Reflecting on FarCon 2024: Enthusiasm from the Crypto Community and Challenges in Infrastructure
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Reflecting on FarCon 2024: Enthusiasm from the Crypto Community and Challenges in Infrastructure
The infrastructure is not yet truly ready to welcome mainstream consumers.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: katiewav
Translated by: TechFlow
FarCon sparked a wave of excitement and optimism. The atmosphere on-site was electrifying, and the fact that everything used on-chain payments felt magical. I was also struck by the high quality of projects I had the chance to judge during FarHack. Clearly, talented developers—from Farcaster-native founders to independent builders to media enthusiasts—are eager to build on Farcaster, and this infectious enthusiasm is impossible to ignore.
Yet there’s a more nuanced takeaway: I think many people left FarCon with more questions than answers. Over the weekend, familiar ideas and concepts were discussed repeatedly—almost to a painful degree. One contentious question hung in the air: Can a truly decentralized, positive-sum social network exist while still being largely steered by a single team (albeit with good intentions)?
I’d like to share some of my initial reflections—ranging from the most frequently discussed topics I heard, to what I hope to see emerge from the Farcaster community, to my broader framework for consumer-grade crypto products.
Is the Infrastructure Ready?
Personally, I don’t believe the infrastructure is truly ready for mainstream consumers yet.
Despite all the talk about L2s and L3s, using these chains remains challenging. Whenever I use an L2 or L3, checking transaction status across respective chains is quite difficult—for example, transacting $ENJOY on Zora is still very confusing. Logging into Farcaster clients via “Sign-in with Farcaster” still feels clunky, frankly, even a bit annoying. Many at FarCon were excited to buy physical goods on-chain, but had to wait over 10 minutes to complete purchases because they needed to transfer funds to Base.
However, hiding behind the excuse that “we must wait for infrastructure to mature before building apps” is dangerous and complacent. At FarCon, I developed a framework when talking to others: thinking in two phases about the development of infrastructure and applications.
Phase 1:
Make tools more accessible to less technical, less crypto-native, product- or vision-oriented individuals (a.k.a. “idea guys”) so they can iterate on app concepts that might appeal to mainstream users. Thanks to efforts by the Farcaster team, native infrastructure teams like Neynar, general infrastructure providers like Stack and Privy, and other community developers, we’ve made significant progress here. Use crypto-native users as test grounds for these MVPs and keep refining them without critical infrastructure blockers.
Phase 2: Build best-in-class application and product experiences for consumers of all interests, crypto literacy levels, and backgrounds.
I believe Phase 1 is nearing its end. Over the past few years, we’ve made remarkable progress in infrastructure—from embedded wallets through partnerships with companies like Privy, to lowering costs via L2s/L3s, improving bridging and chain abstraction with firms like Decent, seamless off-ramp solutions like Ansible, and the construction of the Farcaster protocol itself, a massive feat of complex network engineering. There’s still much work to do to improve UX, but finally, we can now do that while rapidly developing and experimenting with applications.
The Future of Farcaster Clients
During FarCon, there was a lot of discussion and debate (both IRL and URL, but mostly URL) around the fate of clients. Some suspect the Farcaster team may have an incentive to keep Warpcast as the dominant client—leading most other clients to merely serve as feature sources for Warpcast and eventually get absorbed.
Given the form factor of clients so far, I think this is a valid core concern—most clients are just re-skins or slices/cuts of the global Warpcast feed. In my view, most potential client concepts I heard stayed within this narrow scope. My sense is that the underlying homogenizing desire is to attract and extract Farcaster’s valuable social graph, while paying less attention to other foundational aspects of Farcaster: the Farcaster protocol and its data architecture.
Past conversations I’ve had with Archetype research advisor Andrew Hong and teams trying to build social networks led me to realize that the ability to leverage out-of-the-box p2p networking and a data structure actually designed for modular social graphs is game-changing for app developers. I’d love to see visions for clients go beyond supporting existing Warpcast users—offering entirely new experiences or functionalities that may not be possible within Twitter-like interfaces such as Warpcast, or attracting audiences who may not care about crypto-centric topics central to Warpcast’s main user base. Moreover, at a high level, consumer-facing interfaces trying to do everything often end up doing nothing well—“no super apps, I love you.” Channels are a clever step in this direction, as topic-specific Warpcast channels could better enable niche, differentiated clients tailored to specific communities and allow those clients to emerge more naturally.
The above then implies a prior point: the infrastructure/onboarding mechanisms aren’t yet at a state where Farcaster/Warpcast can be fully abstracted away from the client experience, which may trap us in a “meta-feature” client paradigm.
Thus arises another natural question—if we want to attract non-Warpcast users, why use crypto infrastructure at all? In an era rich with information and media (both real and synthetic), social coordination and governance are crucial. I believe fully user-coordinated social products can be extremely powerful, and tokens are a strong mechanism for enabling such coordination.
One short-term question I left FarCon particularly curious about is the future of commerce on Farcaster and commerce-focused infrastructure/clients. On-site, I knew of multiple teams supporting different commercial experiences during the event. This category quickly generated builder excitement, and I’ll be watching developments there closely over the coming months.
Deconstructing Consumer-Grade Crypto Products
In sum, a common question I received at FarCon was: what do I currently care about most in consumer-facing crypto products, and how do I broadly view the space today? Right now, I roughly divide consumer crypto using two distinct frameworks:
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Ecosystem-first
Crypto ecosystems are notoriously tribal (e.g., Ethereum vs. Solana), and this extends to narrower consumer ecosystems too. It’s been interesting observing how Zora, Base, and Farcaster interact as interwoven ecosystems. Transactions on Zora and Base often rely on Warpcast for distribution and discovery, while Farcaster is supported by Zora and Base. I believe the cultures and practices emerging from these ecosystems—both independently and in relation—will be central in shaping the near-term monetization future of consumer-grade crypto products, as builders tend to favor ecosystems with defined user roles.
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Use-case-first
Regarding the types of product use cases I’m considering, here are several categories:
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Connecting offline/online user data
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Brand loyalty
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On-chain social
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On-chain media/music
These categories overlap, so I’ll expand on them below:
In my previous post, “Fast Forward: Building Consumer at Internet Speed,” I wrote about how fragmented user identity and experience are between IRL and URL. For brevity, I’ll briefly restate it here:
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Users’ journeys online and offline are highly fragmented. As boundaries between physical and digital realms blur, the ability to form coherent, representative identities erodes. We have a huge opportunity to build experiences that seamlessly merge physical and digital—especially when social graphs can move freely between online and offline contexts.
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For individuals/communities: How can my favorite online channels better inform and connect with the people, groups, and places I engage with offline?
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For brands: How can brands better understand how in-store customers spend their time online, and engage with them across those platforms?
Now is a critical moment to think about the intersection of crypto and media, though I also believe these products will stabilize over longer timeframes than most short-term opportunities suggest. Traditional media and music are undergoing existential crises, collapsing in terms of business structures, monetization models, and the roles of consumers versus artists/critics. As mentioned earlier, I believe tokens and crypto more broadly are powerful tools that can coordinate media networks increasingly dependent on user participation, user-generated content, and possibly even user ownership.
I’ve intentionally kept these reflections relatively raw, resisting the temptation to over-intellectualize. Overall, leaving FarCon, I feel both excited and cautious about the future. Undoubtedly, star teams and organically formed early ecosystems have laid the foundation. I believe elevating the ecosystem to the next level will require a diverse community of developers, creators, and strong users—and I’m thrilled to be part of this journey.
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@katiewav
