one hand those places bring out honesty and hot takes that might not be shared otherwise, on the other hand they bring out the worst in people who have no concern for any kind of social shaming for being awful. Not to mention the reality that serious opsec enthusiasts put a lot more effort into their online activity than most of us (in the already admittedly-niche subculture) have the time or expertise to manage.
Also consider this: the nature of the public ledger game we’re all playing means that things like castmoney.xyz and ZachXBT’s chain-sleuth adventures are sort of two ends of the trust spectrum. Castmoney has been interesting - I was really fascinated by seeing what coins my social network were buying and how much, and then being also informed of “big” purchases and moves by whales. That’s the public-facing aspect, though, right? I have no idea what percentage of the total portfolio spread across wallets and real world assets these “whales” are spending on random Base memecoins. Their conviction in the token is really determined by the percentage of their net worth - so when they make a big buy that’s really a relatively miniscule buy for them (for all I know), I may be deceived into really risky bets. It’s a similar problem with ZachXBT - for the uninitiated, he’s made a hobby/career out of connecting blockchain dots to point out bad actors, scammers, or hackers or people otherwise being scumbags that is technically public and just hard to map out. The problem for me is that Zach gets anonymous tips (why?) or sometimes will excoriate people who are something closer to serial entrepreneurs than grifters (many such cases). It’s not really about ZachXBT being wrong a lot, it’s more about selective public shaming being a really dangerous tool.
What I mean is this: anon accounts and sort of sponsored public investigators are both the sort of thing where the use case is also the abuse case, the public/private asymmetry is meaningful. ZachXBT might get a tip about a competitor’s dev history or past dealings. SuperAnon posts an aside that suggests this personality or that market is insolvent. If we assume everything we are doing is public, that’s when things like castmoney deceive us: we don’t know the real worth or every action of market actors. When we assume everything we are doing is private that’s when selectively pointing out chains of actions or balances amounts to corporate sabotage. That said, most of ZachXBT’s major work - I think - is pretty justified: Lazarus group, SIM-swappers, Phishers, etc.
We Aren’t A Multi-Media Layer
The last tendency I think worth mentioning is to think of Farcaster as a replacement for Instagram, TikTok or uhhhh Flickr, Tumblr - I don’t know but a place to share video and images and art that is all sort of content-creator-centric. This might sound insane for a minute, because what is a post feed if not a stream of content from creators? I think the apps that have already integrated with Farcaster, though, have demonstrated that things like Rodeo and Drakula make more sense than trying to post everything directly to Farcaster - that the tokenizing and web3-ownership paradigm makes more sense if Warpcast just integrates the apps rather than trying to make everything exist inside itself. In a word: the interaction is what is key, not the native hosting.
Video takes a lot of storage, uncompressed images (which artists are always complaining about) take storage - sharing all these things with all the users takes a lot of bandwidth; but this is all common sense. The problem is rather that sharing all this content without any tokenizing has traditionally been paid for (in web2) with advertising. Each suggestion I see for how to grow Warpcast or Farcaster in the way it handles media seems to me to begin to require some kind of subsidized storage/bandwidth (venture capitalist money or advertising) or even worse, devolves into short-form video churn influencer and lifestyle branding (a few more steps, but also advertising).
In my mind, the paradigm that Farcaster is using the crypto legos - the modular app integration that makes up the variety and depth of all the users can dream up - this is the important thing to return to. Developing a very ornate and particular lego piece is fine, but the whole ethos of legos is the ability to recombine them and create new things. If we don’t want to be a platform that is just bait for mercenary financialized interactions that quickly dump, we have to embrace some kind of meaningful identity. This is why we are still figuring out who exactly it is that we are and what we’re doing being integrated into apps like Coinbase Wallet: we’re not the media - independent or otherwise, we’re not the place for radical privacy, and we’re not the mass social app. That’s all “what we are not” - so what are we? What will we be?