Recently, a post by Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero about Farcaster's current focus shifting from "social-first" to "wallet-first" has attracted widespread attention and discussion. For active Farcaster users, this should come as no surprise. Since the Farcaster App introduced its built-in wallet feature in February, support for more chains has been added, and related functions have become increasingly rich. This announcement is essentially a reiteration and a summary of the team's direction throughout the year. For those less familiar with Farcaster, however, this statement seems somewhat unexpected. Many can't help but exclaim, "The last hope of crypto social," "the village's hope for SocialFi," has "admitted failure," "abandoned social," "deviated from its original intention." They express disappointment that "the social track has been disproven," "Web3 social is unworkable," and worry about the community atmosphere sliding into "casino-ization," with the team "charging headlong in the wrong direction."

This divergence stems from different understandings of the positioning of the Farcaster wallet. In fact, the built-in wallet added to the Farcaster App this year is not an abrupt strategic pivot but a natural upgrade from the previous experience that required connecting an external wallet for on-chain operations. Simultaneously, as Frames have gradually evolved into more feature-rich and complex Mini Apps, users' demand for seamless on-chain interaction has also increased. The emergence of the built-in wallet is essentially to accommodate new scenarios, to complete the foundational capabilities on top of the social network, not to abandon the existing social network.

The wallet is an increment, not a replacement; it drives social, does not侵占 social; it expands social, does not abandon social; it is顺势而为, not a forced transformation.

The original open social protocol底层 remains as always, and the diverse client ecosystem is still healthy. You can switch to another client to experience pure social interaction. The original social functions of the official client, Farcaster App, are still there; it's just that this year, an additional built-in wallet was added, expanding upon the original functions. It can seamlessly connect with Mini Apps, deeply integrate with the identity graph, and interact smoothly with the social feed.

The team has merely adjusted the focus of product-side work, adjusting the path to try to achieve growth for the entire network. They are no longer spending time on onboarding users from all walks of life for network diversification, nor optimizing the less effective Channels community function. They have spent enough time building a small but beautiful "comfortable corner," but the "social-first" strategy failed to achieve sufficient Product-Market Fit (PMF), with tens of thousands of daily active users still being very small. Thus, they very pragmatically returned to the first principles of crypto applications: serving value flow.

On this basis, the combination of wallet and social interaction becomes a stronger product differentiator, a more realistic growth path, and closer to the Schelling point of crypto social PMF. In fact, Farcaster's shift in focus this year is also a footnote to the development direction of the entire crypto social application landscape. "Social applications becoming wallet-like, wallet applications becoming social-like" is the natural convergence direction for consumer-grade crypto applications. Now, almost all products that have even a hint of social features have wallet functions, and wallet applications are also trying to add social elements, not to mention many applications that started with social + wallet as their native positioning from the beginning.

Social Applications Becoming Wallet-Like

If they want to stand out, all crypto applications must answer what distinguishes them from their traditional off-chain counterparts. Of course, crypto social applications must also answer how they differ from traditional social products. Product manager Yu Jun once proposed a famous formula to measure whether a new product is attractive enough to users:

Product Value = (New Experience − Old Experience) − Migration Cost

Some new products have very low migration costs. Threads, backed by Instagram's substantial social graph, reached 100 million users in 5 days. The luckiest scenario is encountering users who migrate precisely for the sake of migration. Bluesky, by hitting the single point of "Twitter without censorship," caught the rare and unforeseen wave of Twitter refugee word-of-mouth.

But the vast majority of crypto applications do not have that kind of foundation or luck. To get users to take a glance away from traditional social products with larger user bases and more mature products, they can only focus on enhancing the new experience. Crypto social started from a technical perspective, focusing on how to integrate with blockchain at the底层 to achieve decentralization. But embedding加密 technology at the底层 is imperceptible to the vast majority of users and does not bring a new experience. It lacks differentiation when competing with traditional social products and can even result in more cumbersome onboarding processes. For example, both major social protocol底层, Farcaster and Lens, use blockchain. Farcaster stores identity data on the OP chain, and Lens stores identity and social graphs on the Lens Chain, ensuring "not your private key, not your social account." But most users don't really care about the underlying technology; they care about what fresh experiences exist at the product level.

The Farcaster team, of course, realized this early on. Their philosophy is "product leads protocol development." They hope to drive the growth of the entire Farcaster network through a flagship product. If they had only wanted to build a social protocol, the team's task would have been基本上 completed. They implemented many theories of decentralized social networking from the start, creating a "sufficiently decentralized" protocol that actually emphasizes the protocol's openness, programmability, and composability. Developers can build various applications based on the open social graph. But if, like the Nostr, ActivityPub, and Lens social protocols, they let the ecosystem develop wildly, users won't migrate just because your underlying technology is different. The content noise brought by野蛮生长 would further reduce the user experience, ultimately resulting in users not wanting to come, and those who come not staying. The Farcaster team building their own client is precisely hoping to attract users to join at the product level.

A high-quality social circle is a new experience, unique alpha information is a new experience, the combination of加密 and social is a new experience. Farcaster initially achieved the first point by onboarding a group of high-quality users, which is also a rare moat, but growth is limited. It's difficult to attract the vast majority of加密 users whose profile is "no profit, no early rise; empty gloves套白狼" (unwilling to act without benefit, seeking gain without investment). Interestingly, Farcaster was once criticized for being too "清真" (pure, referring to avoiding financial talk). For a long time, discussing token price fluctuations on Farcaster was异类 (an anomaly),只能 hiding in the corner of the /DEGEN Channel. 曲高当然和寡 (Highbrow songs find few singers). So it wasn't until early 2024, with the launch of Frames—a crypto-native feature somewhat different from traditional social apps—and the community spawning the $DEGEN creator economy project, that Farcaster's daily active users began to grow significantly, increasing more than tenfold from around 2,000 DAU at the end of January 2024. This was thanks both to innovation at the product level and to the already formed high-quality community possessing the ability to incubate projects within this open social network.

An early version of a Farcaster mini-program, a trading Frame

At that time, Farcaster had actually completed the leap from the "agricultural age" of pure social networks to the初步 "handicraft age" combining加密 functions: Social Graph + Frames + External Wallet, truly connecting social content flow and on-chain operations for the first time. Solana later also attempted to achieve wallet interaction with加密 mini-programs within Twitter feed through the Actions protocol using a browser extension. Social Media × Crypto Applications × Wallet Interaction is a direction everyone wants to explore. Through Frames, users could mint NFTs and execute trades within the social feed—a genuine new experience. But it was limited to a maximum of 4 action buttons, the screen transitions were like PPTs, functionality and performance were very limited, and any action involving wallet authorization required jumping to an external wallet. Functionality was restricted, the experience was fragmented, and it still wasn't smooth enough. So, actually, from the first day Frames were launched, the community has been calling for full wallet functionality, but it took a year to arrive.

In the Farcaster Chinese community WeChat group, everyone started excitedly envisioning wallet functionality when Frames were first launched in early 2024

Later last year, with the arrival of the memecoin supercycle, from the popularity of PumpFun to Clanker, which grew out of Farcaster itself, more asset issuance brought more trading demand. The entire path from discovery to交易 became increasingly important, and the wallet naturally became an increasingly critical entry point in this process.

So it's easy to understand that to allow users to interact more naturally with加密 applications within a social media platform, it is necessary to:

1. Have a底层 framework with higher freedom and higher performance to carry more powerful mini-applications.

2. Shift from connecting external wallets to using built-in wallets to make on-chain interaction truly seamless.

This has also been验证 on the instant messaging social application Telegram, whose Mini Apps ecosystem and built-in TON wallet have already sparked a wave of enthusiasm. Therefore, Farcaster's upgrade this year logically followed suit:

1. Frames → Mini Apps

2. External Wallet → Built-in Wallet

What a webpage can achieve, Mini Apps can achieve. Anyone can build permissionlessly, and they are cross-client compatible, greatly expanding the functional boundaries within the social media application. Interaction with the built-in wallet also does not require jumping to an external wallet. Thus, it moves from the "handicraft age" with basic加密 functions to the "industrial age" with richer functionality. This is not a deviation from the course but a natural expansion along the trend; not a被迫转向, but an inevitable evolution顺应市场需求.

Integrating a built-in wallet is not the death knell for crypto social media, but the industrial revolution of crypto social media.

With the built-in wallet, there naturally come trading signals based on the social graph. Asset issuance, dissemination, discovery, trading, and community building can form a closed loop within the same application. It also facilitates convenient interaction with Mini Apps, enabling almost all functions of加密 applications, including games, video, live streaming, voice Spaces, podcasts, prediction markets, DeFi... A rich Mini Apps ecosystem and the built-in wallet advance side by side like two carriages, integrating on-chain interaction into users' daily social behaviors. Applications like Noice, Bracky, QR, and Harmonybot have also催生 a series of new crypto social interaction scenarios due to the existence of social graph + Mini Apps + built-in wallet, each having their own moments of glory. Against this backdrop, Farcaster's daily active users also once broke new highs at the end of October.

These are all experiences that users can perceive, use, and that unlock全新 scenarios. They are also what truly differentiates them from traditional social products. Even if users initially only use the trading function because the wallet provides a more convenient entry point, lower fees, and a more seamless cross-chain experience, there is still a chance to achieve "come for the tool, stay for the network." This is already a step forward compared to the previous situation of competing for attention from Twitter solely relying on the吸引力 of the social network.

It's no coincidence that some instant messaging applications are also actively adding wallet functions on top of social interaction. For example, Farcaster ecosystem chat application frens and applications like DeBox allow users to simply send a CA (Contract Address) in a chat group to call the built-in wallet for trading. More and more developers are realizing: they should not avoid mainstream加密 users; the characteristic of加密 social is not to stay away from wallets but to embrace them; they should not sever the value layer but integrate it. 加密 social without a built-in wallet is what has "taken some detours."

Wallet Applications Becoming Social-Like

Similarly, crypto wallet applications are also trying to incorporate social elements. From being mere containers for assets and entry points for transactions, as user needs and on-chain behaviors become more diverse, they also want to add social signals and social interactions based on the social graph.

Zapper and Base App were originally both wallet applications. Now they have both integrated content and social graphs from the Farcaster social protocol, effectively acting as clients for the Farcaster protocol. This actually also demonstrates the value of Farcaster as an open, programmable, composable social protocol. The protocol is open, the interfaces are clear, and developers can freely build a client or an application based on Farcaster. Whether it's a wallet or any other application, they can directly integrate Farcaster's social layer into their product without permission.

Zapper has added Farcaster network content and on-chain activity & trading signals based on the Farcaster social graph on top of the wallet. Users can directly discover trading opportunities from the on-chain behavior of followed users and quickly complete trades with one click.

Base App, on the foundation of the original wallet, has integrated Farcaster as a social feed, Zora as a tool for creators to monetize content, and XMTP as the underlying protocol for instant messaging and group chats. Thus, within Base App, content creation, asset issuance, social discovery, token trading, application interaction, community chatting, and interaction with agents can be achieved, forming a closed loop of content, relationships, and value in the same space.

Zerion has now also integrated social graphs to achieve social discovery功能. On the basis of its previously well-established function of following wallet addresses, it has incorporated Twitter, Farcaster, and Lens social identities to better discover users of interest and trading signals from top traders.

Centralized exchanges can also be considered wallets, and they are also actively exploring integration with social features. Binance launched Binance Feed in 2022,升级为 Binance Square in 2023. Leveraging the world's largest crypto trading traffic入口, it has built a comprehensive community platform focused on trading, allowing users to, within the same application, besides trading, also follow trader dynamics, obtain in-depth content information, exchange strategies, and enjoy diverse social interaction functions like voice and live streaming, keeping users engaged on the application for longer periods.

Similarly, Robinhood, a centralized exchange now involved in cryptocurrency and prediction markets, recently announced it is exploring social features, allowing users to communicate strategies, discover signals, and copy trades on the platform.

However, centralized exchanges building their own social features often result in closed ecosystems. Like traditional social platforms, users' relationship chains, content, and identities are still held by the platform. It is somewhat regrettable that ordinary developers cannot freely build new applications based on their social graph; all functions can only rely on the exchange team's point-by-point iteration. But again, users don't care about this; they only care if your product is useful and easy to use.

For wallets, social is not a decorative function but a key step in upgrading the wallet from a "tool" to a "network." Social provides context for asset behavior, a source for trading decisions, and轨迹 for content distribution. Adding social elements to wallets allows them to better possess network effects, moving from tools to ecosystems.

Social + Wallet: Trading, Discovery, Creation

Social applications are becoming wallet-like, wallet applications are becoming social-like. The two are interwoven and increasingly convergent. This is actually the natural convergence direction for consumer-grade crypto applications. For crypto social, if it does not actively integrate with wallets, it is essentially a passive choice that背离 mainstream crypto users. If they don't do it, they will inevitably fall behind and be replaced by more complete product forms. Social applications need wallets to complete the puzzle of on-chain interaction. Core capabilities such as the crypto application ecosystem and creator economy, which constitute the differentiated experience of crypto social, must rely on complete wallet functionality to be realized. Adding a value layer on top of the social layer provides a growth lever for the social network.

For wallets, adding social features is the icing on the cake. Users no longer "use and leave" but can stay because of relationships, content, and community. Wallets transform from tools into networks, from entry points into scenarios, from asset managers into interactive spaces, naturally expanding into more application scenarios and network effects.

Of course, some applications have aimed for the "social + wallet" route from the very beginning,及早 realizing that the two are naturally complementary and can form a value closed loop of content, relationships, and assets.

· interface.social: Supports discovery of popular tokens, tracking user on-chain activity, copy trading, and allows users to publish trading views (Takes).

· 0xppl.com: Supports discovery of popular tokens, multi-chain wallet behavior tracking, copy trading, and profit monitoring.

· Firefly.social: Firefly itself is an aggregator client for multiple social networks, including X, Farcaster, Lens, Bluesky, supporting cross-platform one-click posting. It挖掘 trading opportunities in social data by aggregating friends' trading activity.

· fomo.family: Supports real-time tracking of friends' and top traders' on-chain transactions, and quickly discovers new assets through built-in transaction analysis and profit/loss tracking.

· Share.xyz: Allows users to share any transaction, follow any wallet, receive real-time transaction notifications, and supports copy trading with收益分成 (revenue sharing) for the copied party.

· gmgn.ai: Supports快速 discovery of热门 assets, tracking of smart money and followed users' holdings and trades, performing秒级上链 transactions (second-level on-chain transactions), and provides an integrated on-chain intelligence and trading tool with automatic copy trading, risk control checks, and real-time alerts.

· Vector.fun: Supported on-chain user trading activity and asset discovery. Acquired by Coinbase and operations suspended.

Looking from start to finish, you'll find that their functions and interfaces are similar in many ways. "Trade, Discover, Create" is Farcaster's new slogan. Applying this phrase to other "social + wallet" applications doesn't seem out of place either. They are basically about discovering trading signals, quickly copying trades, and sharing trading strategies.

The difference might lie in how each product chooses its focus. Different applications make trade-offs on functional dimensions, with varying emphasis and depth. Some emphasize content production, allowing users to clearly explain "what to buy and why"; some几乎不做 content, instead倾斜 resources towards trade execution, data insight, and copy trading efficiency. These trade-offs ultimately shape different product strengths and create significantly different user experiences.

Who will stand out? It might depend on who can make one point professional and deep enough.

For example, 0xPPL has become increasingly professional in on-chain graph analysis, and with its connections to many social graphs, it has become a tool for quickly identifying on-chain address identities, which is very useful during new token launches. GMGN has made the entire process from discovery to analysis to execution of trades as efficient as possible. In terms of multi-chain support, Zapper and Zerion, as professional wallets themselves, cover a very wide range of chains. In terms of actual cross-chain experience, the Farcaster Wallet is very smooth with extremely low磨损 (friction/costs).

The "Takes," "Comment," or "Share" features of Interface, fomo, and Share are differentiating points, allowing users to write their own trading logic, hoping their applications can沉淀 (accumulate) content creation, but the centralized content has略少 network effect. Of course, other applications could directly integrate the Farcaster protocol to achieve content creation, allowing produced content to diffuse within a larger social network.

Additionally, applications based on the Farcaster protocol have another advantage: they can reuse the hundreds of functionally diverse Farcaster Mini Apps, embedding mini-programs directly into the social flow, easily expanding the functional boundaries within the application without reinventing the wheel.

Dan Romero once said, "Adding a wallet to a social network is much easier than adding a social network to a wallet." Expanding wallet capabilities on an existing social network might be easier from a product perspective for Farcaster. However, other applications can also directly integrate existing social networks, unless they are sufficiently confident in their own user base.

From the panoramic view of "social + wallet" crypto applications, it can also be seen that currently, if one wants to build a "social + wallet" application, Farcaster and X are the most chosen options for social graphs. Slightly different is that, due to differing degrees of openness, when integrating the X social graph, it often only involves associating wallet addresses with X accounts. But when integrating the Farcaster social graph, besides associating with identity, it can easily import users' existing social relationships and even content produced on the social network, thus obtaining a ready-made social network with one click, rather than starting from scratch to accumulate social content and build a relationship graph.

As more and more applications adopt Farcaster as social infrastructure, the value of the entire network is放大 (amplified) in reverse, thereby enhancing the network effect of the entire protocol. Looking back over the past four years, the Farcaster team, with a restrained development path, has built a "small but refined" social graph. Although growth was limited, the accumulated social relationships, content, and culture are becoming the underlying assets and infrastructure of the open crypto social ecosystem. This network will continue to be enriched, extended, and adopted in the future.

Conclusion

Farcaster is not dead, crypto social is not dead, and Farcaster as crypto social is not dead. True crypto social does not stop at just building a social network; it must combine social interaction with value flow. Therefore, this year's upgrade of the Farcaster App from the inconvenient connection of external wallets to a fully functional built-in wallet is a key leap to补上 (make up for) this long-overdue底层 capability. This is not abandoning social interaction but driving it, giving social interaction a new growth engine.

The recent "mockery" Farcaster encountered恰好说明 (precisely indicates) that Farcaster's social graph is still too small, and its daily active users are still too limited, leading to some information gaps and interpretive偏差 (deviations) among friends observing from afar. Simultaneously, in the trend of "social applications becoming wallet-like, wallet applications becoming social-like," the Farcaster App will continue to face sustained competition—these are also current real challenges. It needs to continue relying on the dual drivers of Farcaster's product-side "wallet-first" approach and the continuously emerging Mini Apps within the ecosystem to共同驱动增长 (drive growth together), the value flow capability at the product layer continuing to配合 (cooperate with) the composable ecosystem capability at the protocol layer.

What will happen next? Still, no one can guarantee the answer. But perhaps加密 social truly begins by expanding wallet functionality on existing social media. Let value flow, and the加密 social network will become more active.