On-Chain Social Projects by the Numbers: Farcaster and Other Protocols Surpass 250K Daily Active Users Combined, Pods.media Mints Over 900K
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On-Chain Social Projects by the Numbers: Farcaster and Other Protocols Surpass 250K Daily Active Users Combined, Pods.media Mints Over 900K
OpenSocial, Farcaster, DSCVR, and Lens are the four most widely used on-chain social protocols, collectively boasting over 250,000 daily active users.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: OurNetwork
Translation: TechFlow
On-chain Social
Lens | Farcaster | pods.media | Zora | Friend.tech
OpenSocial, Farcaster, DSCVR, and Lens are the four most widely used on-chain social protocols, collectively reaching over 250,000 daily active users.
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On-chain social is an emerging consumer category that allows users to build and integrate their follower networks—also known as "social graphs"—across different applications without starting from scratch. With growing daily active users, developer activity, and funding, this sector is approaching all-time highs. While Farcaster and Lens are generally considered market leaders, Asia-Pacific's OpenSocial protocol surpassed 100,000 daily active users this week—exceeding the combined total of Farcaster’s 65,000 and Lens’s 25,000. The Solana-based DSCVR has also surpassed 60,000 daily active users, though it remains relatively unknown to the broader public.
Dune [1][2] | Flipside [1] via @filarm, @opensociallabs, @dscvr
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Zora Network is an app-specific L2 designed specifically to support the Zora platform, where users can share, mint, and collect NFTs through curated social feeds. It could simply be described as “on-chain Instagram.” Zora shares minting fees with creators and has generated 3,586.5 ETH (approximately $8.5 million) in revenue for creators since July 2023, distributing 350 ETH (around $830,000) to creators in August 2024 alone.
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Friend.tech was once the star of the SocialFi space but is now gradually becoming insignificant. At its peak in October 2023, Friend.tech had over 10,000 daily active users and daily revenues exceeding $100,000, even surpassing $1 million in revenue on September 14, 2023. However, over the past four months since May, new user inflows have sharply declined (only three new users on September 4), with both key trades and club trades seeing volume and fees drop by more than 95%. The platform’s native token $FRIEND has also fallen 85%, from $0.887 to $0.120, after the team announced on June 9 its plan to migrate from Base to their own L2, Friendchain—a plan that has since been canceled. Daily trading volume now stands at just $7,600, down from over $10 million in mid-May.
Lens
Lens currently has around 20,000 daily active users, down 50% from its historical high, but users still generate approximately 65,000 posts per day.
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As a protocol that brings social actions like posts, follows, and profiles on-chain, Lens has about 20,000 daily active users. This represents a threefold year-over-year increase, but marks a 50% decline compared to its all-time high of 40,000 reached in June 2024.
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In terms of active user count, Phaver dominates with 50% market share. However, in monetization, Orb captures about 60% of revenue—despite having less than 10% of total users, these users represent the highest quality segment.
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Lens generates revenue from profile mints, similar to Farcaster, and charges a 5% fee on collected posts across the network. To date, Lens has accumulated approximately $500,000 in treasury revenue, primarily driven by profile mints.
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Transaction highlight: A user named Lulita posted a photo on Lens as a collectible, which was minted five times at 100 $BONSAI each—$BONSAI being a meme token for Lens creators. These mints generated $3.50 in revenue for the creator. Overall, this economic model generates roughly $10,000–$20,000 per month, down from a peak of around $270,000 in April.
Farcaster
Anthony Loya | Website | Dashboard
Farcaster has 675,632 users connected to 729,670 addresses.
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Farcaster is a social media protocol that supports application development on top of it. The platform uses FIDs (Farcaster IDs) to identify users and enables cross-platform interactions. From March to September 2024, daily casts (analogous to social media “posts”) grew from 200,000 to over 1.4 million, with reactions peaking near 5 million. After stabilization in June and July, September data shows daily casts consistently between 550,000 and 600,000, reactions between 1.5 million and 2 million, and link shares between 200,000 and 300,000—significantly higher than levels seen in March.
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Farcaster sees 604,786 daily casts and 1,584,278 reactions on a 30-day average basis. The platform added 898,015 signers during this period—a feature allowing users to securely delegate operations to apps without compromising full account security. Individual creators like @cryptohindio and @cryptoteluguo have gained attention, with their posts receiving over 30,000 reactions each. However, the platform does face challenges in maintaining user engagement. Over the past year, the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users has fluctuated between 0.2 and 0.4, indicating potential issues with user retention.
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From March to September 2024, Farcaster user transactions were primarily concentrated on the Base network, accounting for 70–80% of all activity, averaging around 1,000 transactions per day. Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, especially Optimism and Arbitrum, also saw significant adoption—Zora gained traction in NFT-related activities, while Ethereum mainnet maintained 5–10% of total transaction volume. This trend reflects users’ preference for scalable and cost-effective solutions within a diversified blockchain ecosystem.
Pods.media
Pods has minted over 900,000 episodes, with more than 400,000 mints.
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Pods.media is a crypto-native publishing platform that allows creators to instantly publish podcasts as collectible NFTs. Traditional RSS feeds can also interact with these podcasts on web2 platforms. The NFT functionality enables creators to earn revenue, identify loyal fans, and expand podcast utility. Since Q3 2023, Pods has launched 70 shows, released 945 unique episodes, which have been collected by 109,000 unique wallets.
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Monthly protocol revenue grew 175-fold from $800 in January to $140,000 in August, driven by over 30 active shows.
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About 60% of revenue comes from the top three shows. Adam Levy’s Mint leads with a 49% share, generating $448,000 in revenue, followed by Coop Records with 8.8% ($81,000).
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Transaction highlight: One of the current popular podcasts is Terminally Onchain with YB, launched by Hypersub. In this episode, host nonlinear.eth interviews YB about his venture capital background and how he leveraged Hypersub to become a fully on-chain writer and monetize his audience. This episode was minted 6,000 times, generating $11,500 in protocol revenue, shared between Pods and the podcaster.
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