Unchained - The Chopping Block: Is Farcaster the Web3 Social Layer? - Ep. 605

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news and with special guest, and Farcaster aficionado Ted! This episode zooms in on Farcaster Frames: How are they revolutionizing the platform? We examine Farcaster's transformation and its impact on the future of social media: Can Farcaster redefine decentralized communication? Delving into its user base, we ask: What makes Farcaster's community unique? How do airdrop strategies and global hub distribution shape its ecosystem? And what's next for decentralized social networks like Farcaster? Join us for an insightful discussion on these pivotal questions impacting the crypto sphere. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show Highlights 🔹 Farcaster frames launch: Revolutionizing user engagement in crypto communities. 🔹 Social Media Evolution: Farcaster's Rise from Niche Network to Powerhouse. 🔹 Global dynamics: Farcaster's u.s. focus vs. Lens' worldwide appeal. 🔹 Decentralized platforms: the unique soul of Farcaster and Lens communities. 🔹 Airdrop strategies: boosting Farcaster's growth and user engagement. 🔹 From social networks to media: Farcaster's balancing act. 🔹 Overcoming adoption barriers: user reluctance vs. Farcaster's innovations. 🔹 A shift in content, authenticity and interaction on Farcaster. 🔹 Expanding Farcaster's ecosystem globally. 🔹 Farcaster's vision: the future of decentralized social networks. 🔹 Discovering Farcaster: overcoming hesitation, embracing curiosity. Hosts ➡️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly  ➡️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ➡️Robert Leshner, Founder of Compound Guest ⭐️ Ted, the Farcaster Fangirl #1 Disclosures Links Why Farcaster Frames are important: How a failed Facebook bet is coming to fruition in Web 3 By Antonio García Martínez Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frames launched, I don't know if I have ever seen a community so excited about a new feature. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two quond. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed to trading firms who are very involved. D5 protocols are the antidote. D5 protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block.

Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros. First we've got Robert, the Cryptoconosur, and Tsar of Super State. GM, everybody. Next, we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Aloha. And special guest today, we have Ted, Farcaster, fan girl number one. GM. And I have received the head hype man at Dragonfly.

So we are early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is an investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopin Block. at XYZ for more disclosures. Ted, welcome to the show. We are very excited to have you on because today is the Farcaster episode. And we wanted to get on somebody. Sorry, go ahead, Robert.

No, I was just giving hype to the Farcaster. Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, okay. Okay, nice. So we wanted to bring on, so for the Farcaster episode, because Farcasser is a social media app for those who don't know,

it's kind of a Twitter, decentralized Twitter clone, I guess, clone. Let's call it a clone. We, or it's a protocol. It's not itself the interface. It's a protocol, and many people can build interfaces on top of the Farcaster protocol. We wanted to bring on somebody who is a power user of Farcaster who could kind of talk about it from the inside perspective.

And my understanding is that you are a big Farcaster superfan booster. Talk to us about your experience of Farcaster, how you came across it, and what you do on there. Good question. I am a Farcaster power user. I feel like it's part of my personality now and even like my Twitter username. My Twitter display name is actually like Ted on Farcaster. And I've been doing that since before. It was cool.

But I actually got on a Forecaster. I think it was November 2021. So it's been a while. I was connected to Dan for some job advice. I was like, oh, I'm thinking about going like full time into crypto. What do you think? And got connected to that line. Dan Romero, the founder of Farcaster.

Yep. Dan Romero, founder of Farcaster. Co-founder is Barron. They worked together at Coinbase. And he was like, of course, course, like gave great, great advice and, like, kind of changed the trajectory of my life that way. But then also was like, oh, I have this, like, social media, like, decentralized social app. If you want to try it out, it's called Farcaster. I'll send you, like, an invite code.

And this was in, yeah, like, November 2021. I wasn't really on Twitter that much at all. I was more like Instagram. That's where my friends were. So I hopped on the, hopped on Twitter. And I think, Tarun, you were there already. I think. think you were in early easier. You might have churned like churned. Yeah, I will say like one thing is as much as you can dislike Twitter, every time you try a new thing trying to compete with Twitter, it's just like, it's just hard to get the stickiness. But I have to say, super hard. Ted is one of the people who convinced me to continue trying to push on Farcaster. Yeah. So what did early Farcaster feel like? What was like the 20?

Okay. It's like this funny trope right now where everyone's like, we're so early, we're so early. And I was chatting and was like, I remember back when like you couldn't delete your casts. Like it was very, very early. Like you didn't know who was liking your cast. You didn't know who was deleting or who was like, you couldn't delete your cast. I remember before that I was like, oh, I got a like on my cast. Like I didn't know who liked it. I was like so excited. Every cast I was doing, I was getting a like. Turns out it was just like, just like. just Dan, like liking my cast. To like, you know, but it was, it was super quiet. Like, I think the first cast I ever did in retrospect is kind of cringe. I was like, hey, looking for some new Web3 resources. Like, what direction can you point me in? And I was like on a platform full of crypto OGs who were like, what do you mean you're starting to learn about it?

So it was relatively quiet. And then I think. So what was the vibe though? What was like, what was the thing driving the community? at that time? What were people talking about? It was very technical. Lots of founders on there. And then I think into 2022, more and more people started onboarding. And I think people began to find like a community. And so it was one place where I could ask a question and then get responses back. And so you were having this mix of very technical conversations like rooted in

EVM and like developer conversations. But then you were also having like intellectual discussions as well because the signal to noise ratio was so good and better that you could then you could find anywhere else. So that was just like one thing to me was like, okay, great, I could try doing this on Twitter, but I wouldn't be able to have conversations or I could try doing it on Farcaster and actually get good feedback and like develop connections with people that I wouldn't get to do anywhere else. And so I think that like one of the memes are like, I guess it's a feature and a bug. It depends on who you ask, is that farcaster is like so nice, is what people say. And I think it just comes down to like early farcaster community when it was like less than

a thousand users, even less than 10,000. It was like how you would treat your neighbor and like how you would treat people that you would like see in person and like interact with, even if you didn't agree with them or disagree with them. So that was the vibe. And then also like everyone was very bullish in general. So like there were no grifters. There were like, like, yeah, zero grifters. If you were like bullish on on crypto generally in the bear market, like, um, like you stuck around. Like everyone was there where I felt like on Twitter it was like very superficial. Yeah. Exactly. And for me, like as somebody who was really like rolling up my sleeves and trying to understand for like the crypto ecosystem having come in in like 2020 instead of like,

you know, most of those people were 2014, 2015. I basically had like the steepest learning curve that I was able to tackle because I was surrounded by like some of the greatest, most authentic, just like very, very experienced and knowledgeable people who had been working in crypto for a long time. And they were like incredibly welcoming to those of us who didn't have the same background. And so I think also you'll meet a lot of people on Farrakaster early days who weren't working in crypto, but all of a sudden have a completely different perspective on crypto because their access point were like a high concentration of really incredible builders. So that's like what I would say early vibes were.

But it was quiet and like it wasn't as boring. Like it wasn't as spicy as Twitter whatsoever. I still spent some time there like on Instagram. Like yeah, there wasn't too much going on. Yeah. I would give my my view was like I. I kind of felt like it had this, you know, the difference between crypto and Web3 is like very much delineated between Twitter and and Farcaster. I feel like toward the end of 2021, at like the peak of the NFT bill market, there was sort of people who are like, I really like NFTs, but I don't like the Suu tweeting about buying every art box thing type of thing.

And all those people move to Farcaster. And in some ways, I call it the, you know, as Ted said, feature or a bug, but the cult of toxic positivity sort of definitely exists within Farcaster. But interestingly enough, if you just like look at the actual users, you know, compare it to some of the other Twitter spin-offs like Blue Sky and things like that, it had really good retention of its users. because they really focused on this one user group of people who like things on chain but aren't just traders. Yeah.

I think the interesting thing about how they've had this huge growth in the last few weeks, which is why we're talking about it, is they added an extensibility layer for programming your posts, and you can have games in your posts. You can have meme coins in your posts. And that sort of brought some of the crypto Twitter energy over in the sense of, which is why I guess you're getting spammed right now. And it's crazy. So maybe do you want to walk us through what frames are and like if you were to like ELI5 frames? Yeah.

That's a great point. Yeah. So also I think to your point of like it being a community and like anti-spammy was that Dan, it was also like permissioned at that point. anybody couldn't just sign up. Like, they had to basically DM the founders to get an invite to come on. And then this is a kudos to the team is that, like, they are maniacal about getting user feedback. So, like, that kind of sets the stage to where we are today. I think it was like two weeks ago.

It feels like a year ago at this point is that they launched forecaster frames, which basically allow any developer as term point out to create an app that sits within the warpcast. I don't think it's on the protocol level, farcaster, but like you can create an app the same way that Facebook had like Farmville, you know, those like BuzzFeed quizzes that you could like do within the Facebook app or that Twitter before it kind of, it used to have APIs with like the polls, et cetera. So any developer can ultimately build a frame, which is an app, like I even built it and I'm not super technical to be able to accomplish whatever they want. For me, I'm like from a potential and like utility of kind of like why does decentralized social matter or like why does blockchain add value to kind of social networks is like the potential is is pretty insane if you think about it from an e-commerce perspective.

So you can basically just pour around your social identity from one place to the next. If you're doing event RSVPing and like the event ticket is an NFT, like very, very easy to be able to start layer. on top of that. And then from a distribution, I'm forgetting who it was, but like paragraph, if you guys are familiar with paragraph, kind of like a medium or a substack, kind of like web three version of it can do like subscribe right in a frame now where you don't have to like link out to a paragraph newsletter in order to subscribe. It's just like the subscribe button within a cast. Somebody did Girl Scout cookie orders through a frame, which is also wild. You're like, wait, like I can order Girl Scout cookies using my like it's kind of like what Instagram shopping was

but no one's really been able to reimagine or like revolutionize it for in like Web3 socials so far. And then to kind of like those to me are like the inspiring like, okay, this is utility. This is where you really start to like get at the front of like consumer crypto. And then also what you can do and this is kind of like if you hear me on like warpcast right now, I'm kind of like being a little bit melodramatic about it, is that it's also because it's completely permissionless, anybody can create a frame to do whatever they want to do. So what we've seen is this like wild proliferation of like recast and like this in order to be able to get like a free mint.

And so you'll see tons of people like creating a free mint that ultimately it's like it's an air drop, right? Or you get the play this game and like they make a really fun game, which. like I'm all for fun on chain, but then it's like, oh, you'll get this Dgen, like you'll get a Dgen token as a result. And so that is really exciting. And then kind of like this whole Dgen token thing goes back to the original is that when the Farcaster community was like 500 of us, there's this one crypto native artist, Oxen, who at the time was just like doing Farcaster stuff. He was like, eh, this is like really hard to make it as an artist, but I'm going to take a bet on the

farcaster community. And they've treated me well and I'm invested in them. And he's been like grinding up this for like two years. And now like he got involved with the Dgen token. All of a sudden the Dgen token is now tied somehow to his like NFTs and like that's skyrocketing as well. And so when people see this opportunity to A like you have a DGN token that is skyrocketing in price, I think it might have dropped. Then you kind of attract. everybody. I think definitely the ability to like insert meme coin into anything within the protocol is like the number one reason I think you've seen this crazy growth because there was sort of this

huge air drop sort of like, you know, the same way like Jito kind of catalyzed all that stuff. Yeah. This huge air drop happened and like everyone all of a sudden was like, oh, this is the easiest way to get distribution for a meme coin. Now the interesting thing to me is unlike when Facebook had apps or Twitter had apps. You can't really shut down this network. Like, you can't, you can't really shut down any of these apps. It is really truly the hub operators are, are validating this and making it kind of the state changes for it. There's no, there's no sort of like centralized company can say,

stop this thing right now. So I think it will be kind of interesting as a distribution mechanism to a bunch of users who already know how to use crypto. They have a wallet. And they're using this thing, not just like I own this NFT and like it gets me into the Discord. It's it really is like they are making content and kind of will this network effect be a good distribution mechanism? Like people keep distributing tokens or NFTs this way or will it kind of like turn into like a new type of application so that kind of. So to ruin, if I if I'm understanding correctly with frames, right? So you're so you're in Farcaster. You have your Farcaster key. A frame. With a frame, basically what it does, if I'm understanding correctly, is you sign a, or derive a second key with your actual Ethereum or Farcaster key or whatever.

And so you can't actually spend money or do economic transactions in a frame. You have to, basically, you can only sign something which is relatively inert. So you can't actually end up getting scammed or hacked or whatever using a frame. Is that correct? Yes, but they did just allow you to now link out. So for instance, Brandon Chow, B. Chow on it created a generative artment where you can generate the art. And then when you're ready to mint whatever version you bought in, it says like ready to mint.

And it will pop up a window that warns you like, hey, you were now leaving. Yeah, you are like now leaving and we'll bring you to the page. However, on recent developer calls, it sounds like, in-frame transactions, maybe on the roadmap. And so there is a... So how is that not like a massive security risk of having people clicking a button and being like, great, now you just, you know, paid some random dude all your USTC?

I think that's a great question for Veroon. Okay. It seems like a very bad behavior to encourage in people. Let's put this way. This week is about the users of Fark. I think we'll have. Okay, okay, got it, got it. Okay, this week's all right, all right, we'll get into that.

We'll get into that. We'll get into that. Okay, so speaking of the users. Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool, cool. We'll try to get some of the Farcester founders on the show maybe next week. But so just for a sense of scale then. So Farcester has grown from about, you know, 2,000 roughly daily actives.

It's ballooned within the last few days to something about 30,000 daily active. So it's really, it's grown, you know, 15X in just a few days. Now, in absolute term, for a social network that's still pretty small, it's still like a very kind of fledgling network from social media perspective. But with this massive influx of users, what are these new users like?

How has that changed the vibe of the network to 15X overnight? Haseeb is asking if there's a vibe session, which I'd say not quite. Or just a vibe shift. I mean, whenever you get, I mean, whenever new people enter a space, there's always a vibe shift.

So I think there's multiple vibe chips, five, blah, blah, blah, five chips that have happened. And like, the first one was when frames launched, I don't know if I have ever seen a community so excited about a new feature ever. So they've been announced like releasing new features. And I think any dev or builder who's listening to this, who is building on Farcaster, it isn't necessarily easy, right? Like balance between centralized kind of client on top of it and whatnot. And so when they released, and distribution is the hardest thing. I think that's what we're all talking about here is distribution. And so when all of a sudden you have frames, like the entire developer ecosystem was,

I've never seen them so excited. Like within there was a hackathon that weekend that was like in New York City, 40 people showed up, variant helped on. Like it was incredible. And so that was like the first vibe ship was basically allowing, I would almost call it like a gift that the team gave to all the developers. being like, hey, we know it's really hard to build your own client outside of forecaster. So here, test and build and experiment within it or warpcast.

So, like, that was a vibe shift number one. And that's what really took off. Then I think really smart business move was when this started taking off, obviously, some of like the more spammy or let's say like very crypto-twitter-esque tactics started like emerging on frames. There was a good business decision in that the team. team was like, okay, we have a lot of interest right now. Everyone's talking about frames.

It's kind of trending on Twitter. Why don't we remove the payment mall to create an account and we're just going to allow free signups? Right. And so like usually it's $7 something like that to sign up. And I think that great business model, but kind of realizing, okay, a big blocker is to like is a payment. It's $7 to whom to sign up. That was a decentralized network. I pay, I pay like, I think I paid, well, I think I didn't have to pay because I was

an early user. I got grandfathered in the first year. But you pay for, you pay a protocol fee, I'm pretty sure, because like they set up your custody address that holds your forecaster ID. And then there's also storage, like I pay for storage because I care about all my And then there's also some like a small gas fee that's covered as well. I don't know all the economics. Are you like prepaying your storage rent or something?

Like what who gets the $7? And how do you pay it? Do you pay it in dollars? Do you pay it in Eath? I remember. You guys do series. I think you can do both. Do you pay?

Yeah, I think I paid my created. So basically the the main philosophy of Farcaster, which I think as a design, philosophy for software is quite different than some of the other social networks have been attempted, is that only the ID component of the identity and the profile is stored on-chain, so almost like using your E&S, like there's a sort of portable ID. Then there's sort of an overlay network of these people who are running hubs. And you can almost think of like your on-chain signing acts as an Oath to the overlay network. And once you get to the overlay network, which could be much more centralized or small number of nodes or whatever, then those people are offering storage, making sure the state is synced and things like that.

So it's sort of almost like two networks, one that has maximum decentralization as expensive and you have to pay for it for the ID part. And then one that's much less. And you can. That's more like federated Mastodon style, like the actual content. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But it is one network. But you could make your own hub and forked if you want.

So you could do the Macedon thing if you want it. Yeah. I see. Okay. So you pay. There's also whether many clients. You pay to get the ID. Yeah.

Yes. Okay. And then I pay extra for storage. And it's storage of the content that you're creating, but not of anyone else's content. Correct. Yeah. Right. Okay.

Interesting. Okay. So, you know, among the members of the show, so obviously, to Roon, I think also Tom has been an early Farcaster user. Robert and I are not. So we are the two boomers on the show who are not on Farcaster. Robert, why, I mean, especially given now, Farcaster's kind of blowing up. I'll ask you first, why are you not a Farcaster? Well, before the show started, I asked Taran.

By the way, that's a cheap cop out. You're just asking him first so you can copy his answers. That is correct. That is correct. Yeah. Well, I made the first move, the first mover advantage. I'll be honest. I'm not a ultra early adopter. I'm like second wave. That is not true. What are you talking about?

You are totally early adopters. Every time some random NFT or game launches, Robert's always like, hey, are you guys doing this like random fucking DJN thing that I just learned about? Well, also, Robert, how often are you like cast? I call it casting. Wow. I'm like so farcaster native. I don't even call like tweeting anymore.

Well, I'm like, how often are you posting on Twitter? once every couple days. Yeah. Like, I get, like, if you guys, if I had to make an answer for why you're not on Farcaster, it's probably because literally up until right now, it was like less than 100,000 people who are on the platform when, Robert, I'm pretty sure you have more than 100,000 followers on Twitter alone. I do.

Which is, like, you know, a gravity to keeping me on that platform versus starting a zero again. Exactly. And I think. Turin even came out and was like, the only reason I'm here is because like, Ted has told me to come here. So it's hard, right?

I was honest about it. But then I started doing this thing where I started using my Farcaster to write things that I didn't mind totally being public, but I didn't want telling the entire world immediately. And then I got in trouble for some of those. And some Twitter armies came after me. So I was like, I like the idea of like- Budo Rums came after you for your Farcaster posts.

Yes, yes, yes. My Farcaster posts that all, yeah, the content is shall not being named. You can go find it on the internet. Yeah. But like to like you probably, yeah, if Robert's like, hey, I have distribution, like I get access to what I want to access on my following already on Twitter. I understand why he might not want to pop over to Warpcast or Farcaster. any client there, right? Like, why put in the effort? Um, so that's, that's like one reason. And then also, it's hard. Like, the switching costs is hard. And I don't think even for me,

like, Warpcast isn't my only social media. I think turns out as the beginning. Like, when you're using social media and when we're so used to it nowadays, like, it's kind of you have, it's hard to form a new habit unless there's something about it that keeps pulling you back. Um, And for me, that is a sense of community. I'm like the opportunity to be intellectually curious. And I think it's funny turns like, oh, the Twitter army came for me. I'm like, I have a channel on Warpcast that is exclusively for controversial topics and conversations where like no one is ever going to come for me, no matter how politically incorrect an opinion is. And like, that's okay.

And so for me, that's like what my so what is. that's what my purpose is, in addition to kind of like my larger beliefs about like decentralized social, et cetera. But again, like there's a activation energy and then there's a distribution problem, which again, we're going back to vibe shift, like by allowing anybody to sign up for free as long as they have, I think a phone number and the phone number was really key to like reduce more spam than what might be there. You're allowed like the forecaster team basically just scaled protocol by an insane amount, kind of pressure testing it. And then also, because it's still relatively small, and I think this is the issue with like threads or blue sky, mastodon,

whatever, is that it's still like only 100,000 users. Like they are still very, very close to the users themselves and already know our pain points. So from a spam perspective, within one day, like channel spam was pretty much addressed really quickly, within two days, like your main feed spam completely addressed. And now, like, today, they've completely solved some of the notification spam as well. So back to the point of, like, they're kind of showing like, yes, this can be permissionless. And here are different ways in which we can, let's say, incentivize new behaviors that are way past the point of designing a solution for on other social media networks. and personally that I think like lens or mastodon or threads,

threads less so because it's like tied to your Instagram identity, have kind of like dropped the ball on. Can I interject one very elementary question? Yes. What is the difference between Warpcaster and Farcaster? Farcaster is the client and Warpcast is the, or Farcasters. All the way around, yeah. I was like so 10 steps ahead of what I was saying.

Farcaster is the protocol and then Warpcast. is the client on top of it. Same way that email is a protocol and like Gmail or Yahoo Mail are the clients on top of it. That is the easiest way to describe it, I believe. So Warpcast is like by far the dominant client and that's the one that the team itself, like the original founding team maintains, right? Right. So I remember, so BitCloud is kind of one of the, Big Cloud is sort of more of a predecessor of

friend tech, let's say. It's kind of more financialized than Farragaster, which explicitly is kind of more pure social and less doesn't really have a financial. But frames allow financialization. Yes, in a kind of roundabout. I can just, I can burkle drop everyone. Nowhere near as intrinsic. Yes. I can work.

I can drop you. You can do that. No, no, I get you to sign something with your public key and I can now I can now I know you're active. Right. Well, with this delegated key, right? Like, not your actual Ethereum key without. But I can find the mapping. Like that.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. The reason there's all the crypto degen traders joined Warpcast is because they Right. They want these airdrops started happening. Yeah, they want these air drops. Right, right, right. So, okay, so it feels like there's, there's two things happening here that I guess I'm curious about. And we want to poke at. And maybe we'll come back to this when we bring on one of the co-founders. So the first thing is that it seems like a lot of what this big, massive growth on Farcaster has been AirDrop farmers. Is that a lot of people realize that now, especially the early addresses, like the first generation of farcaster users, are prime air drop material. They're getting lots and lots of air drops for just meme coins and random crazy whatever shit.

And so it feels a little bit like Celestia in that people realize that like, okay, this set of token holders or this set of users is just gonna be getting this whole, a cycle of air drops. And so get on there so you can get all your air drops and the earlier the better and just have some engagement so that you're your air drop ready. So this seems like one thing that's happening.

Like I don't know how much of the behavior of the new influx of users is this as opposed to people who actually want to hang out and like join a community. But it seems like there's a lot of financially motivated people who are, you know, yo, I'm here for the air drop. So that seems like one thing that's happening. And not literally the Farcaster AirDrop, but as Trem mentioned, all the other meme coins and other random dog shit that is going to air drop to the idea that frames make it easy. You know, one thing people promised in 2021, which I was at that time thought was a little preposterous,

but like people were really like, oh, look, we have these high value NFT collections. We have these, we basically have free customer lists of like who we should sell to, right? Like the Cole Christie's, Ugo Labs diamond thing, right? Like, was it, sorry, was it a punk? I don't know. Lesser knows more about this type of stuff than I do. But whatever, the whole like Tiffany has made that little like logo, the little pendant, whatever. and you had to have it to buy it.

Like, everyone always talked about, like, the customer being, like, easier to find with NFTs, right? Like, they own this thing, their part of this community, like, oh, you should be able to market to them, whatever. That always seemed a little bit crazy because a lot of those people were purely speculating. But I think the interesting thing about FARCasters, it started explicitly non-financial, opposite of Frontec, opposite of BitClout. And then added this thing where you can write your own code that does enough, just barely enough, chain activity in terms of a signature that you make it easy to do these kind of like air drops for social things. And that seems more likely like a target. You could almost use that for marketing if it takes off. Have you, what's his name? Antonio's Spindle did a whole

blog post on how you can be thinking about frames in terms of marketing. I mean like some of the most, they also have a frames dashboard that you can go through and see like, how many people have liked this, how many people have recasted this, you can go through and you're right. People are using this as a marketing mechanism in a way. But then to your point, it has introduced this financialization. If you look at some of the frames and like this was my plight, I'm like, I really care about like these utility frames and like more so like, okay, how can we bring this into, I guess it's like more of the Web3 vision. Most of them are like D-Gen machines. Like literally it's like a slot machine frame where you like pull the, pull the slot and you.

I mean, it is real. But I think crypto is really an auriboros, right? It's like every cycle, there's like another dice to the Toshi dice that comes out in some form. There's like an ether roll that comes on something. Like all these gambling games, if you give enough programmability, they immediately show up, which is like, that's a, that's crazy. Right. And I think the important distinction too and why, again, like, let's, say all of the 50K new users who just came on, like, are only there for the airdrop.

Like, we've all seen this happen. AirDrop farmers come and then they go, right? Like, they don't stick around unless they think there's something worth sticking around for. And some of them may. All that to say also with, like, the growth, I think really, like Twitter celebrities, I don't know what else to call them, have also joined, um, forecaster. Or like, oh, wow, this is actually really interesting. And they're staying now or like returning, whereas they wouldn't before.

I remember I used to be like, oh, there's like a churned user. And like the farcaster team would tell me. And they were like, no, no, no, there's no such thing as churned users. It's just a potential user. Like it's a potential recapture, which I think was smart to say. But going back to the design of it is like, again, I think the difference between friend tech or like BitCloud is like, who was the team behind creating that financialization? And it was the team who was developing everything. And I think what the Farcaster team has done really intentionally and really well was that they always designed from a place of kind of like permissionless and also

avoiding the fact that, you know, like they don't talk about a token ever. Like you will see them say repeatedly. Like we have no plans to launch a token. So like they kind of removed. a lot of the financialization in which you can then start to get it like, okay, why are people actually coming to use this if we're removing a lot of the financial incentives there? Even like their own internal like peer to peer payment is the concept of like it's this thing called a warp.

Where like the way it started is they started like dishing out warps as a reward. If you were posting good content, if you invited users that converted. if you let a channel, so they were using warps as like a reward mechanism and you're like, oh, that sounds a little bit like points. And the difference is is that warps like are actually not at all like points because they, you can't move them out of the app. So basically you can either buy. Sounds like points to me. But you buy warps, like a hundred warps is $1. You can decide to buy it or you get gifted it. And the way that warps are used is like really only two ways is a you can gift them to another user.

So like if people let's say comment really thoughtful things on like some of my content, I will gift them warps as like a thank you. It's like a nice gift. And you can send a note with it. And then the other way you use them is that warps can be used to mint NFTs. So like purely utility. So like, oh, use 500 warps to mint this NFT or use 800 warps to sign up for this. other forecaster app instead of having to pay the sign up fee. And so there's no speculation with it. There's no like price discovery. It's always 100 warps is $1. And that is what it is.

And so I think the team taking a very intentional approach about that and being like, we're not going to design a kind of like decentralized social network around financialization and speculation has, A, led them to, like, take a step back. And even right now, like, they're not focused on frames or, like, building different frames. Like, the developers are doing all of that on their own, like the builder ecosystem. They're focused on, like, how do we address the spam issue? How do we continue to grow? How do we fix notifications for people, et cetera? And I think that's why a lot of people have stuck around and, like, continue to be here despite the influx of spam, because there's this like huge sense of trust for the team to continue building in a way

that's like purely value add for the user in a way that's not financially motivated. That was a long, long. No, that's a, I think that's a very good, it's a very good insight about what makes Farcaster so different from a lot of the other experiments in decentralized social. Well, I also think like, you know, oftentimes on this podcast, we talk about things from the lens of like the people building them or the financial lens or what have you. But I do feel like there's very few products in crypto where I could actually be like, hey, I want to hear from like a super user that like really loves the thing and like give you.

And like I feel like this is like one of the only products where you can say that. It's like this maybe sometimes people would say like some of the defy stuff for people who like live off of that. They will be like, but they don't have the attachment in the same way. right? It's like a totally different experience. And like, no, what other consumer crypto thing has like super fans? I mean, like the super fandom is is crazy. Well, first off, it started small. Like, we would host Farcaster meetups and like internet strangers. Like, I don't know. Like, I'm, I was on the internet a lot growing up, but I never like met people from the internet. And now I would say I consider that is what your parents tell you not to do, right?

Exactly. They used to tell you not to do that. They used to tell you not to do it. Everyone tells you not to do it. And now I would consider some of my best friends today, people who I met from Forecaster, who've just like I've continued to see or continued to like, you know, build friendship with, which is super nuts.

But like the thing that is the most nuts is last year there was like a FAR conference or FARCON is what we call it. Completely decentralized. The FARCaster team had no involvement in planning it. doing anything. It was like fully grassroots and 100 people showed up. And then this year, someone was like, oh, I want to do it in LA. Ted, help me out. And so I just kind of like raised my hand and said I would do it. There are 600 applications that already came in of people who are willing to fly all the way to L.A. pay a $200 ticket price and hang out for like five days with

other forecasters exclusively. And like we understand like when we think about ETH Denver today, yeah, it's huge, but like what was it back in like 2018? I don't know. But the fact that like this small ecosystem has people like my entire, the reason I was on Farkaster or Vorpcast in the first place when Turoon messaged me was because I was like responding to all these requests of people being like, can I come? Can I get on the list? Like months in advance. It's not until May. And like people are like losing it. And so there is, I don't want to call like a cult following. but I think it's managed to bring together builders, consumers, and just like a really interesting dynamic mix of people.

Also with the introduction, I think I see if you called it at the beginning, you were like, oh, it's like Twitter. I think a year ago was exclusively a Twitter comparison. And now I would say it's a mix of Twitter and Reddit because they have channels. So like think of channels as subreddits. And so the best way I can describe this in terms of like who's on this platform and how is it interesting and dynamic and different is that there's a food channel. Like everyone loves cooking, whatever, not everyone, but like people like food. And then all of a sudden this guy, Giuseppe starts posting photos of different things he's doing, he's going to the farmer's market, et cetera.

And we ask him, we're like, oh, like, you seem to cook a lot. What do you do? Ends up he was a chef at a Michelin store restaurant in Napa and as a professional chef and has a professional chef. has worked everywhere. And now he kind of like, you get access to someone who you would never have access like that before. And so the food community is like really strong in, on Warpcast right now, like due to this channel where you're able to go and then find people who you instantly have a connection or like shared interest with and communicate about that specific shared interest. So like the discoverability helps with channels. And I think the way you can do it is like find

your community in a way in which like you go to channels and there's an there's an LA channel so like think about all those people who never would have hung out otherwise are now like okay let's talk about LA things and like there's a book club that we do there's a potluck now and so it did start as a Twitter it is a real community unlike a lot of crypto communities with that that's the thing that really jumps out of me about Faracaster and I think it's true of Lens as well is that these these two communities, they really have a soul at the center of it. And that's actually quite rare in crypto.

A lot of the things, like, decentralized social is very, very old. You know, I think the first thing that I can remember, what was the thing that Justin Son acquired? The Torrent? What was it called? No, no. It was one of the many things he acquired. No, the one that, the one that try to kick them out,

like they try to force it. Steam it. Steam it. Steam it. Steam it. Steam it. Steam it. So, like, steam it is like super OG decentralized social. It was one of the ones where, like, if you get upvoted a lot, you get paid in Steam tokens, and like you can make money by being very social. And then, of course, there's, you know, there's Bik Cloud, and there's Bik Cloud, which has become Diso. And there's, you know, a bunch of friend tech, obviously.

There have been many different plays at trying to create these decentralized social that integrate money in some way. I think the difficulty that most these platforms run into is that they tend not to have a soul. That's the best way I can describe it. It's hard to kind of put into world, well, you can talk about the incentives and the race of the bottom and like the blah, blah, blah. But I think the easiest way to encapsulate that is that there is not this like beating heart at the center of just people who are in it for the love of the game. Yeah. Who are just like, I just want to build an awesome community and like hang out with my friends. I think there's definitely some truth to that for both lens and Farcaster.

I think they've just like attracted two very different types of initial users. Yeah, I'd like to. Farcasters' initial users are like, they remind me. It reminds me, so like 15 years ago, I remember I was like a very early user of Quora and I did the same thing you're talking about where like after a year I like started going to meetups and meeting people and whatever. And it was like, oh, there was like this level of like curiosity in the early stage of platform.

People weren't afraid of like asking questions and looking dumb in public. And I think Farcaster at that, whereas I feel like Lenz is going more for like the vibes like type of play like it's like a totally different type of person but they both they both are yeah like you said both seem to care a lot about their community yeah it's interesting i never i'd love to hear your perspective on lens because i think lens again i have a big distribution i don't know what my follower account is at but i have a good distribution platform on forecaster but everyone says like lens is a great platform for distribution for content. So there's like tons of interesting apps built on top of it, et cetera.

Like they really built it on like, oh, this is where creators can monetize in a way. And so I went to that platform and like didn't, it just like wasn't for me. Like I couldn't get it. It was like kind of clunky. And I was like, why do I have to like make a transaction every time I want to post something? Whereas for me, I value as a user. And like, again, I approach all crypto consumer applications just as consumer applications. Like that's always what I approach it as.

And I'm like, is this a good consumer app? Like, how does this compare? I don't, I kind of like try to remove the crypto from it. And I care about like dialogue and connection. And like, that's what farcasters value proposition to me was. Whereas like Lens was like, we can help our create. creators monetize and I was like, well, I don't consider myself a creator. So like that actually doesn't appeal to me. And I think if you think about social media generally, like if you look

across platforms, only 1% of users are actually creating content. 9% of users are engaging with that content. And then 90% of users, like the remaining 90% are just lurking, right? Like think about how many Reddit lurkers you know. And so I don't know how much like a value proposition of like oh, we allow creators to monetize. Like that speaks to a very small slice of everybody he's using social media, where if you're like, hey, do you care about like building community or like meeting like minded people or like kind of like participating in a new social media? Whatever the value proposition is to you, like that to me about Farcaster, like that's actually

like the soul I think you're getting at. Whereas with Lens, like again, I'm, I don't know what I don't know because I'm not on it. Okay, let's not, yeah, let's not talk shit about Lens without anyone actually using the product. Again, I can't, I can't comment on it because I, yeah, yeah, no, it's fine. I mean, your team Farkasers is cool. I will say, embrace that. Yeah, Lent's also just, they have an equally passionate community. They actually, it's an interesting thing is like, farcasters seem way more U.S.

centric and Lens is like, way more not U.S. centric. Yeah, Farcaster is like very Silicon Valley, you know, that's, that's like my. L.A, L.A., L.A., L. Really? It's L. L. California.

California. California. California. Let's say California. It's like Lens has the coolest branding at ETH Denver last year. Like Lens is swag. I was like, I want that. Forecasters never going to do that unless me and some of the designers.

I just meant the users. The users, the users are kind of, the users are like if I, they're. Yeah, it's also like disproportionately like smart developer engineer, you know, that kind of like the early user base. Whereas I feel like for Lens, it was more kind of, um, Yeah, more global, more just like anyone who's excited about crypto decentralization, decentralized social. That's my impression. But again, I have a very low resolution picture. I have a question for you.

So if we maybe make this posit, this kind of statement that unlike social networks and Web 2, maybe Web 3 social networks are inherently more regionalized, potentially. How can we haven't seen like a East Asian Web 3 social network? Good, Farcaster right now is East Asian social. Like if you look at, I know there's a lot of air job farmers. I'm sure the new generation of air job farmers. Yeah. 100%. 100%.

That's where they're coming from. And I think it's interesting because like, I don't know, you have to go into the channels and like these are being, it's a social media platform. Unless it's like an Instagram where it's like purely aesthetic and visual, the first language that you're building in is English, right? Like most of the developers. or most of the builders are building in English and it's a text-based platform up front. So I think it is going to be a little bit regionalized. I do think with like channels that are

country-specific, you can kind of start to build more of a community on a platform that way. But again, like I don't have, I don't have an answer, but I do know that if you look at the hub distribution and again, hubs are like the data validators, they're very global. It's not just like only the U.S. where the hubs are operating. Sure. Yeah, I, you know, if you look at sort of Web 2 social networks, like normal social networks, it's very clear that social networks have regionalized to a large extent, although there are, you know, obviously Facebook is massive and, you know, some of these

Instagram, whatever, they're obviously very international. But then you have, you know, things like VContagta in Russia. You have WeChat and, you know, kind of a bunch of other platforms in China. So it is not the case that it's totally uniform, but you do have these super platforms. And obviously anybody's in Anglophone market is going to be using the Anglophone products, which is largely Facebook and Instagram and so on. Crypto, I don't think we've seen the same level of regionalization in crypto in large part because crypto is largely Anglophone outside of China.

Like if you want to use crypto products and you, because a lot of crypto is about making money. And if you want to make money, you got to be early. If you want to be early, you got to speak English. Like, unfortunately, or you got to be English. Wait a minute. What? What? I don't know if I understand with that last, agree with that last day.

No, it's just the case that a lot of this content does not get translated into other. I don't know. I don't know. Crypto traders. Like, crypto traders. And I will tell you. Yes, yes. I mean, he speaks English.

I mean, what are you talking about? Yeah, he speaks English. But my point is the team. Who does it does not really speak great English. I mean, that's fine. Right. But the point is that, you know, if you're trading crypto in China, you are, I mean, you're at least translating stuff that's in English.

You're on Twitter because that's where a lot of the news happens. That's where a lot of the most important information is getting disseminated. For the record, for the record, Google Chrome will translate pretty much any web page. Yeah, to be clear, it's not that hard, it's not that hard to translate stuff. But the reality is like if you, if you're going into a lot of these markets where English is not the primary language, crypto, like most of the crypto content is in English. And so it just is this strong force So this gets back to my question

Of like well will there be a Let's say Chinese Just standard Which is a different country Okay yeah Yeah Will there be what other country It's like the easiest

Let's say Indian Asia easy Yeah sure sure sure Indian Asia because like you want someone I mean English speaking Yeah Are you asking will there be a A separate hub for Indonesia Or will there be a totally separate network for Indonesia?

Well, no, no. I mean, it might be a separate network that is part of the farcaster network, right? Like someone forks a hub and they regionalize a hub and, you know, some of the content gets cross-posted. I guess I don't totally understand like what the difference is between the hub and. Okay. A hub is just like a hub is like what keeps the protocol running. So I don't know enough of. So that's just like a server.

That's just like a data center someone hosting data. It's all the like underlying infrastructure. Okay. So it's just going to lower latency for somebody who's in Indonesia? No, no, no. I think it's like for instance, warpcast, this is like what we're talking about, decentralized social. You know like when Instagram goes down, everyone's like on Twitter being like, is

Instagram down? Is Instagram down? And like you don't have anything to do. The thing with carcasters like yesterday with like recently with all this influx of users, Warpcast has had a hard time like going like validating their data and retrieving their data from the hubs, meaning like warpcast has gone down. And like if that happened to a web two social app, you can't do anything. You just like wait for the centralized team to like put it back up. What the beauty of Farcaster is, because it's a decentralized network, there's another

client that's not Workcast called Supercast, where if you went and logged on to Supercast with your Farcaster account. So like you have the same again, like you account, you create your Farcaster ID. You log in there. Even though WarpCast is down, you can still log in and see all the same content in real time. Because Supercast is like pulling the same data from those hubs. And so that's the beauty and like that's the true decentralization in effect of Farcaster. Is that even though the major client is down, you're still able to go and access all the data that's on in the, in the network. And so what would be the point of having a hub in a different geography, right? Because the hub is just a place where they're storing data, but they're not localizing. They're not doing anything that's going to be transparent to the user. The user is just like, wow, my data is

somewhere in Farcaster. I don't really know where it is. I don't think there's like necessarily a point. Like that's a great question. And I don't know if there's a point. You're like, oh, what's the value proposition? Like, I don't think it's necessary. But I do think, if you look at a map, I just think it speaks to the decentralization and like the globalization of it when you see that hubs are everywhere and not just confined to one country. So like, again, it's not a necessity. But to answer your question, I have an idea for why you would want separate hubs, which is pose each of the, the farcaster say zones. I'll call them a zone. Let's just suppose that they have some way of communicating with each other. Well, the like master's.

on. They each generated fees of some form. So like frames may be generated fees that remitted. And you may want to actually allocate different amounts of capital that say backing these hubs to different regions. But like the Indonesian fork is generating a certain amount of fees. It may, and maybe maybe people are staking eventually to run hubs. Yeah. There is a company. You could imagine that something like that hub. Yeah. There is a company called Nainar. it's kind of like Namar but they basically have created a way to make running hubs a business and so what they do is that a developer can pay them like $9 a month and basically they get access to all the hubs because each hub gets like an API so it makes it easy to be able to call and

return all the data from the network and so they've been able to scale it and I think turn to your point is like, oh, why is it important if other countries have it? Like, you can imagine if Nainar is running 90% of the hubs, that makes you question like, okay, what if like Nainar decides to be a bad actor? They won't. I trust them. But I think it's a good point. And of course, they're making fees somehow from the developers paying them. But I think to go back is like, because again, I just like described there's, oh, like anyone can build a client on top of it. nothing is stopping Indonesia, like a, let's say a fun, smart social entrepreneur in Indonesia from building a social media app on top of Forecaster.

So someone can do that and like the entire, all Indonesian users. That makes that. And then, yeah. So let me ask you guys this. So taking a step back from Farcaster and all the details. Because I want to get back to this thing about kind of social media habits because I think that's part of part of the story about Farcaster and Decentralized Social

is like re-changing people's relationship with social media socially and culturally. That's the big vision, right? That's what a lot of people get excited about with decentralized social. Let me ask you this real quick. How many of you guys used threads? I used it the day it came out

and I don't think sense. You and use threads? I go on it once a week. You go on threads still. I don't, no, no, I don't. I don't produce content. Because it's a lot of my friends who are like, I went to high school with or college with who are like boring as shit and like have families in the suburbs.

And like they are on dread all the time. Because they actually write more content than their Instagram is like too curated. And it's actually an interesting way to see like people from high school for me. Because like to them it's their first ever text based social network that they've started inside. Yeah. It's a niche. It's a niche niche reason. I think if Threads was in the Instagram app, I would use it way more, but I don't use that.

And I don't really post any content there. But I think, again, this speaks to like, I'm like, like, the reason to ruin you're on it is because like the people that you grew up with and know are there. Right. It like goes back to like, oh, these are my people. Like, this is my community. Like, I'm interested in what they're doing. And they're not posting on Instagram, but I care about what they're posting. So I just think that that's interesting.

And I also agree that Instagram has everyone thinking about like curated feeds and like, what should I appear to look like versus like. Exactly. I think threads news feed also is like clearly gated in the algorithm is like clearly about like only showing you content that you're going to agree with. Whereas Twitter is like only showing you content you disagree with. It's like it's engagement model is like that. And the problem is you have this like, this what I called the cult of toxic positivity effect of like, oh, you only see these things where everyone is like wagmeying themselves.

Yeah. Right. Right. But but the other thing is like Facebook as a company, I guess culturally, doesn't understand how to make an algorithm that isn't like, it's in tune to like only show you this little walled garden that you want to see yourself in. You know, and I think text-based stuff doesn't work that way. You kind of, you kind of can't do that the way, you know, That's true. It's pretty boring. Yeah. It's pretty boring. The content on threads is such dog shit because of this.

Because like you only see, like, you write one word and you get, you'll only see that content. It doesn't give you any opposing content. And it's in some sense, their curation is their problem to me. Yeah. People often say, like the criticism of social media is about echo chambers, but in a way, like, an echo chamber maybe is healthier than just reading. So there's an echo chamber in the sense that you're reading only content that you agree with or only content from your side. That's actually pretty boring because like, oh yeah, I agree with that.

I agree with that. Right. But actually you'd need some kind of, you know, something to push back against in order to actually feel like, oh, shit, okay, this thing surprised me. This thing is actually, this thing pisses me off. This thing, you know, you feel some kind of engagement. So I never used threads at all. and I was horrified that I might actually have to try it

if enough people were like leaving Twitter. I was kind of like, I'll be a later. Dreds is also like all these brands that pay influencers have threads where they talk about their influence. That like that thing is like, and Facebook's clearly like learning like their news feed is horrible. All it does is fucking show you repurposed ads from like some brands.

Okay. The point of this was not for us to dunk on threads. I was wanting to bring it back to like talking about social more broadly. So I. No, no, it's fine. Very strong feelings. Very strong feelings about threads. I did not realize that I was tapping into here.

But I guess the thing that I wanted to try to explore is like your relationship with new social networks. That was kind of the thing that I was trying to get at. So I, so Linda, a friend of the show, has been trying to get me on threads forever. No, no, on threads. Farcaster. I was, I was going to go. Sorry, I'm moving slow. I'm moving slow.

Sorry. Let me take a second. Let me take a second. You guys are riling me up. She was trying to get me on Farcaster for a long time. And obviously, Linda, she's dedicated herself. She's trying to build a startup on top of Farcaster. So she's very engaged in the community.

She's been trying to get me on Farcaster for quite a while. I, I guess I'm somewhat like Robert, although Robert thinks he's more like Robert than he actually is. I think Robert's actually a super elite adopter of stuff. I'm very much a late adopter in that. And it's part of the reason why I'm a terrible VC when it comes to social or consumer. This is why you're in crypto? Because you're such a late adopter?

You can't be bottom decile. You can't be bottom decile if you're in crypto. Yeah. I'm definitely bottom quartile on consumer, right? I'm definitely bottom quartile consumer. Okay. After consumer, maybe I about that. Yeah.

For consumer, I'm just, I'm not, I don't like using new problems. It's just not my thing. And the thing is like when I was younger, it was very different. I think when I was in my early 20s or even like when I was a teenager, I was trying, you know, I loved being part of communities and like being super active and engaged and like meeting new people and friends and content and blah, blah, blah. Like that, like what you guys are describing is exactly what I would be spending all my time on. If I was like 19 years old, stuck in Texas on the internet, like way too much.

That was like my upbringing was joining these small communities and being a, you know, like contributing and trying to be a part of a new vibe. Now I'm like fucking old and boring and I'm just like, I see Twitter as like this big gladiatorial just like fucking war zone. And any time I post anything on there, I was like, great, I'm ready to fight. Like, let's go.

And the idea of like this kumbaya wonderful place where everyone's nice and like, oh, that what's why, why, what's the point of that? So I think, you know, if, if Farkaster really gets to a scale where I'm like, okay, in order for me to continue to have to be a part of the conversation, I need to be on Farkaster, that would be the thing that would get me to go there. But yeah, I think I'll more controversy, more confrontation, more differing. Yeah, it's like if I felt like the most important conversation is happening there and I'm missing it on Twitter. Twitter is just like the unwashed masses of, you know, just DGens and I don't know, NFT flippers. If that's what it felt like to me,

and journalists. I mean, Twitter, Twitter really started from journalists. Yeah. And I feel like that's still its main. Right. Like personally, I agree with you.

Like right now I would say Farcasters operating much more like a social network than social media. And I think a lot of the confrontation that you're like, oh, this is like really interesting and I want the spice and like I want to go to war and I want to like fight for my ideas. That happens a lot like once we got to social media scale. And going back to like,

what do I feel about like web to social is that there's no platform that does both. So like Snapchat, like everyone like Gen Z is using Snapchat like no other because it's a messaging platform for them. Like they've used it exclusively for messaging. That is a social network. That is not social media. Whereas like Instagram, all of that advertising, all of that kind of like BS, that's purely social media now. I think some of like the messaging and stories is more social network. So I, I hear you and I think where Warpcast is right now is still in the social network phase. And it will not hit social media phase until it does have like a million active users. Right.

Like otherwise, like it doesn't make sense for any like news platform, et cetera, go there. That being said, I'm like, I think it's worthwhile right now to like start building your audience there. And at least like having an account and doing that. Because, of course, like I'm on the show because I'm a super user and a super fan is like, I fundamentally believe that like the team can scale it to be a million active users, a hundred million active users and it will get there. But I agree. Like until it's at that level, like it's not a social media platform where you're going

to be finding the latest and greatest news. Like when open AI happened, everyone was just taking screenshots from Twitter and posting screenshots on forecast. Granted, I liked my conversations more on forecasters. but yeah. So I think a funny thing is, you know, given the success of the Trump NFTs, I can imagine that there'll be a Fox News air drop on Farcaster. Of what?

What? Why? Just because like I think this idea that frames are platform can't kick you out. You can air drop anyone. And like, you know, if you're shameless enough, you'll do it. I could see that combo happening. Sorry. And you're saying that Fox News is going to

AirDrop tokens to Farcaster users? That's a sign of success. If Farcaster makes it, that's going to happen. Is it which, all right. I don't know how you got from where you started in that sentence to where you ended, but I'll take that as a big prediction. I guess what I'm saying is like media,

you know, if I think about like the Facebook versus Zinga site, so that's sort of the first platform de-platforming of like a similar thing, right? Like Facebook had this application layer. the biggest application on there started making a bunch of money. Facebook was like, fuck you, we're going to restrict your thing

and then they had to come to some agreement. Here you don't really have that. And I think if you think about the media in general, their number one complaint and why they're like suing open AI and whatever is like, oh, they want like some remuneration

for this content they're creating somehow indirectly. Well, guess what? This is a great way to get it for them. So that's where I got to the Fox News. How? Wait, sorry. I still don't understand. I still don't understand.

I still don't understand. understand what you're saying. But okay, we're at time. So we have to wrap. But, um, Ted, it was awesome having to show. I'm very excited for people on, on Twitter or Farkaster to roast me for this prediction. Okay. All right. Great. If they understand what you just predicted, they might be able to know. No, I actually think you're right. But I don't think it will people who it's happening to will think of it as I got airdrop from Fox News. I think they'll think, oh, I got a membership perk from Fox News. Like I think in the way that Warpcast is being built in Farcaster, that it will just be the same Web 2 language. But behind kind of the scenes, it's the quote unquote air drop.

Right. Well, we'll see. Next time, hopefully we're going to have one of the co-founders of Farcaster to come on the show. And so we'll be able to go a little more deep into the weeds and maybe even some of the philosophy behind why building decentralized social. But it's a really big topic. and we're really glad to have your perspective, Ted, as an early supporter, a super fan, a super user. Where can people find you on Farcaster? At TED.

That's it. Oh, easy. Also, Farcon invites went out today. All the Farcon invites went out today. All those 500 plus people, but it's in LA. So if you want to join those 500 people, hit up at TED on Farcaster. Ted, thanks for joining us. Thanks for next week.

Bye. Thank you.